Reflecting on Mahinda

“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world… and then we f***** up the endgame.” (Tom Hanks, “Charlie Wilson’s War”)

The day the war ended, I wasn’t quite 17. Our old Isuzu Gemini didn’t have an onboard radio, so on the way home from the exam hall – I had sat for my O Levels – we made do with a portable one. The news was everywhere: over the airwaves and on the streets. People were elated, overjoyed: mountains of kiribath and piles of lunumiris, hordes of youngsters waving one flag after another, greeted us all the way from Wellawatte to Boralesgamuwa. As Wordsworth would have put it, bliss was it to have been alive then, heaven to have been young. Nothing seemed subdued in the air, and nothing could be. For me and pretty much everyone else, Sri Lanka had won. Everything else came later.

My generation was among the last to see the war through to its end, to have been alive to the dangers and the torments that accompanied it from the beginning. We had witnessed successive peace talks, a ceasefire agreement, even a post-tsunami “deal” with the other side. Nothing worked.

When we moved from my old home town to where I am now, politics had reduced to a battle between those who wanted peace and those who wanted war. Among such obtuse divisions shades of grey did not exist: either you voted for the peaceniks – the UNP – or you threw in your lot with the nationalists – the SLFP. I can’t remember the day the latter won the election in 2004, but I do remember the sense of elation among my family: Mahinda Rajapaksa, the populist candidate, had clinched the presidency, defeating the appeasers. Five years later he would help us end the war.

Mahinda was a hero to my family – to an extent to me also – and, for a brief moment right after the war ended, even to those who disliked him. At that moment we defined our enemy, not in crude ethnic terms, but in terms of a ruthless terrorist outfit that preached only fanaticism. We never defined another by what set us apart; only by what brought us together. Call it sentimental nostalgia, but I now remember May 2009 as one of the few times in our recent history from which we could go forward, as one. Leading us all ahead there was Mahinda. How could you dislike the guy?

I never understood the halo many of us painted around him later on. But I understand why they did what they did, turning Mahinda into some kind of deliverer. The man was in, and of, his time in a way none of his predecessors were – barring one. The exception was Ranasinghe Premadasa, who, it must be said, hailed from an altogether more subaltern, and thus depressed, background.

Like Premadasa, Mahinda was receptive to what people expected of him: not as a demagogue and a nationalist, but as a populist and a patriot. Today these words have become anathema to left-liberals and neoliberals. But then they are not bereft of meaning; only leaders conversant with the politics of people, as opposed to the politics of power, can make the people matter and the people count. In this Mahinda may have been, at one level, the successor of Premadasa. No wonder Dayan Jayatilleka, a man who obviously knows what he’s writing, and more importantly what he’s not writing, wrote of both as the two “most courageous, heroic, leaders we elected in my lifetime.”

So the halo a lot of those who supported him painted on him wasn’t entirely unwarranted. And yet – and this is something that needs to be emphasised fairly and squarely – what was so refreshing about Mahinda Rajapaksa wasn’t so much his appeal to a single constituency as his appeal was to every constituency. Put in other words, in the aftermath of the war, he appeared less a narrow nationalist than a pluralist patriot: the sort before whom everyone could become one.

In his declaration about there being no Sinhalese and Tamils, but all being Sri Lankans – the boldest made by a popular president here – lay a philosophy and a way of doing politics that could get the country ahead. When he became the first president to make it a point to speak in Tamil – which no other president no matter how liberal or popular had tried to do – he thus went as far as anyone in his office had to reach out. I often wonder whether such gestures were recognised for what they were, and whether those for whom they were meant grasped their full significance.

Not that it matters now. But it mattered then. The excitement and the exhilaration of those statements, decisions, and gestures, which I doubt were lost on us, were lost on those who could have responded. Instead of acceptance, he and his government got intransigence, a persistent refusal to endorse such gestures. I fail to understand why we crowned him like we did, but I also fail to understand why such sentiments never got reciprocated. Why did they go unnoticed, really?

Tempting as it would be to view it so, the lack of a proper response to these gestures and sentiments was not the only, or even the main, reason for his government’s downfall. Thirty years of war do not end without victors claiming their share of the spoils from the losers. Although the war went on, and continued to be fought, without the victor/vanquished dichotomy, after it ended that dichotomy crept up, doubly so because of a resurgence of Sinhala ultra-nationalism on the one hand, and the perceived defeat of its competitor – Tamil ultra-nationalism – on the other, towards the end of the decade. Yet the defeat of the latter meant that Sinhala ultra-nationalism could no longer thrive. In the absence of an enemy, paraphrasing Voltaire, we need to invent one. Four years later the ultra-nationalists invented one in Alutgama. That fight continues.

At the outset, then, a fatal rupture developed between the imperatives of multi-ethnic populism and the convulsions of mono-ethnic ultra-nationalism. Against that backdrop Mahinda’s government found itself forced to take sides. Sri Lanka witnessed three moments in which it faced a choice between an inclusive, progressive path and a divisive, reactionary one: 1948, 1970, and 2009. In 1948 the choice was made in favour of a compradore bourgeoisie that doubled down as a dependent elite, and in 1970 it was made in favour of a state-led reformist programme that, while laudable, got bogged down in the contradictions of the times in which it came to be enacted. What road would 2009 take?

It’s perhaps the biggest tragedy of my time, my generation, and the generations which followed mine, that the choice made was not the choice that should have been made. Mahinda’s charisma did not, and does not, stem from his pandering to one constituency: his populism, nurtured more by the left than by the right, extended to everyone. As multi-class as it was multi-ethnic, it’s the sort of charisma very few leaders have been endowed with. A Muslim friend from Hambantota – Rajapaksa territory – put that in perspective best: “He was of the South, but not just of the Sinhalese.”

So we know what road we should have taken, just as we know what road we ended up taking. What compelled him to abandon the first road and take the other, whether the forces that prevailed on him to do so profited by their insularity, and how we might have fared had we not listened to those forces, are questions I can’t really answer. All I know was that we had a golden opportunity, the best we ever had and the best we ever got, to forge a new future. The nationalism we should have made use of then should have been more pluralist than exclusivist, more accommodating than assertive. Yet trapped on every front, the then administration gave in to the chauvinists.

My critique of Sinhala ultra-nationalism today has always been that it differs little from the forces of neoliberalism it so strongly opposes: mired in its contradictions, it thrives on internal divisions while offering the feeblest resistance to external pressures. Andre Gunder Frank was not wide off the mark when he observed that “national” (or nationalist) capitalism was no better than its compradore variety. Amidst the resurgence of ultra-nationalism we are witnessing today, a contradiction has hence sprung up between the demonisation of the ethnic Other and an acceptance of an economic model which does not differ, or depart, radically from the sort championed by the previous regime.

We could have changed all this. Yet we did not. I still don’t know why. In Mahinda Rajapaksa we got the kind of deliverer the country was in need of: not a mythical Diyasen Kumara, but a popular unifier nurtured by the left. Today the revival of the nationalist right within not just the government, but also sections of the Opposition, threatens to eliminate everything we achieved in 2009, and everything we could have achieved in the years which followed. That is our tragedy, and the tragedy of all those who helped conclude the war. What pains me is that it did not have to be this way.