No More Dissent

The website LankaDissent has decided to close down operations. The website is now replaced by a black page which reads as follows:

In this land of the most compassionate Lord Buddha….. 

Sinhala Buddhists who believe this land belongs to the most compassionate Lord Buddha and constitutionally calls it the “Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka”, sing with pride “In wisdom and strength renewed / Ill-will, hatred, strife all ended / In love enfolded, a mighty nation / Marching onward, all as one / Lead us, Mother, to fullest freedom.” as their National Anthem.

And….. in this compassionate, democratic Buddhist land enfolded with love, in wisdom and fullest freedom, media is forbiden to raise a dissenting voice. Media is forbidden to criticise the “law” of the ruling regime. The media is forbitten to speak for the people.

Many who thought they as the media have a right to freedom of expression, they have a right to information, that the people also have the same right and that it is a fundamental right in a modern civilised society, have been told very bluntly and at times most brutally, that it isn’t so in this land of the compassionate, democratic republic, run by a “patriotic” regime. 

The Tamil media in the North were the first to have been told this bluntly and ruthlessly while the Colombo media did not want those dissenting voices in the North, heard elsewhere. They had to learn that lesson, first hand.

And….that was a lesson learnt by some, who are not with us to tell their story. That is a lesson learnt by some, who don’t have the right to say it, because they have a right to live some time more. For a lot, it was their station “Sirasa” that went ablaze with that lesson. It was their station that was smashed and set on fire to teach a lesson. 

For Lasantha Wickramatunge, an editor with a passion for uncompromising media professionalism, it was a challenge to face. A challenge he never minced words, in meeting. He had his own aggressive style in meeting the challenge. Admired and respected but left alone without political backing. 

And….. he, therefore, could not surmount this challenge, all by himself.

A lesson learnt, that needs no repeats to learn. This compassionate Sinhala Buddhist land does not tolerate “dissent”. Those who would not want to learn that living, would have to learn that in death. We who live, would come back when “dissent” comes back as a democratic right, accepted and enjoyed in a modern land of compassion.

Till then, good bye!

Editorial Board
Lankadissent 

Open for comments. Previous home page of LankaDissent is available on Google Cache.

In Mutiny

The name for this blog was inspired by this excellent piece on the 25th annivasary of the Black July by V.V. Ganeshanathan. The piece appeared in the blog Sepia Mutiny. Here is a particularly relevent excerpt:

On the 24th of July, rioting began as news spread about the deaths of the soldiers. The government was obviously complicit in the pogroms. (This link is to a Sri Lankan government website.) People with voter lists directed the mobs to the homes and properties of Tamils, which they destroyed. Thugs stopped vehicles on the streets, and, ascertaining the Tamil identities of the people within, set them aflame. When the violence finally ended, days later, as many as three thousand Tamils had been killed. Thousands and thousands more were left homeless. Shortly after, Sri Lanka saw a flood of Tamil emigration.

The 25th anniversary of such a hellish hour in the country’s history should not pass unnoticed on the Mutiny. Sri Lanka is Mutinous; it’s Mutinous in all the wrong ways: fostering ethnic hatred, distrust, violence, censorship, betrayal, and rootlessness in its own people. And it’s Mutinous in all the right ones: Sri Lanka and its diasporas are full of people who resist easy definition and boundaries, who refuse to cede to what they believe to be wrong, and who still fight, after twenty-five years, for a just home in the most beautiful place on earth. This is not a country that can be seen in black and white. This is a country in which authorities helped Sinhalese civilians to attack their Tamil neighbors. And this also is a country in which the people who saw that what was happening was wrong took their Tamil countrymen i and tried to protect them from the chaos. The best of human nature beginning a long battle against the worst of human nature. [do read the whole thing]

This blog will be a space for people, especially young people, to be mutnous in all the right ways, to express opinions on the issues related to the conflict in Sri Lanka. Primarily, participants of this blog will be young people involved in the Colombo Study Circle project of Beyond Borders. But the door is open for anyone and everyone to contribute. 

If you’d like to be contributor, just send in your contributions to inmutiny[at]beyondborders.lk with your piece of writing. For more information visit this page.

Why a study circle?

  First Meeting of the Study Circle. Colombo

 

This blog is a space for members of the study circle to splash around in mutiny. The study circle project is that of Beyond Borders. This inaugural blog post is a brief description of how we came up with this idea.

Essentially the study circle is a talk shop – a space for young people to chat about issues relating to the ethnic conflict. A lot of people accuse the civil society or the ‘NGOs’ of being mostly talk shops arranging for meetings and conferences at the Taj and Hilton where they chat with mostly like minded people come up with reports and recommendations. Well, we are explicitly saying, whether you like the word or not, that this is a talk shop because whether it’s between ‘like minded’ people (I think this phrase is misleading. Can there be ever ‘like minded people’? A phrase that is to me inherently antagonistic to the idea of diversity) or not so like minded people, we think there are not enough talk shops especially for young peopel. At a difficult time like this where even the mentioning of the word ‘peace’ (aiyo the word again!!) is considered to be unpatriotic, we need to continue the dialogue and talking and hence this project. Acutely aware of the ‘politically apathetic’ tag that is hung around young people’s neck this initiative wishes to say that is not so.

The term ‘study circle’ stuck me when I was reflecting on what I had read in Mark Whittaker’s anthropological biography of Sivaram (Taraki – the revolutionary Tamil journalist as Whittaker calls him. The book is called ‘Learning politics from Sivaram’) a book I had read almost a year back. I was stuck by the culture of intellectualism that had a vibrant existence at that time quite independent from the (university academic led) formal circles of intellectualism (I promise to come back to this issue later in a different post. Either on my blog or on the present one.) People like Sivaram benefited from such spaces or had created one of their own. One of those that he had created with his friends was the Batticaloa Readers Circle (In Tamil ‘Mattacalappu vacakar vattam’. They were apparently inspired by the ‘Chennai vacakar vattam’.) It was originally a literary gathering of sorts but of course literature has everything to do with politics and hence it was a good space for political reflections among various things. In fact during that time it was people who were engaged in literary work who were real stalwarts of an independent culture of intellectualism. The study circle was established somewhere in the early 80s and continued for a long time well into the 90s (Whittaker speaks of meeting the readers circle people in 1997). It became a formal organisation with a constitution and by laws. As per the by laws Sivaram was asked to quit later for joining one of the Tamil militant movements. I doubt of its existence now.

Now this I thought something our generation has very little time for and interest in. Talking is considered a waste of time by many of young people (Sorry if I sound very condescending. That’s not what I am aiming at.) Even those political types are averse to it. ‘We need action’ is the buzz word. Plus of course the culture of violence negates the setting up or sustainable existence of such spaces. Any independent culture of intellectualism has to be a threat to power and hence the Chinthanaya, the Vanni types, JVP, NMAT or the Douggie types will never like something that is independently intellectual.

We thought we will start one and give it a trial hence the study circle. The Batticaloa Readers circle was for sometime open to the public – they had public debates- but they had to drop this when it became too dangerous to debate in public. It became a gathering of people in the 10s and 20s or even less. Ours is also not a public debate – it’s a gathering of ‘chosen’ members – 25 of them registered as members, with a varying number participating at each meeting. We do get some funding but very little for the study circle itself. The study circle is part of a larger project other aspects for which most of our funds are directed to. It’s independent in its agenda setting. There have been some good discussions so far and not so great ones. We are limited in time. Can’t go on till 10 or 12 in the night as the Batticaloa study circle was able to possibly in the early 80s. Unlike them unfortunately we don’t meet at people’s houses. We still need formal venues. Our study circle definitely does not have a formal setting though it has some of its ‘bad airs’ but I hope it will get a lot more informal and free typish. I also hope it generates more talking from more people and it creates a sustained interest amongst its participants.

Members of the study circle, let’s rain in mutiny.

-Guru.