Rallying between a new will to power and the apathy of the powers that be

LAST week we took a long walk down memory lane. It was to a time when Sri Lanka then used to be a nation of diplomatists (a few of note of global calibre), demagogues able to move a nation’s mighty spirit and break a people’s backbone in the same breath, and avid pioneers in the spheres of civics and governance. And oh, ‘e pluribus unum’... if not quite yet one people, one nation.

- By Wijith DeChickera

President and Finance Minister Anura Kumara Dissanayake Namal Rajapaksa Sajith Premadasa Ranil Wickremesinghe

A handful of readers were probably prone to think of Ceylonese heads of UN agencies and debonair foreign ministers who once did our little island nation proud by boxing above its weight.

This week you might be tempted to take a short stroll to the nearest neighbourhood suburb for that rally which has a slim potential to position Nugegoda as another Nuremberg in terms of mass movements away from popular democracy towards the interests of a particularly mercantilist class. And also from an emerging pluralism back to ethnic particularism and/or socio-cultural and pseudo-religious exceptionalism. Or the agendas of some agents provocateurs posing as part of an ostensible joint opposition event.

But saner counsel, such as that which passes for it these days, will probably prevail later in the day. And a so-called joint Opposition rally — ironically sans the leader of the Opposition and his party — will rally to protest against the incumbent regime.

The other ironies that abound run the gamut from discredited mainstream parties that were once in Government and only recently rejected by the people — not once, but no less than three times in successive polls — protesting against alleged corruption by their successors in executive and legislative office, to sly attempts to privilege a perspective of the past in which race and religion are key. Have they no shame, or sense of history? Or is this what desperation smells like?

Shall we content ourselves — instead of a jaunt to that junction — with perambulating through the pages of this journal you’re perusing at present? Let’s borrow a leaf from notebooks of yesteryear. In which yours truly penned a piece then titled ‘No! to Nugegoda as a Nuremberg’ then, which may still have a little usefulness left in it, now.