By Tisaranee Gunasekara –

“…the social state is advantageous to men when all have something and no one has too much” –Rousseau (Social Contract).

Values are not constants. Different historical-times have different political, developmental and socio-cultural values. For centuries, beheading a murderer was an accepted practice across civilisational-divides. So was child labour. In those Western nations caught in the ferment of the first Industrial Revolution, children as young as six-years worked for 18-20 hours in mills and mines. Politicians and prelates, kings and society ladies accepted this brutal exploitation as a necessary condition for the wealth of nations. The initial demands for marginal improvements in the harsh labouring-conditions of these ‘new slaves’ were decried as inimical to national wellbeing: “It was asserted….that the restriction of the labour of young persons and children would be ruinous to industry and that foreign countries in which enterprising employers were not hindered by factory laws would secure trade which would be lost to Great Britain”[i]. The US Supreme Court declared any attempt to provide some safety to America’s labouring children as unconstitutional, in the first quarter of the 20^th Century[ii].

The post-socialist world is experiencing a counter-revolution in ideas and attitudes. A key component in this regression is the return to certain economic beliefs, once abandoned as unethical and damaging/destabilising. A case in point is the triumphal return of the old – and historically invalidated – theory of ‘inequality as the driving force of capitalist growth’. The worsening chasm between the rich and the poor is no longer seen as undesirable, or dangerous. Denuding public services and anti-Robin Hood tax policies have become synonymous with ‘good economics’. The obscenely conspicuous consumption by the mega-rich, even in times of general economic distress, has become socially acceptable. Augustus Melmotte, Anthony Trollope’s stratospheric-earning, stratospheric-spending, corrupt and corrupting financier is the new entrepreneurial prototype, from New York to Beijing– and Colombo.

Refusing to learn from the past is a characteristic of not just the political man but also the economic man. Inequality was the great societal-de-stabiliser, from French Revolution onwards. Radical Enlightenment thinkers warned about the political dangers inherent in socio-economic inequality: “The man discriminated against is aggrieved. The man who possesses nothing lacks any stake in society”, cautioned d’Holbach[iii].

239 years later, the ‘Riots, Communities and Victims Panel’, appointed by the British government to study the August 2011 riots, concluded that societal violence is inevitable when people do not have a ‘stake in society’[iv].

Stable societies are cohesive societies. Cohesion is impossible when a society is racked by inequality. If some people feel that they are marginalised for ethnic/religious/sociological reasons or that development is something that happens to others, disenchantment sets in and politico-psychological fissures develop. Instead of the necessary ‘national’ perspective, ethnic/religious/caste/class perspectives become predominant. Instability breaks out, even in the midst of spectacular growth, as the ongoing events in Brazil and Turkey demonstrate.

Socio-economic equality is not an automatic outcome of growth. Like political equality it must be aimed for and worked at, by governments and by societies. Societal pressure and political will are important requirements for any real movement towards greater socio-economic equality, just as it was for political equality. Where governments do not make extra efforts to promote equality, inequality flourishes. This insalubrious atmosphere breeds the socio-political germs which eventually kill the growth-march of the economy, often in a fusillade of violence.

As happened in Sri Lanka, in the second half of the 1980’s.

The Relevant Interregnum

The Premadasa presidency marked an interregnum in more ways than one. Ranasinghe Premadasa was Sri Lanka’s first (and only) non-upper caste head of state. His ascendancy revealed the caste-fault-lines which bisect our society, underneath a veneer of modernity. As the discourse of that time demonstrates, even the left was not immune to this malaise; a visceral antipathy to this ‘caste-upstart’ was something dominant caste Sinhalese and Tamils had in common. Much of the baseless accusations levelled against Premadasa and the viciousness of the epithets hurled at him stemmed from this primordial hatred.

Premadasa was a member of a subaltern caste; he was born and bred in Keselwatte, the geographical other of Kurunduwatte and Sri Lanka’s equivalent of the old Harlem, a place which ‘the respectables’ avoided like the plague. He knew of the anger and the bitterness, the frustrations and the despair of the marginalised. His (misplaced and dangerous) sympathy for the JVP and the LTTE, and his persistent attempts to reach out to them stemmed, from empathy.

As President, Premadasa sought to bridge destabilising societal-gaps (poor-rich/rural-urban/powerful-powerless) with programmes such as Janasaviya, Gam Udawa, 200 Garment Factories and land-redistribution. This conscious adoption of a strategy of equitable development marked another epistemological break from the Lankan norm.

Available statistical evidence points to the success of this ‘growth with equity’ strategy. During the 1989-1993 period growth rate improved[v], unemployment decreased[vi], budget deficit was contained[vii], balance of payment and debt service ratios improved[viii] and the stock market thrived[ix]. More pertinently, poverty[x] and inequality[xi] decreased and literacy rates[xii], infant mortality rates improved[xiii], real wage-rates increased[xiv] and trade union activities intensified[xv].

This definitive movement towards a less-unjust equilibrium was made possible by an increase in expenditure on social services (as a % of total government expenditure)[xvi], the distribution of 327,368 acres of state land amongst landless poor, the building of 159,336 new housing units with state assistance, the setting up of 134 new garment factories in underdeveloped areas[xvii], the granting of free uniforms and mid-day meal etc[xviii].

What is significant is that this growth-equity improvement took place while the country was recovering from the Second JVP Insurgency and engulfed in the Second Eelam War.

Today we are headed in the opposite direction. According to the latest Mercer’s International Geographic Salary Differentials, Sri Lankais among the five lowest-paying countries for para-professional employees in the world[xix]. This is one more indicator of a development path which under-develops the people[xx].

As a grade 11 student-participant of an essay competition to commemorate President Premadasa observed, “If the ‘development’ of a country goes hand in hand with the worsening of the living conditions of the people, for whom or for what is that development? A developed country for a malnourished people – is this not an insanity? Must the people of the country gaze at highways like a child looking yearningly at an empty ice cream cup?[xxi]

Inequality’s destabilising impact can assume particularly deadly forms in a country beset with ethno-religious divisions, especially if the rulers use the race/religious card to impose an artificial cohesiveness on an economically divided society. Premadasa understood the mutually sustaining relationship between anti-people development and the rise of fanaticism: “Sinhala villagers felt increasingly shut out from power and privilege which continued to be enjoyed by the few. These feelings of being denied access to a better life took an ethnic character when some of our leaders found it expedient to divert their emotions along ethnic lines”[xxii].

People, de-prioritised by prevailing developmental values and deprived of benefits of growth, can be bamboozled into demonising the ethno-religious ‘Other’.

The sense of déjà vu is palpable.