By Sarath De Alwis –

Sarath de Alwis

The four southern states of India are located closer to Colombo than to Delhi. Colombo can therefore be used as an efficient gateway to the South Indian market, giving it access to 250 million people.

The National Savings Bank affiliate NSBFMC makes this defiant and revealing statement in the background brief of the document that seeks investors for the National Airline. It is a positively promising discovery by a state owned bank. It has daringly suggested that Colombo can be the portal to that part of the planet that makes up the territory south of the Vindhya mountain range of the Indian subcontinent. In this technetronic age Air ports are ‘portals to the planet and airplanes the closest thing to time machines.’

That our nation has waited until the national carrier and its appendage Mihin Lanka nosedived in to the ground to discover aviation geography is reflective of our past folly. The belated discovery of the subcontinent as the hinterland of the national carrier of Sri Lanka rests in that bewildering space between humour and hurt. Hurt because of lost opportunity. Humour because Mihin rings a bell. The common understanding is that Arahant Mahinda came by air to Mihintale and that President Mahinda built an Airport presently used by two Air Lines, plenty of Peacocks and a few elephants.

Aviation is a subject of which I have some peripheral knowledge. By a combination of circumstance fortuitous I thought then, and with retrospective wisdom I regret now, I joined Air Lanka eight months after the 1983 pogrom and served it for fourteen years. My assignment was that I persuade the pacifist Japanese that coming to Sri Lanka in those turbulent years was a worthwhile proposition. A person who considered himself a veteran in aviation who perhaps rightly considered me to be an interloper, said that I wasn’t capable of knowing the difference between a cock pit and a shit pit. Prophetic words. Under the Premadasa regime I was in the shit pit. Pasky is my witness.

The knowledge I gathered in that exercise, though limited is deep and passionate. It has formed a kind of link one develops in a reluctant liaison which is both painful and rewarding.

On reading the twenty page document prepared by the NSBFMC, I was exceptionally induced to comment on some of its contents. Yet, out of difference to its notation of confidentiality, I concluded that it was best to avoid a public conversation on the subject till its dead line passed.

When I started on this missive, my intention was to write on the Subject of SriLankan Airlines and our willful neglect of economic opportunities offered by geography. Half way through I had to alter course. Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka published his latest tract ‘Reading though Sampathan’s spin.’ The learned lunacy contained in it explained many things. So, this missive is not about aviation. It is about how the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka define themselves in the technetronic and global age.

But we need to deal with aviation somewhat peripherally. The average flying time from Trivandrum to Delhi is 4 hours 30 Minutes, to Mumbai it is 2 hours and five minutes, to Colombo it is only 1 hour.

Flying time from Bangalore to Delhi is 2 hours 25 minutes. Curiously from Bangalore to both Mumbai and Colombo the flying time is 1 hour 25 Minutes.

Although we dismiss myths and legends, as fiction and fantasy, we discover that they are in fact perplexing realities explained by limited knowledge and beliefs of those ancient times. The Hanuman Bridge may contain some truth after all.

When we frame this Geographic destiny in the context of global and regional commerce, the Silicon capital of India is equidistant from Gota’s Garden city Arcade where Jaqueline Fernandez has her fine dining restaurant ‘Kaema Sutra’ and Bollywood where she lives and works and may or may not be reading the ‘Kama Sutra.’

Just as individuals, countries can get lost. In the past decade under Rajapakse rule, Sri Lanka lost the map of morality, the map of civil behavior. In the case of the national airline and the nation’s global connectivity, we lost the simple map of geography. It became fashionable to histrionically preach and practice a developmental apartheid between the south and the north of the island and between the island and the southern part of the Indian sub-continent.

Delhi is reasonable. Chennai is incorrigible. The ‘Sakya clan of Magadha desha are historical friends. The Dravidian tribes are ancient adversaries.

Market accessibility, natural with geographic proximity was stymied by an officially sanctioned cultural apartheid, preached, practiced and propagated by movements of the type of the Ravana Balaya, Bodu Bala Sena and influential opinion peddlers such as Parliamentarian Udaya Gammanpila, Poet and pundit Gunadasa Amerasekra and neurologist Dr. Anurudha Padeniya and his coterie of neurosis patients. According to Dr. Padeniya, India does not have doctors as good as our own.

To some of us, country and nation is the same thing. To Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka and many others – probably a majority of Sinhala people, the two words – country and nation mean two different things. The country is a physically demarcated territory. Nation is a shared state of mind. The nation clings to language, religion, customs and traditions. It is a cultural composite.

The Sinhala ‘Jathiya’ ipso facto, the Sinhala Nation is a politico-cultural entity. The Sinhalese have a unique character and therefore unique collective rights different from other citizens. The state is a politico-judicial entity that exercises its sovereign rights on behalf of the Sinhala nation.

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka deserves to be congratulated for his forthright views which leaves no one in doubt. He insists that Tamils in Tamil Nadu and Tamils in the North of Sri Lanka constitute an existential threat to the Sinhala nation. It is best to quote him in his own carefully composed, eloquently argued, bountiful bigotry.

“There is no logic by which an ethnic community should enjoy the same degree of autonomy on a small island that it does on a vast subcontinent. There is also no logic by which an ethnic community which is one and half million strong in two border regions of a small island should enjoy the same quasi-federal powers that eighty million Tamils enjoy in Tamil Nadu.

Secondly, the island of Sri Lanka has only one neighbor and that’s to its north. The North of Sri Lanka with a million Tamils is only 18 miles away from Tamil Nadu which has 80 million ethnic Tamils. The Southern two thirds of Sri Lanka has no neighbors, no co-ethnics, no adjacent co-religionists, and no speakers of the same language.

Thus it is geopolitically unaffordable, and actually dangerous for the Tamils of Sri Lanka to have the same political power as the Tamils of India. What Mr. Sampanthan proposes is a second Tamil nadu on the soil of the small island of Sri Lanka. This is not merely unacceptable, it poses a deadly existential danger.”

For all he cares, Dr. Jayatilleka would not mind Sri Lankan Airlines flying empty to the South Pole. In fact the brother in law of his current political idol was doing something similar with the National Air Line until 8th January 2015. {Not that things have changed all together. }

What Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka suggests and affirms is that Federalism per se is not a bad form of government. But it is bad for Sri Lanka. The Tamils of Sri Lanka need to be under constitutional surveillance. They should be denied the right of administering their affairs in the Tamil majority province because Tamil Nadu is suspect.

The National Airline of Sri Lanka wants to make Colombo a regional aviation hub. It wishes to make South India its catchment area to feed a funnel in Colombo. Perfect sense in the global age. But not to Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka. He is comfortable in the age of Henry the navigator. He should seriously consider offering his services as ideologue to the neo Ottoman tyrant Erdogan.