{"id":208043,"date":"2020-02-12T00:06:56","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T18:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=208043"},"modified":"2020-02-16T23:33:43","modified_gmt":"2020-02-16T18:03:43","slug":"decolonizing-reconciliation-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/decolonizing-reconciliation-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"Decolonizing \u201cReconciliation\u201d Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dilshan Fernando –<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dilshan Fernando<\/p><\/div>\n

There were many readers and interpreters of the 2019 presidential election result: some were jubilant, others lamented heavily. All strived to provide the most meaningful analysis of the post-election situation that for many, especially the losers, was a nightmare that couldn\u2019t be explained under a consistent principle. Although I don\u2019t agree, many from both camps almost unanimously agreed that the good governance (GG) government\u2019s reconciliation outlook was a major factor that affected detrimentally to its later unseating. However, there are questions and assumptions about GG government\u2019s reconciliation programme that we must confront, if at all we consider reconciliation is still a valid topic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before we get in to GG government\u2019s reconciliation programme and outlook, we must entangle ourselves on a brief detour to place the problem correctly in the context. Some abstractions assist in this endeavour. From a theoretical point of view \u2013 those who despise theory must soon un-blind themselves by taking the example from devout theoretical practices of nationalist populists like Nalin De Silva<\/span><\/strong><\/a> that consistently anoint their hallowed power edifice \u2013 reconciliation does not strive to unite dis-unified parties. Philosophically, there is no harmonious \u201cOne\u201d that later divides in to a differing \u201cTwo.\u201d Rather, we should start with the non-binary \u201cTwo\u201d itself. To put it simply, it is a grave conceptual mistake to think that reconciliation is a political project that endeavours to bring back the dis-unified parties (Two) \u2013 in our case ethnic communities \u2013 to a harmonious whole (One) that existed before they got dis-unified. The reason is that there was no such ethnically unified national identity in the first place.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are no prodigal sons that a benevolent father needs to bring together in reconciliation. It\u2019s not because that Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and other minorities are more than prodigal sons, but because that there was no \u201chappy family\u201d in the first place that the benevolent father \u2013 played probably by the GG government \u2013 must re-unite. Not only that there was no happy family before, but also that there cannot be one in future. Believing the contrary of the aforementioned, in my view, resulted in a colonial indoctrination of reconciliation that later brought down the very political force that brought it forth. Let\u2019s peruse this apparent absurdity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, what is so colonial about bringing the ethnicities together? The simple answer is that different ethno-religious communities have different conceptions about this togetherness itself. For example, for right wing Sinhalese, Sri Lanka is their historical and moral \u2013 referring to some transcendental right similar to the largely secular Israelites who nonetheless believe overwhelmingly that God gave their land \u2013 homeland which was later also inhabited by other ethnic communities who landed here for non-historic and non-moral reasons \u2013 from trade to chance. Contrastingly, for a Tamil, right to one\u2019s land is determined solely by the self-affirmation of the concerned ethno-religious group, which also provides meaning to their nearly a century old struggle. Self-affirmation is no less moral than historic right in some sense. And for a typical Muslim, Islamic way of life \u2013 from Prayer <\/i>to Parda<\/i> – prevails over any attempt to integrate them to secular notions of life. Quite reasonably then, there should not be any justification to un-veil a Muslim woman who has self-veiled herself, where ironically, all women in Islam are veiled in essence, eluding to its fundamental metaphysic, even if they are not actually covering their faces. In this background, what perhaps does bringing people in these radically different walks of life together actually mean? The answer must be estopped for another moment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In an 1853 New York Herald Tribune article titled \u201cThe British Rule in India,\u201d Karl Marx notoriously asked whether \u201ccan mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?\u201d <\/i>referring to the social conditions of colonial India. An occasion where Marx is often labelled as a Euro-centric white charlatan, on my view, is nonetheless a correct diagnosis of colonialism in our region. When the British arrived, or for that matter even the Portuguese, Sri Lanka back then was not in ethno-religious harmony. This is true even if the country had a unified kingdom from time to time. What constituted arguably such an ethno-religious identity is the very anti-colonial attempts to get rid of colonialism. Hence, Marx\u2019s question is whether the then progressive social forces have been able to capture the historical agency to un-root the feudal kings and regressive aristocracies without the unforeseen \u2013 no less brutal and barbaric \u2013 intervention of the colonial forces. I think not.<\/p>\n

The interesting story then is that not only that the anti-colonial movement allowed the inter-ethnic communities to unite against the British, but also the historical situation provided the downtrodden oppressed classes, including the minorities to channel their rage against their own oppressors. This meant that the Tamil speaking people in the country stood against their counterparts \u2013 the Sinhala majority \u2013 in view of winning political sovereignty. Does this mean then, that the Tamil \u2013 or the ethnic \u2013 question is a colonial scapegoat?\u00a0 <\/span>Answer: No, precisely because unbeknownst to the British, the historically oppressed classes \u2013 from Tamil speaking people to the lower castes \u2013 were able to articulate their suffering for the first time in history. On my view, British were a necessary price that the national pride had to pay in order to grant the language of struggle to the downtrodden.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What then is<\/i> the Tamil struggle against the Sinhala state? Nothing but, oxymoronically, an anti-anti-colonial struggle par excellence, emphasizing its facet as an alternative anti-colonial struggle, against the majoritarian one. This radically means that the Tamil struggle was never of a kind that sought to plunge back to a harmonious whole that pre-existed the British. It is in this sense that the Tamils were the first moderns in Sri Lanka, just like the Dalits in India. Tamils were the first to know that there never was a \u201chappy family,\u201d when even their most progressive Sinhala counterparts \u2013 from various leftist forces \u2013 were singing this melody. Tamils knew that Farntz Fanon was right when he said in his \u201cBlack Skin, White Masks\u201d that \u201cthere is no black mission. There is no white burden. I do not want to be victim to the rules of a black world. Am I going to ask this white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17<\/i>th<\/sup><\/i>\u00a0century?\u201d <\/i>There should not be any burden on anyone to pursue empty western multi-culturalism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this sense, we can conclude that the empty pressure to unite all ethnicities under happy family was never enshrined by an authentic vision about Sri Lanka. One could site India, as is often the case. Well, quite forcefully, I must remind everyone, that there is no united India without the fact of a Muslim Pakistan, irrespective of alluding to the numerous examples of anti-unitary protest movements in India. What a debacle it would have been if all the two hundred million Muslims who are living in present day Pakistan were asked to live in India? Inter-state diversity of India while true of being diverse, did never threaten to undermine its Hindu identity \u2013 according to Arundhati Roy \u2013 in comparison to its perceived threat of Islamization. Therefore, \u2018reconciliation as harmonization\u2019 is undoubtedly a colonial, elitist indoctrination that represses the \u201cReal\u201d of brutal otherness pertaining to each of the ethnic communities concerned. Concisely, it wipes out \u201cdifference.\u201d<\/p>\n

Politically, this pseudo pressure to ethnic harmony, both cared to make the majority Sinhalese guilty of their ethnic-cleansing past and consequently pushed them to embrace their ethnic brethren with unconditional sympathy. They were forced to \u201cunderstand\u201d their \u201cothers.\u201d GG government\u2019s various reconciliation-related institutional arms from ONUR to OMP were anointed with this idea of reconciliation. Their personnel asked the Sinhalese to go to Masjids and understand the Muslim prayer. They asked the Tamils to visit temples and experience the Buddhist bliss. Muslims attended the catholic churches and sought to understand Christians venerating the crucified Jesus Christ, who according to them is Isa alayhe\u00a0salam. How can we understand others, especially ethnic others with different ways of life, when we don\u2019t mostly understand ourselves? Moreover, why should only the poor Sinhalese, Muslims, Tamils, Christians, others, mostly from the country\u2019s periphery, understand other poor underprivileged people when the rich Colombo-dwellers merely sit and patronize them? Would this message – to forcefully understand the other – be a formidable one to carry to the households of the benevolent elites of Rosmead Place or Javatta Road?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My contention here is that the true approach to reconciliation is not to forcefully require masses to \u201cunderstand\u201d their ethno-religious \u201cother.\u201d Rather, what is lacking in Sri Lanka\u2019s public sphere is the domain of polite manners and indifference to others. With the risk of being plummeted away as nonsense, I argue to affirm the paramount importance of these regimes of manners and politeness \u2013 basically the honorable practice of indifference \u2013 that make our social space a tolerable one, sometimes quite unbeknownst to us. Try to recall how in our day-today lives we politely ignore many feelings we get about strangers, sometimes our own colleagues \u2013 from jealousy to disgust \u2013 that we simply don\u2019t give sufficient recognition to be expressed freely. In those circumstances, we implicitly agree that we don\u2019t have the right to express to others whatever that comes to our minds. In this sense, while it is truly admirable to be authentically non-racist and even select a spouse from a different ethnicity or religion, it is another thing that we learn to practice indifference even when we \u201cfeel\u201d bad deeds about one\u2019s ethno-religious others. So for example, even if you \u201cfeel\u201d that a particular religious ritual of another is totally futile and hilarious, one must immediately recognize that one\u2019s own rituals must be equally futile and hilarious in the other\u2019s eyes. While both don\u2019t concede one\u2019s rituals and practices in this situation, what one learns is that the authenticity of one\u2019s identity is not constituted by castigating the identity of the other.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Surprisingly to many, the only way to accomplish the above is to learn to politely keep distance with others and practice the art of indifference to make each and every one tolerable in the social space. To give an example how this art of cold manners actually works, recall (those of you who know a little bit about American culture) the standard \u201chi, how are you?\u201d greeting that literally every person living in the US offers as a general courtesy measure. The trick here is that this question is precisely meant to be taken merely performatively and not literally. So the normal answer to this question is \u201cI am fine, how are you?\u201d and not a serious narrative about how one\u2019s day has really been. Although this exchange is purely performative, one can immediately deem a person rude if this apparently performative gesture is not undertaken. One is then expected to follow with this empty, yet profoundly important, gesture even with one\u2019s ethnic other if we are to survive in the social multiplicity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Well then, is there no chance for authentic inter-ethnic relations at all under this conceptualization? Answer: vehemently no; precisely because such inter-ethnic relations are left out to be authentically formed instead of forced to be bonded. There certainly are magical moments in our lives that we connect with friends from other ethnicities or religions in a totally unexpected way \u2013 almost like falling in love. Those relationships and connections are better to be left unregulated in regimes of manners and forceful bonding. My argument about polite indifference in this essay is about the silent majority whom we mostly don\u2019t care about but are nonetheless not permitted to be excluded from the social space due to racism. What is this secular notion of reconciliation of indifference, if not a refined decolonized and modern idea, forced in place of the non-secular \u2018understanding the other\u2019 rhetoric?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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