{"id":93502,"date":"2013-06-30T00:03:25","date_gmt":"2013-06-29T18:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=93502"},"modified":"2013-07-04T01:35:46","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T20:05:46","slug":"if-thuggery-is-to-be-arrested","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/if-thuggery-is-to-be-arrested\/","title":{"rendered":"If Thuggery Is To Be Arrested\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?s=Malinda+Seneviratne&amp;x=11&amp;y=3\">Malinda Seneviratne<\/a><\/span>\u00a0&#8211;<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_93503\" style=\"width: 160px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/if-thuggery-is-to-be-arrested\/malinda-seneviratne-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-93503\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-93503\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-93503\" title=\"Malinda Seneviratne\" src=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Malinda-Seneviratne-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Malinda-Seneviratne-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Malinda-Seneviratne-50x50.jpg 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-93503\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Malinda Seneviratne<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Theft in institutions of whatever kind, if it takes on the character of \u2018business as usual\u2019, has implications.\u00a0 It implies that there may be in-built (unidentified or ignored) chinks that facilitate pilfering.\u00a0 It implies that the person in charge is either a thief or is incompetent.\u00a0 If the boss robs, it amounts to a thieving license for all subordinates.\u00a0 The logic can be applied to other acts not sanctioned by the relevant rules and regulations of a given institution or system.<\/p>\n<p>If some random local government politician\u00a0 throws his weight around, assaults someone, threatens, robs, rapes or engages in some other illegal activity and if that kind of infringement is rare, we can put it down to character quirk.\u00a0 Indeed, we could even predict that the individual can forget about re-election.<\/p>\n<p>That may have been the case a long, long, long time ago. Not now.\u00a0 Hardly a day passes when we don\u2019t read or hear about a politician who is associated with some form of illegal activity, some act of thuggery or abuse.\u00a0 It is no longer \u2018news\u2019 and that says a lot about what the \u2018usual business\u2019 is.<\/p>\n<p>It is about flawed institutional arrangement exacerbated by flawed constitution, one might explain.\u00a0 It\u2019s about bad people doing bad things, would be another explanation.\u00a0 It is a law and order problem, pure and simple, another would opine.\u00a0 It\u2019s all these, in fact.\u00a0 But if \u2018culture\u2019 has a role, we need to understand that certain \u2018cultures\u2019 flow from institutional structures and moreover flourish and grow more pernicious because these structure favor the bad over the good.<\/p>\n<p>It is then about people in key positions not willing to do anything about it or else are themselves too compromised to intervene.\u00a0 When <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/page\/4\/?s=Mervyn+Silva&amp;x=11&amp;y=4\">a minister<\/a><\/span> calls the media and goes on to tie an official to a tree and gets away without a scratch to political career, lower ranked politicians take a cue.\u00a0 Inaction is reward enough and encouragement to boot, after all.<\/p>\n<p>This indicates rank insincerity on the part of those at the top or else a resolve to \u2018let be\u2019.\u00a0 Letting be, though, has a dynamic of its own.\u00a0 Bad news spreads fast.\u00a0 What big brother does, small brother considers \u2018fair game\u2019.\u00a0 And we so we have the ridiculous situation of schoolboy rugby matches necessitating riot police personnel being on hand to step in if things get bad.\u00a0 Players punch players, linesmen weighs in to add muscle to player-player brawls. Spectators assault referees.\u00a0 Inquiries are announced and held.\u00a0 Through it all \u2018pain of punishment\u2019 has not made its way into the thick heads of thugs and thugs in waiting.<\/p>\n<p>It is not a local thing, mind you.\u00a0 The United States has demonstrated in word (Madeline Albrights scandalous-but-honest statement that the death of over half a million children in Iraq \u2018was worth it\u2019) and deed (in recent times Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria) that guns-in-booty-out is par for the course in the New World Odor.\u00a0 That\u2019s a Double-O license for the rest of the world.\u00a0 If spying on private citizen is \u2018ok\u2019 for the US Government, then that will be \u2018ok\u2019 for others, Sri Lanka too. If plunder at gun point is ok for Uncle Sam, it\u2019s ok for the Mervins of Sri Lanka, doctored or otherwise.\u00a0 If war is a game and slaughtering Osama bin Laden or Muammar Gaddafi is \u2018ok\u2019, that\u2019s a cue for nose-punching (and of course \u2018thou shalt kneel at my command\u2019) for every two-bit thug who has by hook or by crook got elected.<\/p>\n<p>How do we correct this?\u00a0 By objecting.\u00a0 On pain of punishment.\u00a0 This side of \u2018that\u2019 lies complicity, approval and the risk of being accused of partaking of spoils.<\/p>\n<p>As things stand, with respect to hooliganism, thuggery and theft, the word in the street is that those mandated to arrest the situation are silent and therefore have legitimately earned the tag \u2018beneficiary\u2019.<\/p>\n<p><em>*Malinda Seneviratne is the Chief Editor of \u2018The Nation\u2019\u00a0and his articles can be found at\u00a0www.malindawords.blogspot.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":93503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.3 - 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