Publisher : HarperCollins, Rs499
The book will not please those who can’t see anything good in either the return of peace or the lankan Army. What matters is that the people of Sri lanka get over the past, live in a present of peace and pass on a sense of well-being and trust, not rancour and hatred, to the coming generations, says RAJESH SINGH
American author Robert Fulghum once said, “I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief.” This applies so well to the state of affairs in Sri lanka today, where the citizens of that country, be they Sinhalese or Tamils or Dalits or Muslims, are looking to move ahead, of wanting to bury the ghosts of the violent past, of placing their destiny in the hands of imagination of a better and peaceful life rather than root it to the knowledge of recent bloodshed, of hoping for the return of communal harmony by leaving aside the experience of bitterness and blind hatred, and of seeking to give life to the myth of well-being by downplaying the pains of history.
Fulghum’s popular book, All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten, may have been written in a different context and for a different audience. But the universality is apparent. As children, we are not taught to discriminate, to hate, to kill and to justify it, and to carry the burden of dislike or anger over to the following day or week or month or year. We learn those attributes as we grow and become more ‘educated’ and more ‘intelligent’ and more ‘worldly-wise’. Over the past few decades, Sri lanka had been gripped by everything that can destroy an individual, a society, a nation. Savagery by those who had the means to perpetuate it was the order of the day. Tigers of a different kind roamed the streets and consumed all that they encountered as the enemy. The country’s Armed Forces were on an overdrive to flush out the militants, in the process targeting perfectly innocent citizens with a Tamil name, a Tamil face and Tamil language. It seemed that the barbarity and the distrust would never end.
The dreaded Tamil Tigers, who pushed a large section of the population, often against its wishes, into a futile war, have been decimated for five years now; the Army is engaged in healing rather than in cracking down; and Colombo has been stretching itself to be seen as an emollient instead of an energetic contributor to the decades-long brutality. True, there are those who are holding out, wanting to keep the embers of the past burning, and hoping to resurrect the nightmarish past. But many of them are doing so by remaining at a safe distance from the churn that Sri lanka is going through, in comfortable existence in countries that have more soft corners for terrorists than for those who crush militancy. These elements are not stakeholders in peace but provocateurs of unrest.
The narrative of a fresh dawn forms the crux of Padma Rao Sundarji’s book. The ‘new country’ in the making that she has visited (as opposed to the war-torn one she encountered during her previous trips) and observed from talking to people in the east and the north; to former members of the liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Army personnel; and to lay citizens, is a work in progress. While the author does not paper over the questionable acts of the Army during the conflict, she also does not fall into the trap of self-righteous outrage expressed by other observers who saw wrong only in the Army and the political leadership of the day. And, given that many accounts have been written to demonise the Army and then President Mahinda Rajapaksa, under whose leadership the lTTE was destroyed and its leader V Prabhakaran shot dead, Padma Rao Sundarji’s book provides a refreshing, alternative perspective — that of the Army and the ‘others’. There are interviews with senior uniformed personnel who experienced the war against the terror outfit from close range, and with key one-time Prabhakaran aides who exposed the brutality of their Thalaivar — including the kidnapping of innocent teenagers from their homes and schools, their forcible induction into the lTTE and indoctrination into violent struggle, and the use of innocent men, women and children as human shields.
What should make our leaders from Tamil Nadu, who lose no occasion to express their solidarity with the Tamils of Sri lanka — often in ridiculously regionalist jingoism — sit up and take note is that most lankan Tamils (including Tamil community leaders) the author interacted with, had nothing but contempt for the shallow display of solidarity. As the spokesman of the Jaffna-based Tamil Dhamma Buddhist Association, this is what Ravi Kumar had to say to the author: “All that noise in your Tamil Nadu too is cinema politics, emotional politics, drama politics… They (Tamil Nadu politicians) are misusing the so-called Sri lankan issue, when there is no issue any more, only for their furtherance. They are useless, absolutely useless.”
He is the not only with contempt for the ‘drama politics’ that leaders of Tamil Nadu have engaged in. Dayanidhi Velayuthan, better known as Daya Master, is an instantly recognisable name for even those who have casually followed the lTTE’s rise and fall. He had been a spokesperson and media coordinator for the terror outfit, “a schoolteacher who had been pulled out of school by the Tigers and saddled with the task of handling the international media visiting at the time because he could speak some English”. He was in the long list of people recruited by the Tigers against their wishes. Now at peace with himself, he appeals,”…they (Tamil Nadu politicians) should at least stop fomenting trouble between us and the Sinhalese.”
Interestingly, Daya Master also reflected the sentiments, quoted earlier, of American author Robert Fulghum. He told Padma Rao Sundarji, in the midst of running the operations of his Dan TV, “There were 30 years of war here. Both sides committed crimes. But the past is past. It has been four years since the war ended. Of what use is a post-mortem, over and over againIJ” Try saying this to a section of the Sri lankan Tamil Diaspora and our Dravida politicians who don’t want the flames of hatred to be extinguished!
The book will not please those who can’t see anything good in either the return of peace or the lankan Army. Their pleasure is immaterial. What matters is that the people of Sri lanka, of whatever denomination, get over the past, live in a present of peace and pass a sense of well-being and trust, not rancour and hatred, to the coming generations. One of America’s most popular clergies, Robert H Schuller, had remarked: “let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future.” Journalist-author Padma Rao Sundarji’s very readable book is about those hopes, albeit with hurts in the backdrop.