Can a people as a whole go silent? Can they go mute? Not really. But people can become contemplative. They can seek to consolidate hither and dither, after the devastating periods of economic malaise and resultant suffering that they went through.
Today, despite the occasional tear-gassing of protests etc. the people are stoic and have not diverted their attention from their main tasks which seems to be to look after home and hearth. May sound rather like cliché, but there seems to be more than a modicum of truth to the assertion that people want a period of quiet livelihood regeneration.
Does that mean that they do not want democracy and they want to abdicate their rights? Anyone who thinks so is absolutely out of their minds. But it’s just that people want one or the other of realities, meaning they either want stability or they want fruitful revolt. They are astutely aware that they cannot have stability and revolt all at the same time, especially when they know that the ‘revolt’ they are getting is in fits and starts.
Look at Greece. Syriza was the left-radical party so-called which was called upon by the Greek voters to revolutionize the country at least in a manner of speaking, after the country’s sovereign debt crisis and the ‘meltdown.’ But the party didn’t stick to any of its left-radicalism when elected to power to pull Greece out of the lingering effects of the crisis. Instead the mostly neo-liberal austerity label was adopted by the Syriza Leader Tsipras and his party, but nobody in Greece was in a mood to protest as such.
This was Greece’s period of consolidation under what was ostensibly a radical-left political party. But there was no leftism let alone radical-leftism left in the Greek left flank. The then prime minister’s policies met with vocal protests after he clinched various deals with the creditors, and that was that. There were none of the anti-austerity protests of the virulence that was seen in 2011 and 2012 in that country.
DIVERSIONS
Why? It’s because the Greek people didn’t want a revolution, they wanted to remain in the European Union and get on with their lives. The Syriza Government was in power until 2019, which is quite a long run for a regime that came in on a leftist agenda and turned their back on the voters and opted for unpopular austerity instead. In the recent elections of course Syriza’s performance has been dismal and the party has been reduced to a rump, but that’s in 2023, many years later. In any case there is no revolution because the Greeks are now led by Conservatives.
People may want to see parallels in this country’s meltdown and what we are facing in terms of that which some may see as social apathy and a temporary abdication of democratic rights. People have seen that revolution can get them thus far and no more because last year’s uprising didn’t quite change their economic circumstances, even though it brought about some change in leadership. As in Greece people who were not willing to swallow the bitter pill earlier are willing to swallow the bitter pill now.
Is this good? This article is not about casting value judgements. It’s about trying to see the current political realities for what they are and making sense of the people’s general reactions. We don’t even have a populist politics to speak of though we had a sort of a nameless and faceless ‘aragalaya’ which nobody took any ownership of which is by itself a rather queer aberration.
Leave alone an appetite for revolution, there doesn’t seem to be an appetite for the political drama that Sri Lankans usually relish. We do not have ratings here, but it must be that the ratings for political talk shows are down and less than they have ever been before. The recent events such as the Prophet affair and the stand-up comedy fiasco — surely all readers are aware of these events and there needs to be no special explanation here? — have also been diversions at best, and are little sideshows similar to the cricket and the teledramas.
AUSTERITY
Are the people maturing one may dare to ask, half tongue in cheek? Not that they are, but they have been forced to, and that’s a significant difference. Again the Greek analogy is good. For example, after the meltdown the Greeks didn’t want austerity and the left parties, though they were to eventually turn their backs on that position, also paid lip service at least to this stance. But Greeks everywhere despite all this wanted to remain in the European Union and some analysts even saw this as a bizarre contradictory position. That’s because the Europeans were all calling for austerity in Greece and well, it’s as if the Greeks in that context wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
We too seem to have a head bowed moment of austerity though the word is not used here. It’s not austerity in fact but it’s a bitter, enforced struggle, but then again austerity everywhere from UK to Greece has been a euphemism for a bitter struggle. Some may say that the people here are so resigned to the bitter livelihood struggle and they have decided to keep democracy in abeyance until then.
Others would say that it’s the regime that’s keeping democracy in abeyance, but the writer’s point is that nothing can be done by anyone who governs unless there is overt or tacit compliance by the people.
Today, the political parties are also seen to be in consolidation mode as if they are mimicking the people and the leadership. The position of the political party leaders seems to be that they are getting their parties ready for the jousts ahead because they are certain they are going to win and they want to put their best faces forward. It’s a rather aw-shucks take on things as if they are gamely trying to fit in.
But what they are in fact trying to do is to figure out what is going on. They don’t know what to make of this extended mute-phase where the people have become unrecognizable to themselves. Politics used to be the next most exciting thing in this country after some other unmentionables, but that does not seem to be the case anymore. People don’t even seem to be interested in cricket these days; they’d rather sit back and watch paint dry.
CACOPHONY
People everywhere however don’t want to be frog-marched into the future. But someone may add nonchalantly, here they do, because here is not everywhere. Perhaps Sri Lankan people have had too many traumas such as insurgencies, wars and economic meltdowns. They do not want to be traumatized anymore by politicians yanking at each other’s throats while they suffer. They’d rather suffer in silence without that cacophony.
People sometimes do acquiesce in their own suffering in a political variation of the Stockholm Syndrome. If you google it you find that Stockholm Syndrome is when kidnapped and sexually abused persons start identifying with their tormentors and sort of fall in love with them.
Basically political apathy of the kind we are experiencing now would have been the last thing the people expected when the uprising or Aragalaya of last year was in full fettle. But the Aragalaya constituted of a great deal of manipulative puppetry and people only deluded themselves by imagining that they were active participants.
They do not perhaps want to replicate that experience now by becoming anyone’s political pawn and are treading with extreme caution. By doing that do they run the risk of ending up in the graveyard of democracy one wretched day in the near future? Or are they confident that by biding their time they would have scored a coup by making all present day political parties bar-none, quite irrelevant so that an entirely new lot could rise from the ashes of today’s motley crew?
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