Woman and child
You must have seen that picture. It’s an image from several weeks ago — a photo of a man — his lips drawn back in a grimace, holding up two loaves of bread, his arm outstretched. Behind him flames burn, leaping upto the sky, in front of the old Parliament building. Many international publications ran that photo — with headlines like ‘Sri Lanka’s economy in crisis’ — the photo of the man symbolizing the desperation of a people driven to extremes.
It did and didn’t. Like everything in Sri Lanka, it was complicated. The photo was taken at a an organised political protest. Political protests in Sri Lanka are shows of strength, involving people transported from all around the country and given bottles of arrack as incentive. Political protests are organized, choreographed affairs. While it may reflect a genuine crisis, the protest itself is never spontaneous.
There is another picture that came later, last week. You couldn’t have missed that one. It shows the back view of a woman carrying a baby in her arms. The baby’s face is just visible, cradled against her shoulder. She holds the baby with her left arm, and her right arm is upraised, holding a banner. Not even a banner, a white half sheet that flaps in the wind. You can’t see the words written on the half sheet but you can see the defiance in her stance.
That photo was taken at the protest in Mirihana on 31st March, when people gathered in the evening protesting near Jubilee post . It started at least, as a peaceful gathering of people in the area, of people sick of waiting in ques for petrol, for gas, for everyday necessities, people tired of trying desperately to get their children to sleep in the stifling heat in a country where the government imposed 13 hour power cuts, tired of trying to work with no internet and no lights, tired of the exhausting endless struggle of trying to juggle limited money with limitless costs while watching the ruling family open coffee shops and talk about the digital age, as if they lived in a parallel universe. It was a protest without a political party, a protest that came out of exhaustion and frustration. This was a very different kind of protest from the the earlier one. It was not choregraphed and there lies its strength and its danger. No one knows what lies ahead.
It’s a moving photo that captures a moment, the kind of photo that bypasses logic and appeals to your emotions, the kind of thing ironically, that the Rajapaksas used to be so good at manufacturing and feeding to their voters.
But this photo wasn’t manufactured. It was true. And the words on the poster are now against the ruling family.
In the aftermath of the protest the President’s Media Division issued a statement blaming ‘extremist elements’ for the Mirihana protests. The statement refers to the ‘Arab Spring’ (mistranslated as Arab forest!), clearly trying to imply a connection with Islamic extremism. But this time the statement wasn’t believed — everyone could see the mother and her child. How ridiculous was it to call this extremism?
We need to keep this memory alive. Gotabaya Rajapaksa came to power precisely on the card of saving us from extremism. He announced that he would be running for the presidency days after the terrible grief of the Easter bombings. But for years before that the narrative had been building that extremist Muslims were out to get Sinhalese and only the Rajapaksa strength would save us. For many Sinhalese this narrative made sense. Of the Bodu Bala Sena it was often said ‘We don’t condone their methods but — .’
In Mirihana, on Thursday, a woman and her baby were included in the label of ‘extremists’. This is what has happened in the past when anything was a threat to the rulers. But we didn’t notice then because we were not the targets.
The racial, extremist card has been played again and again, by those in power. It came in 2018, when the owner of an eatery in Ampara was accused of putting sterilization pills in food, followed by the anti Muslim riots in Digana, it came with the numerous stories that Muslim population was increasing. In May 2019, a Muslim doctor in Kurunegala was accused of performing forced sterilizations on over 4,000 predominantly Sinhalese women. The allegations appeared as a front page story in a Sinhalese newspaper soon after the Easter bombings, the article also stated that the unnamed doctor was part of an extremist group. The story spread like an epidemic and hundreds of women then started coming forward to make complaints. In June 2019, the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) informed the court that there was no evidence to back the allegations and the doctor has now been reinstated in service. But it was the news of the supposed sterilizations that received enormous publicity. The disproving of the allegations has gone almost unnoticed. In the minds of many he is still the ‘sterilisation doctor’
The original intention of the state was to charge the protestors arrested at Mirihana under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. As terrorists. They could not because of objections by the Human Rights Commission, wide publicity received and the support from lawyers who immediately rushed to Mirihana. In this case the label of terrorist was proved to be false. There will be other instances in the future when this protection is not given to minorities, when other Dr. Shafi’s are made into scapegoats.
One heartening thing about the protests on how it seems to have, for the moment at least, broken down racial divides. All are united together against a common enemy. But this will not last forever. And whatever happens, the economic future looks grim. If the common enemy is vanquished, once again we will be competing with each other, struggling for everyday essentials. “In an economy which is expanding people have no time, desire nor motive for hate-race, class-hate or religious hate. It is only when a country’s economy is on the down-grade that the inner stresses of society begin to make themselves felt.” Tarzie Vittachi wrote those words more than fifty years ago soon after the race riots in Sri Lanka in 1958. Politicians know how true this is.
We need to look critically and without prejudice at the labels politicians pin on groups and people. Who is an extremist? A woman with a baby carrying a poster? A man who could sterilize women in secret without an entire hospital knowing? We are a people who believed such hysteria and that is why Gotabaya Rajapaksa was voted into power. Ask questions. Think. Understand that there is no such thing as saying ‘We don’t condone their methods but –”. If you tolerate a group that condones racism you are condoning racism.
Understand that politicians will manipulate us again and again into voting for them, playing on our insecurities. Until we have enough and then the guns will turn against us.
And even if you don’t believe that’s true, simply remember Rathupuswala. In 2013 the army shot dead three protestors during a demonstration at Rathupaswala, Weliweriya. The protestors were asking for clean drinking water.
If we don’t change how we look critically at politics and racism, irrespective of what happens now, the Rajapaksas and politicians like them, only need to lie low for a few years and triumph again at another election in the future. Because they will make sure that we have something, another extremist, another terrorist, to be saved from. They are good at finding extremists. Look at the woman in the picture.
