Galle Face – Blood and Porridge

July 26, 2022

The brothers grim

The second half of my tuppence-worth about the current, dire situation in Sri Lanka and the shower responsible for it.

The feel-good factor generated in 2015 by the election to the Sri Lankan presidency of Maithripala Sirisena, and the expulsion from that presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, didn’t last for long. As I mentioned in my previous post, inflation got worse under Sirisena, and he soon faced criticisms that in Sri Lankan politics sounded depressingly familiar – about nepotism, corruption and bullying the media. He even managed to make the world’s headlines, and make a dick of himself, regarding Enrique Iglesias of all people. The Latin heartthrob held a concert in Colombo and some excited local ladies threw their knickers at him and ran onstage to kiss him. Such women were ‘highly uncivilised,’ declared the unimpressed president, and he called for the concert’s organisers to be ‘beaten with toxic stingray tails.’

My Sri Lankan colleagues were soon grumbling to me that the new president was as bad as the old one and that the country’s politicians, whatever their supposed political hue, were “all the same.” Their cynicism was spectacularly validated in 2018 when Sirisena tried to remove his Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe. A constitutional crisis erupted because Wickremesinghe refused to leave office. And who did Sirisena want to replace Wickremesinghe with as PM? Why, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the man whom he’d ousted in 2015.

Sirisena’s attempt to usurp Wickremesinghe failed, but the resulting governmental dysfunction surely contributed to intelligence failures that enabled the Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka the following year. Indian Intelligence had warned that the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ) were going to carry out a terrorist attack, but no action was taken. 269 men, women and children died as a result. Sirisena’s government later had to apologise for its ineptitude. This was surely the last nail in its coffin – and the beginning of the return of the old dynasty. I remember looking at Twitter on the day of the bombings, just before social media was suspended in an effort to stop the spread of misinformation, and seeing calls for the reinstatement of ‘Iron-man Rajapaksa’ to clean up the mess.

Thus, the election later that year, 2019, was a foregone conclusion. Not that we were spared the usual dodgy campaigning. I was running another training course, this time in the northern, predominantly Tamil city of Jaffna, when the Rajapaksa roadshow rolled into town and a rally was held beside the training building. Sri Lankan politicians like their rallies, although often there’s not much correspondence between the people attending the rally and the location where the rally takes place. Accordingly, I doubt if you’d find many Rajapaksa supporters living in Jaffna, but a great crowd of people still turned up, which possibly had something to do with the dozens of buses parked along the sides of the neighbourhood’s streets. Soon, amplified voices were blasting through the walls of the training building, speechifying in praise of the House of Rajapaksa. I remember the face of one of my trainees, a Tamil Catholic priest, contorting in disgust and rage at them. (Priests had not been spared during the end-of-war massacres in northern Sri Lanka.)

From twitter.com

However, this time, it wasn’t Mahinda Rajapaksa who bagged the presidency. Getting the job instead was his brother Gotabaya, former Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Sri Lankan army, less flamboyant than Mahinda but no less mired in allegations of human rights abuses, media intimidation and corruption. Mahinda settled for the post of Prime Minister. Let’s not say those Rajapaksa boys are undemocratic. Meanwhile, youngest brother Basil got the post of Minister of Finance and oldest brother Chamal got the unwieldy-sounding portfolio of ‘Minister of Internal Trade, Food Security and Consumer Welfare, Mahaweli, Agriculture, Irrigation and Rural Development’. In addition, there was now a brood of younger Rajapaksas to accommodate. Chamal’s son Shasheendra became Advanced Agriculture Minister in 2021. Mahinda’s sons Yoshitha and Namal became, respectively, PM’s Chief of Staff and Sports Minister in 2020.

A word about Namal Rajapaksa, until recently seen as the family’s heir apparent, as the man who’d take the reins and ensure that Sri Lanka remained a loyal Rajapaksa fiefdom well into the 21^st century. Appropriately for a Sports Minister, he has some sporting achievements on his CV. He’d been a keen rugby player, or as local sports journalists would term it, ‘a keen ruggerite’. (I love Sri Lankan English, but I wish the word ‘ruggerite’ would be expunged from the language.) He captained the national Sri Lankan rugby team from 2013 to 2014, an honour I’m sure he got on account of his playing ability and not who his dad was. In a portent of what his family would do to the country, his captaincy saw the team get demolished 132-10 by Japan. A less funny and far darker rugby connection was, to quote his Wikipedia entry, the allegation of his ‘involvement in (the) murder and torture of Wasim Thajudeen’. Thajudeen was a fellow rugby player whom he had a feud with.

In March this year, when Sri Lanka’s economy had dropped through the floor and the population was panicking about finding fuel and paying for food, Namal lit up the country’s social media with images of himself living it up and enjoying luxury water-sports facilities in the Maldives. It doesn’t surprise me that a friend who got introduced to him at a reception described him as one the most insufferably entitled people he’d ever met.

Thus, the 2019 election resulted in the government being infested with more Rajapaksas than ever.. The great Rajapaksa kleptocracy was back on track. To keep everyone happy, President Gotabaya – ‘Gota’ – initiated sweeping tax cuts, a move that with hindsight was a wee bit unwise.

So, what could go wrong? Well, as we’ve just seen, everything.

Shortly after my departure from Sri Lanka, things got really bad. There were massive, daily power cuts. Photographs and film clips of seemingly endless lines of vehicles, queuing for hours or even days in the heat – heat in which, tragically, several people died – outside depleted petrol stations became familiar images on the world’s media. Meanwhile, protests against the Rajapaksas gathered a head of steam. The protestors, whose slogans included ‘Gota’s gotta go’, must have included many people who’d voted for the clan in 2019. Given the damage inflicted by the fertiliser fiasco, I can’t imagine even the rural, conservative, Sinhalese heartlands feeling any love for them now.

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

Basil Rajapaksa resigned as Minister of Finance on April 8^th. Chamal Rajapaksa, now just ‘Minister of Irrigation’, quit five days earlier. Mahinda clung on to the post of PM until May 9^th. Then, in an effort to escape resignation, he used the familiar ploy of bussing in supporters to stage a show of strength. This backfired, to say the least. He brought a mob of goons, stooges and thugs to the Prime Minister’s Residence of Temple Trees on Galle Road. The mob assured him that everyone still loved him and didn’t want him to resign. No doubt they got boozed up on free arrack as well. Then they spilled out onto the street, proceeded to Galle Face Green and attacked the anti-government protestors who’d been camped there peacefully for weeks. When the general populace saw what was happening on TV and social media, they reacted in fury and took to the streets themselves. (A timeline of the shenanigans on May 9^th is provided here by the excellent factchecking and investigatory group Watchdog, whose founders include the Sri Lankan data scientist and science fiction writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.)

It was lucky that the country didn’t tip over into violence and anarchy then. Afterwards, Mahinda Rajapaksa had no choice but to resign. One consequence of the unrest provoked by his stunt was that the Rajapaksa Museum down in Hambantota, built with state funds and using the manpower of the Sri Lankan Navy, got trashed. Talk about karma.

After that, it was just President Gota who, politically speaking, was the last Rajapaksa standing. He didn’t depart until after a deluge of protestors invaded the presidential residence in Colombo’s Fort area on July 9^th which led to another glut of images on social media, this time of protestors enjoying the cool waters of the presidential swimming pool, lying on the presidential four-poster bed, watching news coverage of their own demonstration on the presidential TV, and so on. Allegedly, the protestors also discovered bags containing 17.8 million rupees. Even by presidential standards, that’s a lot of loose change to keep lying around the house. Gotabaya didn’t agree to resign until a few days later – after he’d got out of the country. His efforts, and his brother Basil’s efforts, to flee had a tragi-comic quality. Attempts to leave Sri Lanka using commercial flights were thwarted by immigration officials refusing to process their papers and by fears that their fellow passengers would beat them up.

However, Gotabaya has definitely left now. He flew in a military aircraft to the Maldives and from there travelled to Singapore. Yes, at the moment, he’s in the country that I’m in. Indeed, if the rumours are true about him being holed up in hotel in the Singaporean neighbourhood of Orchard, he might only be a stone’s throw away from my workplace. The Singaporean authorities are adamant that he won’t be getting asylum. While he’s here, I’m sure they won’t be taking any advice from him on how to run their economy either.

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

While it’s gratifying to see the Rajapaksas scuttle off like this, disgraced and despised, every Sri Lankan I’ve spoken to has insisted that they should stay in the country. They should be put on trial for their many crimes, have their corrupt ways exposed and, most importantly, be stripped of all the money they’ve looted from Sri Lanka during the past two decades. That money should be returned to the country in its greatest hour of need.

What happens next? I’m afraid I’m not optimistic. The Sri Lankan economy is now a disaster, and where there’s disaster, disaster capitalism is never far away. I can see the country being at the mercy of the IMF and having to re-structure its economy in the extreme, impoverishing, free market-worshipping manner described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (2005). From past experience, that means the sale of public assets, with the result that the majority of people get poorer and an already-rich minority, able to take advantage of the new, rapacious economic climate, become even richer.

Meanwhile, the old Sri Lankan practice of confining politics to a small, wealthy, well-connected elite – which, come to think of it, they may have inherited from the British – shows no sign of going away. The ubiquitous Ranil Wickremesinghe, who’s served as Prime Minster six times (yes, six!) in the past, has now installed himself in the presidency, has denounced the anti-government protestors as ‘fascists’, and has sent in police and security forces to violently clear the protestors from their encampment in Galle Face. All this from a man who on May 9^th condemned the attack by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s minions on the same protestors.

From twitter.com

It’s not the removal of a few, corrupt old faces that Sri Lanka needs. it’s an overhaul of the whole, entitled, business-as-usual political system. But I wonder how much chance there is of that happening.

As the Who sang, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss…” But let’s hope Sri Lanka won’t get fooled again.

December 18, 2020December 21, 2020

From sci-fi to Sri-fi

© yudhanjaya.com

During the half-dozen years I’ve lived in Sri Lanka, I’ve read a fair number of novels and short story collections by local writers, including works by Martin Wickramasinghe, Romesh Gunesekera, Shyam Selvadurai, Carl Muller, Ashok Ferrey, Ameena Hussein and Michael Ondaatje. The latter is probably the best known internationally, though ironically for a novel that doesn’t have much to do with Sri Lanka. Their output is what snobby literary critics would describe as ‘mainstream’ literature. I’ve seen none of them associated with ‘genre’ fiction, although Muller’s work contains a lot of humour and labelling it ‘comedy’ certainly wouldn’t be amiss.

On the other hand, I didn’t expect to encounter anything in the past six years that could be classified as ‘Sri Lankan science fiction.’ But, to my surprise, I have. Romesh Gunesekera’s 2002 novel Heaven’s Edge is set in a surreal future Sri Lanka where the Civil War hasn’t ended but gone on and on, with the country becoming increasingly authoritarian and its environment increasingly despoiled. An uneasy mixture of dystopian fiction, allegory and magical realism, with flashes of J.G. Ballard and William Gibson, I have to say I find Heaven’s Edge the least impressive of Gunesekera’s books that I’ve read.

Better is the 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. Although Clark was in many ways a very English Englishman, Fountains is for me a very Sri Lankan book. Clarke had lived in Sri Lanka for decades by the time it was published and the fictional island the story takes place on, Taprobane, is simply Sri Lanka with a few tweaks, for example, with Sigiriya Rock and Adam’s Peak being near neighbours when in the real Sri Lanka they’re 175 kilometres apart. Set mostly in the 22^nd century, though with some bold flashbacks to 2000 years earlier in Taprobane / Sri Lanka’s history, Fountains is about the construction of a giant ‘space elevator’ linking the earth’s surface with a space station in geosynchronous orbit. Geographical factors necessitate the elevator being built from a mountaintop in Taprobane / Sri Lanka, which coincidentally happens to be the island’s most sacred location. The book meditates on the conflict between preserving heritage and culture and pushing on with scientific and technological progress, with Clarke treating both causes sympathetically even if it’s obvious which one will ultimately prevail.

Now, I’ve discovered the 28-year-old Sri Lankan author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and recently read two of his novels, Numbercaste (2017) and The Inhuman Race (2019). While neither book is entirely to my pernickety tastes, I’d say they make a good case for Wijeratne being hailed as the potential future of Sri Lankan science fiction.

On his website Wijeratne identifies himself as a member of a ‘Data, Algorithms and Policy’ team working for a thinktank called LIRNEasia. This background obviously helped shape Numbercaste. Its narrator, Patrick Udo, is recruited by a tech company called NumberCorp in the 2030s and gets involved in a project with revolutionary consequences for humanity. Its purpose is to collate every human being’s data – salary, bank balance, credit card rating, police record, social media profile and a thousand things more – and distil it into a single score, an all-important ‘number’ that determines the social and professional options open to him or her. As Udo says near the book’s end, “Every morning I’d check Number News on my phone. Tap, tap. There, just above the news and the social gossip and the who-checked-in-wheres, was my score. My score was critical. It got me the best tables at restaurants I went to, all simple but pricy affairs. It got me into the VIP section of any club where I wanted to party. It got me first class tickets on the airplanes.”

A person’s number isn’t immutable. It can rise or fall. As Julius Common, NumberCorp’s visionary founder and leader, argues, this makes it a positive force because it rewards good behaviour and punishes bad. For example, police officers who blot their records with corruption or brutality will see their numbers drop below the threshold required for them to remain employed. Thus, they’ll be replaced by less crooked cops with better numbers. That, of course, is Common’s spin on the system and the question throughout the book is if it’ll actually become a tool of oppression, locking everyone into their own social and professional cells on different tiers of society and keeping everyone in line with the threat of demotion to lower tiers if they don’t obey orders. Will Common and NumberCorp lead the world to utopia or dystopia? In the book’s afterword, Wijeratne notes that China has tried doing something like this in real life with its social credit project.

Much of Numbercaste details Udo’s Boswell / Dr Johnson-like relationship with Common. This relationship sees Udo play the role of humble employee, then trusted lieutenant and finally fallen-from-favour outcast. Although it’s largely set in California, a culture where the names Zuckerberg, Musk, Gates and Bezos are intoned as if they’re ancient but all-powerful deities, Sri Lanka makes an appearance along the way as an early test lab for Common and his scoring system: “We need a sort of guinea pig to test this stuff. A small population that we can monitor and test and retest the bulk of our SEA algorithms on… This place is perfect… Highly connected, almost everyone’s online, and the government will let us do whatever the hell we want as long as their ministers are happy.”

As I’m a relative luddite with information technology, and an avoider of most social media, Numbercaste isn’t a book that automatically appeals to me. Also, I suspect more could have been done to humanise Common whilst chronicling his inexorable rise. Perhaps he could have been given some Citizen Kane-style foibles that taint his success with bitter unhappiness. Nonetheless, a lot of Numbercaste impressed me and Wijeratne’s prose style is spot on. It provides just enough detail to give a firm sense of time and place, but never overdoes it and doesn’t get in the way of the fast-moving narrative.

Obviously, the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the world have made a lot of science fiction published before 2020 but set a short time after it seem dated. In the real future, people in 2025, 2030 or 2035 will presumably talk about the 2020 pandemic in the way that we still talk about 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis now. In the near-futures of pre-2020 science fiction, the characters aren’t talking about it because the writers had no idea it was going to happen. The 2017-published Numbercaste gets around this credibility problem by accident rather than design. It alludes to something called ‘the TRS-8I superbug’, which ‘hit Asia hardest’ and ‘had done in millions of people’. Among its victims were ten million Sri Lankans, who presumably perished from it sometime in the 2020s. So that’s why nobody mentions Covid-19 in Numbercaste. The TRS-8I pandemic was so traumatic that it erased the earlier virus from the collective memory.

The Inhuman Race, meanwhile, takes place in an alternative universe, in a version of Sri Lanka in 2033 where, to quote the book’s back-cover blurb, “The British Empire never fell. Communism never happened. The flag of the Commonwealth still flies over its colonies, which lie stripped bare in the name of British interests, powerless to resist.” The story begins with gangs of feral children scrabbling for survival amid the ruins of the Colombo seafront. This is a legacy of the Chinese Emperor deciding to give the British a bloody nose: “having won the might of a united China,” he “brooded over his navy from his darkened throne-room. The white devils that flew the Union Jack ruled too much of the ocean for his liking. Dimly, he remembered Fa-Xian’s accounts of Ceylon, the Buddha’s blessed island… And thus the British Empire’s first direct contact with China in two hundred years was when the Chinese warships pulled into Colombo port and began their assault.” In the ensuing carnage, Colombo’s ‘Galle Face Green became Galle Face Brown.’

While the novel’s first part offers some good post-apocalyptic fun, with the different gangs using as their headquarters the shells of the different luxury hotels that used to do business along Galle Face, such as the Shangri La, the Taj and the Cinnamon Grand, and with a gigantic mountain range of garbage separating the city’s devasted seaboard from its more habitable parts inland, I enjoyed the later chapters more. Here, the action switches to the island’s still-intact administrative centre, the mountain city of Kandy. At the same time, the book’s main theme emerges, which is about how much robots built to emulate living beings should be regarded as living beings themselves. This is hardly a ground-breaking theme in science fiction – though you might think it is if your name is Ian McEwan. But Wijeratne explores it well, through the eyes of a sympathetic character called Dr Kushlani de Alemeida. She’s an employee of a company manufacturing and using robots for dubious entertainment purposes. Though these products look ‘a lot like what God would have made the humans to look like had he been limited to metal and cheap plastic’, Alemeida uncovers evidence that they’re more sentient than anyone had imagined.

What I really like about the book’s Kandy sequences are the glimpses it gives of Sri Lankan society in this weird, alternative-universe scenario where the British Empire is still a thing. Order is maintained by ‘British’ soldiers, actually Indians and Gurkas, and by a fearsome outfit called the Inquisition that consist of ‘hooded monk-like figures’, from whom ‘a pale face with ruby lenses for eyes’ occasionally appears. The economy has been portioned off to the control of several rich houses, the Ratwatte, Madugalle, Rambukpotha and Bandaras. The judiciary is staffed by Buddhist monks, which leads to some interesting debate when Alemeida tries to convince a court that the robots should be treated like living creatures. The British themselves, apart from a mention of a Governor, are invisible – though evidently creaming off the country’s wealth at the top.

In this way, The Inhuman Race reminds me of certain works of Sri Lankan literature set when the country was under British rule, like Martin Wickramasinghe’s Ape Game (1940) and Madol Doova (1947) or Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). (Okay, Village wasn’t penned by a Sri Lankan but by an Englishman, Virginia Woolf’s husband no less, while he worked for the Ceylon Civil Service. But it was written from a native’s point of view, not from a colonialist’s.) In those books too, the British are barely around. The administrative machinery they’ve set up is run by the locals, which gives a semblance of Sri Lankan autonomy. But again, up above, the Brits are discretely pocketing the profits.

One small but nice touch in The Inhuman Race’s is when a character refers to the words of ‘the great Pratchett’: “There is no justice… there is just us.” So not only has Terry Pratchett churned out Discworld novels in this alternative universe too, but he’s even more revered than he is in our one.

I was slightly frustrated that The Inhuman Race didn’t show more of its future-imperialist / Buddhist society or, indeed, of the secretive Chinese Empire that pulverised Colombo at the novel’s start. But The Inhuman Race is supposedly the first part of a trilogy, so hopefully Yudhanjaya Wijeratne will supply more details in the instalments to come.