{"id":62289,"date":"2021-04-18T07:46:06","date_gmt":"2021-04-18T07:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/?p=62289"},"modified":"2021-04-18T07:46:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-18T07:46:06","slug":"the-h-word-and-retro-economics-of-unreason-by-dr-dayan-jayathilake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/the-h-word-and-retro-economics-of-unreason-by-dr-dayan-jayathilake\/","title":{"rendered":"The H-word and retro-economics of unreason-by Dr Dayan Jayathilake"},"content":{"rendered":"

The H-word and retro-economics of unreason-by Dr Dayan Jayathilake<\/span><\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Source:<\/span><\/strong>FT<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

China\u2019s Defence Minister Maj-Gen. Wei Fenghe visits Sri Lanka later this month. The former head of China\u2019s rocket forces, he was awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz for promoting defensc cooperation between Pakistan and\u00a0China, last December.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Sinhala-Tamil New Year greeting from the Chinese Ambassador in Colombo, released in impeccable Sinhala, mentions the \u201cstrategic advice\u201d (\u201cupades\u201d) on bilateral relations given by the Presidents of China and Sri Lanka in their two telephone conversations. It concludes by announcing the intention of taking the Sino-Sri Lanka \u201cstrategic partnership to a new level\u201d in the New Year \u201cwhich is a time of new beginnings\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Dr<\/span><\/p>\n

Invoking Hitler\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Only the bitterest enemy of a political leader would associate his name with that of Adolf Hitler, the personality universally identified as the epitome of evil in modern history. Any political leader identified with Hitler by one of his colleagues would fire that colleague and vehemently disown and denounce the reference. Not so in Sri Lanka today (though it is Afro-Asia\u2019s oldest democracy). Not so, presidential aspirant Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2018 (Gotabaya gets an unusual compliment \u2013 The Hindu \u2013\u00a0https:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/news\/international\/gotabaya-gets-an-unusual-compliment\/article243006 77.ece<\/a>). And, not so President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.<\/span><\/p>\n

GR loyalist, State Minister Dilum Amunugama just revived the morally-warped H-word:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Buddhist clergy also said it is ok to be a Hitler, that is good\u2026The 6.9 million who voted for President Gotabaya believe that he should be a Hitler of some sort\u2026I don\u2019t think the President likes to become a Hitler at once. But if he is pushed towards that by the actions of various sections, then he will become a Hitler, and no one will blame him. Everything will go fine then\u2026\u201d (Video \u2013 Sri Lankan Minister says President should become \u2018Hitler\u2019 \u2013 newsfirst.lk –\u00a0https:\/\/www.newsfirst.lk\/2021\/04\/12\/sri-lankan-minister-says-president-should-become-hitler\/<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n

When the dots are connected, are a Presidential trajectory and project indicated? There was no early warning in Myanmar, it was never an entrenched democracy and is on China\u2019s periphery\u2014so there\u2019s an excuse for the world\u2019s and the region\u2019s democracies. In Sri Lanka\u2019s case, all the warning lights are flashing red.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

History will not absolve the global democratic community if it fails to interdict the fusion of a leap-frogging power-projection with a \u2018retro-Hitler\u2019\/Myanmar project, to subtract an old democracy from the world\u2019s democratic camp and convert it into a dependent outpost of a despotic Eastern system with an empire mentality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If the Quad and the world\u2019s democracies can\u2019t beat the external-internal autocratic convergence and consolidation in Sri Lanka, an established democracy 18 miles from of a Quad member which is the world\u2019s largest democracy, where can it succeed in defeating despotism and the blunting the offensive to change the global balance against the democratic great powers?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If the Myanmar contagion is carried to Sri Lanka, the signal will be strengthened that the democratic order is historically obsolete and the democratic powers are \u201cpaper tigers\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Economic irrationality<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Anyone old enough, who has experienced Sri Lanka\u2019s political and social life consciously (as I have), knows in his\/her bones that we\u2019ve been here before, in 1970-1977, and this thing is either going to wind up as it did the last time, or in the (far worse) way it would have, had that Government suicidally extended its term further.<\/span><\/p>\n

What saw us through with an average growth rate touching 5% during the long war, was a resilient, unchained private sector. The hard drive of the economy, the corporate sector, has grown and been globalised for four decades. It has also become accustomed to a certain framework of macroeconomic decision-making and consistency of conduct by the Government, which furnishes a stable macroeconomic matrix conducive for the private sector. All that is ending.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Five streams feed into the GR Government\u2019s retro-economics:<\/span><\/p>\n

1. The old SLFP thinking, abandoned by President Chandrika Kumaratunga and unrestored by Mahinda Rajapaksa, which damned the Open Economy of 1977 as the great Fall of a self-sufficient, i.e., involuntarily abstemious, and therefore virtuous Sri Lanka.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. The Jathika Chinthanaya ideology of the late 1980s, and its corollary the Jathika Arthikaya project i.e., that of a \u2018national economy\u2019 (the main ideologue of which was Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekara).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

3. The anti-globalisation ideology and economic nationalism of President Donald Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. A misreading of the Chinese economic achievement and the hopeless conceptual confusion of globalisation, neoliberalism and an Open Economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

5. The \u2018barracks model\u2019 of a self-reliant command economy and a siege mentality.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Far more literate and intelligent people than today\u2019s Cabinet and top officialdom, designed, implemented and justified the economic model of 1970-1977. The OPEC oil price hike of 1973 was the COVID-19 of that time. Though the external shock was as real as it is now, the voters rejected that as an excuse because their lived daily experience revealed that things could have been done better and differently; that their suffering was in considerable measure, policy-driven and therefore avoidable. The people were also aware that the ruling clan was hypocritical, in that its members were living a life of luxury while everyone from the middle classes downward were suffering.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Gotabaya Government\u2019s paradoxical policy framework\u2014\u2018Ban-onomics\u2019 (as the Daily FT Editorial has it) plus Port City\u2014is akin to fitting one foot with a shoe that the foot has long outgrown, and the other foot with no shoe at all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lenin once said about the abnormal capitalism of Russia, that \u201cwe suffer not only from capitalist development but also from its insufficiency\u201d. Sri Lanka suffers not only from interventionist overregulation (import controls, licenses) but also from the insufficiency of regulation (the Port City).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018The Only Hope\u2019<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

No wonder then that the architect of Sri Lanka\u2019s economic revolution of 1977, Ronnie de Mel, a far more lucidly penetrating intellect than any in Government today and the most successful Finance Minister the country ever had, went on the (televised) record on his 96th birthday, insisting to Sajith Premadasa that:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think that the only hope for Sri Lanka to make a comeback is if you can get the whole thing going under your control and the control of policies that you represent. That\u2019s the only hope for Sri Lanka. I will say that openly, and have said that to many people\u2026Sri Lanka is in a dire situation\u2026I am very fearful at times at what might happen\u2026I hope you will be able to save Sri Lanka\u2026I always feel that you are the only hope\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the Opposition\u2019s neoliberal \u2018free-marketeers\u2019 must digest Ronnie de Mel\u2019s sage counsel that \u201csocialism\u201d must be part of the economic policy paradigm\u2014something that President Premadasa\u2019s son surely grasps by instinct. \u201cWhat Sri Lanka needs is equitable growth,\u201d said the wizard of the Open Economy, which is quite precisely what Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz told Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and Finance Minister Samaraweera in 2015 in Colombo and was ignored, guaranteeing the UNP\u2019s elimination five years later. (Daily Mirror \u2013 Fmr. Finance Minister Ronnie de Mel asks for more of socialism \u2013\u00a0http:\/\/www.dailymirror.lk\/breaking_news\/Fmr-Finance-Minister-Ronnie-de-Mel-asks-for-more-of-socialism\/108-209896<\/a>)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moral apartheid\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

When the President pardons someone found guilty by the Sri Lankan Courts of murdering unarmed civilian captives including by cutting the throat of a five-year-old child, and the Secretary\/Defence greets him upon release, while the elected Mayor of Jaffna, a young second-generation lawyer, who may or may not be guilty of approving a municipal employees\u2019 uniform which approximated that of an illegal police force of a banned terrorist organisation, is bundled into custody before dawn instead of being given a Ministerial cautioning\/instruction, such asymmetry exhibits moral apartheid.<\/span><\/p>\n

The perception of Mayor Manivannan as a subversive threat indicates that President Gotabaya is unlikely to permit a Tamil Chief Minister and Council to hold office under the 13th Amendment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A unilateral retrenchment by the President from the 13th Amendment will give Tamil nationalists the excuse to claim they have no alternative but to re-assert \u2018the right of self-determination\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, if the 13th Amendment no longer stands, India will have no formal commitment to Sri Lanka\u2019s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and no counterweight and constraint to resist the push from Tamil Nadu and\/or from competitive geo-strategic compulsions, to tilt towards Tamil \u2018self-determination\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The purge\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a disturbing story appeared in the LankaCNews, the popular website (close to Minister Weerawansa), which purported to quote a mainstream newspaper, Aruna, as follows:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cInvestigation by State intelligence agencies has revealed that certain prominent officials occupying top posts of state institutions are functioning under the dominance of Islamic extremist organisations. Information has been uncovered that decisions taken by the State regarding these organisations reach them through the said officials.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Central Bank, the Attorney-General\u2019s Department, the Port, the airport, the Health Ministry are among the State institutions where high officials have been subordinated to the ideology of these organisations in a planned manner. It is said that among such individuals occupying high posts are professors, engineers, and computer scientists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA wide-ranging inquiry into places which can pose a threat to national security and those individuals occupying high posts, has been commenced by the State Intelligence Service, the Terrorist Investigation Division, the Special Police Unit and the CID.\u201d \u2014Aruna (lankacnews, 13 April, 3 p.m.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Endgame scenario<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The GR regime can\u2019t use ethno-religious polarisation to permanentise a Netanyahu-type rightwing ultranationalist electoral majority, for three reasons:<\/span><\/p>\n

1. The Sinhala majority is usually divided down the middle, and the seismic nationalist shift to the Rajapaksas was the result of the anomalous factor of the Ranil Wickremesinghe leadership of the UNP. That factor has gone, never to return or be replicated, and has been replaced by a new Opposition led by a youthful, Western-educated, populist orator with a surname that is a brand, and the war-winning Army Commander as his new party\u2019s Chairperson.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

2. The chronic, colossal economic malfunctions and mismanagement, the resultant collapse of living standards that the public (the majority of which is Sinhala) is undergoing, and the acute disaffection of the middle classes accustomed to the consumer standards of four decades of the Open Economy, almost certainly ensure a replay of the electoral fate of the 1970-1977 Bandaranaike Government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

3. Tamil discontent in the north won\u2019t produce violent rebellion, but may produce a peaceful civic resistance (as prefigured by P2P), which if forcefully repressed by this strategically Beijing-partnered regime, would trigger pushback from the external environment, starting with the neighbourhood.<\/span><\/p>\n

An electoral tsunami may be temporarily blocked or overturned by military intervention as in Myanmar, which will prove unsustainable despite the Beijing backstop, because:<\/span><\/p>\n

(a) Sri Lanka is not located on China\u2019s doorstep. Resupplying a distant island is difficult to sustain.<\/span><\/p>\n

(b) The Tamil minority is located on India\u2019s doorstep.<\/span><\/p>\n

(c) China has no military assets anywhere close to Sri Lanka to offset India\u2019s Thanjavur airbase in Tamil Nadu with its squadron of Brahmos cruise missile-carrying Sukhoi-30s.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(d) The Gotabaya regime is already sufficiently on the West\u2019s radar to make any lunge to \u201cbe a Hitler\u201d or \u201cdo a Myanmar\u201d, trigger unilateral sanctions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Easter martyrs\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The second anniversary of the Easter massacre falls next week. As a Catholic and a conflict analyst, I ponder these points:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n