Sri Lanka: A welfare state in cinders

The island country’s worst-ever crisis has unified its people in their demand for better accountability and governance

I must have passed by her a hundred times before. I would, on occasion, stop and buy a few beautiful blue water lilies, or a few pink lotus flowers. Two dozen flowers would cost 300 Sri Lankan Rupees. Six months ago, it would have been half that.

In Buddhism, the pink lotus is sacred, as it is a divine symbol of the Buddha as well as of the path to enlightenment. Yet, enlightened leadership has eluded this lost paradise since Independence. Instead, the symbol has been appropriated by the Sri Lanka People's Front (SLPP), the ruling party of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, as its political emblem. A horrendous monument to his ego and the government's profligate spending, the “Lotus Tower” stands 350 metres high. It cost over a million dollars.

Religion has always played its role as an opiate of the masses in the subcontinent.

Surekha Chandani sits in her makeshift pavement stall outside one of the oldest Buddhist temples, the Gangaramaya in Colombo, and sells flowers and joss sticks to temple goers. Beside her is the love of her life – a big black German “lion” Shepherd called Pinky.

Gangaramaya, started by the famous scholar-monk Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Nayaka Thera in the late 19th Century, lies in the heart of the city in a now gentrified area ironically still called “Slave Island”. Politicians have come and paid their due here, on many a full moon day. The temple in its heyday was a pioneering centre of learning and vocational training, as the main springboard for Buddhism.

The temple demonstrates a hotchpotch of Sri Lankan, Thai, Indian, and Chinese architecture. Present on the premises is Seema Malaka (ordination hall of monks) which was built with donations from a Muslim sponsor and designed by Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka’s most famous architect of Eurasian descent.

It is kitsch, and the face of Buddhist culture to tourists wanting their Instagram fix, making it possibly the number one must-see spot in the city.

To the temple’s left, the Beira Lake plays an important role in conveying surface drainage, as well as serving as a catchment and home to species of storks, pelicans, and monitor lizards. Yet, a reeking stench emanates from a cesspit of discarded items such as polythene bags, tyres, metals, organic waste. This too is another symbol of a nation of beauty harried by systemic abuse.

A mile away as the crow flies, is Galle Face Green, a colonial landmark which is now the epicentre of the #GOTAGOHOME protests.

Sounds waft across the lake nearby. A gaggle of bedraggled and wet youngsters carrying placards walk to and from there.

Five minutes earlier, I had met this young mother ‘Manike’ – a woman with a six-year-old in her arms. Menike was begging. Her husband is a construction worker. She works three days a week as a domestic worker for 800 SL rupees a day and lived an hour and a half away from the airport. Milk powder shortages and the unbearable cost of living drove her to hop a bus to the capital to beg. Last week, Manike lost her one-room home as she could not pay the rent. Her husband has no income now as most construction sites are closed. Sri Lanka faced a shortage of cement due to import bans and exchange rate escalations. Most cement imports come from India or Pakistan. By stark and shocking coincidence, a bag of cement and a kilo packet of milk powder costs roughly the same now.

Menike is 35 years old, looks barely 25, has studied only till Class 4 and lives one day at a time. “I don’t need much,” she said. “If I get some food for the kids, I am happy. I can skip the odd meal. I am used to it,” she began to cry.

Perhaps it was Manike’s tears that made me stop this time in front of the lotus seller by the temple near my house. As I write this piece, I realise that this temple, and Surekha’s life story read like a metaphor, for the ongoing socio-political crises in Sri Lanka.

This is her story. Her father was a man from the South. “My father ran the first and only food van in this area, in the early 1970s, selling ‘Kola Kanda’ (a porridge of coconut milk, red rice and the juice of leafy green vegetables),” she says.

Surekha’s mother would be up at 2 am every morning to make the broth, and they would be at the park by 7 am. Surekha herself had passed her A-Levels and her nursing exams. She had worked as a nurse in Ward 9 (the neuro ward of the National Hospital nearby) but left her job around 1989.

“It was the height of the war...too many soldiers coming in with concussion. It was depressing and I was falling sick,” she explains. Her uncle knew the head priest and she was asked to set up a pre-school for the temple.

She then trained as a Montessori teacher, passing all exams and won a JAICA scholarship to train in Japan, Somewhere in between, she was forced into a loveless, arranged marriage, had four children.

This story resonates, as it underscores the different strands of Sri Lanka’s post-colonial history. Hidden talent and potential through decades of welfare in free education and healthcare had given her the bedrock for a better life.

Yet, instead, she stood selling her lotus flowers on a side-street by a reeking man-made lake beside a temple that had morphed into an enterprise and a centre of power and privilege. There she sits, a clutch of dependents to foster, her only solace a pedigreed dog that lives like a mongrel on the street.

What is it then that connects Menike, who is reduced to begging on the street, and Surekha, who sells lotus buds beside a temple, to each other and to the crisis that the Galle Face protest seeks to address? I’m tempted to say that they share courage and determination against a system that both gives them opportunities and yet rudely takes them away.

They are women taking care of their families in a society that used to care and support but has now lost its ability and resilience to do so. It is this loss, robbed by the avarice of a few, that has made the sea of protesters camped out at Galle Face demand “no more”.

Pushing for change

Herein lies the rub. Despite its head start in being the first country in the region to open its economy, despite strong welfare and free education that has given it the best quality of life index in South Asia, Sri Lanka now stands perilously on the cusp of plummeting into a failed state.

Yet, like the lotus that comes from the mud, out there is a transformative silver lining. A not-so-silent revolution, inclusive, youthful and seemingly non-partisan is out there pushing for change: Substantive change. Systemic reform, the rescinding of the 20th Amendment and curtailing of constitutional impunity and presidential power. A cleaning up of the stable and freeing the bureaucracy to perform. Accountability frameworks, governance and performance matrixes are being heralded. Bitcoin accounts are being named, shamed and traced.

The complicit corporate world is watching with bated breath. Many protesting on the street are their own children. A tenuous sense of hope looms high above the despair. Increasingly, the artists, the intellectuals, the students, the lawyers, IT professionals and even the cricketers are realising their responsibility to be part of this change. The road ahead will be steep and rugged, but it might well be worth the interim pain and sacrifice.

(A former journalist and broadcaster, Shehara de Silva has worked on nation-building strategy and political PR in East Asia. She is based in Colombo)

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