Militarisation, Lankan Style
By Tisaranee Gunasekara -February 9, 2013
Sri Lanka’s unexpected loss at the T20 World Cup finals in late 2012 plunged the country into despair. The fact that the defeat happened at home raised the shock to a new level. The day after the cricket fiasco,Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, Defence Secretary and younger brother of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, offered his take on why Sri Lanka lost its fourth cricket world cup final. At a function to mark the commissioning of 23 principals of leading national schools as brevet colonels, Rajapaksa attributed the defeat to the “absence of leadership training” (Sri Lanka Mirror, 8 October 2012).Rajapaksa’s “analysis”, considered in confluence with the occasion on which he made it and his full official title (Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development), indicates both the extent of Lankan militarisation and its sui generis nature. In Sri Lanka, militarisation is advancing with disturbing rapidity, and making inroads into traditional civilian preserves. The motive force behind these meticulously planned waves of militarisation is not the military leadership. The authors and directors of Lankan militarisation are the country’s civilian rulers, the Rajapaksas. The militarisation drive is part – and a critically important one – of the grand Rajapaksa scheme to strengthen “Rajapaksa power”, concomitant with dismantling democratic freedoms and subverting judicial independence.
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Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected the president of Sri Lanka in November 2005. Since then he and his family have moved ceaselessly to gather the reins of state and societal power into their hands. This orchestrated metamorphosis of Sri Lanka from a flawed democracy into a neo-patrimonial oligarchy is happening concurrently with the transformation of the Lankan military into a praetorian guard of the new familial power elite. The bloated military is being fed huge chunks of the national income, and used to crystallise Rajapaksa dominance of state and society.
“Leadership training” is the Rajapaksa regime’s code name for civilians being given courses in physical and psychological regimentation by the military. This process began in 2011 when all new entrants to universities were ordered to undergo a compulsory three-week leadership training programmes in army camps. Varying excuses were conjured to make this outrageous anomaly seem necessary and innocuous, ranging from promoting English and computer literacy to teaching rural students proper table etiquette. But the real purpose of the programme is to transform universities – hitherto immune to Rajapaksa influence – from breeding-grounds for dissent into epicentres of patriotic-conformism. Subsequently, some secondary school students and all ministers and parliamentarians of the ruling party were sent to army camps for leadership training. Subjecting 23 principals to a week’s “cadet and leadership training” by the National Cadet Corp marked the latest step in this process of administering a concentrated dosage of militarisation to civilians.1
The leadership training programme is a brainchild of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development.2 Logically, any concordance between defence and urban development is hard to perceive. However the twinning of these two disparate areas has given the military legal entrée into a wide variety of civilian preserves. Even more pertinently, it has enabled the Rajapaksas to use the military to bypass democratic norms and legal boundaries and undertake questionable projects aimed at economic extraction, politico-ideological indoctrination and societal control.
Militarisation, Lankan style, is turning the Lankan military into an effective tool of Rajapaksa power and a total defender of Rajapaksa rule, well beyond the boundaries of democracy, constitutionality and legality.
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