Independence Day

Today marks Sri Lanka's 61st year of Independence.



The asshole who started it all. Solomon Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike. Prime Minister, 1956 – 1959. Assassinated... by a Buddhist monk.

It's hard to imagine that on the eve of independence in 1948, Ceylon, as it was known at the time, boasted the second most prosperous economy in Asia after Japan. As recently as 1965, Sri Lanka was richer than South Korea. It's hard to fathom that there was a time when Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister of Singapore, visited Sri Lanka, saw the relative prosperity and multi-ethnic harmony, and hoped his nation would become more like it. Now both aforementioned countries are ahead by leaps and bounds while Sri Lanka is a strife-stricken Third World hellhole. What happened?

Sri Lanka is a tragic example of the hazards of democracy - a country whose potential was squandered by petty politicians more concerned with perpetuating their rule than lifting the country up.

It started out alright. Unlike big sister India, Ceylon's transition to independence was markedly smooth and peaceful. The first Prime Minister, Oxford-educated Don Stephen Senanayake, was by all accounts a good guy. The big Don brought all the ethnic groups together and was dedicated to improving the condition of the common folk. Like The Godfather.

Unfortunately, Don got on a horse, pulled a Christopher Reeve and somehow croaked, and his son, Dudley, took power. He lacked his father's political acumen and by 1956 a shrewd politician, Solomon Bandaranaike, ascended to power by pandering to the nationalism and xenophobia of the majority, thereby killing what had up to that point been fairly amicable relations between the Tamils and Sinhalese. (More confounding is how a Sri Lankan guy winds up with a Jewish name like Solomon.)

Unfortunately, Uncle Sol must have missed the Oxford lecture on Democracy 101, because one of the key components of a healthy democracy is the preservation of minority rights. Things steadily slid downhill from there, and by the 1980s the Tamils had had enough of getting pushed around, got really pissed, and a faction took up arms. We all know the rest of the story.

More recently, Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of Singapore's incredible ascendance from colonial backwater to Alpha City extraordinaire, had this to say about the island:

We have got to live with the consequences of our actions and we are responsible for our own people and we take the right decisions for them... When I went to Colombo for the first time in 1956 it was a better city than Singapore because Singapore had three and a half years of Japanese occupation and Colombo was the centre or HQ of Mountbatten's Southeast Asia command.

And they had sterling reserves. They had two Universities. Before the war, a thick layer of educated talent So if you believe what American liberals or British liberals used to say, then it ought to have flourished. But it didn't.

One-man one-vote led to the domination of the Sinhalese majority over the minority Tamils who were the active and intelligent fellows who worked hard and got themselves penalised. And English was out. They were educated in English. Sinhalese was in. They got quotas in two universities and now they have become fanatical Tigers. And the country will never be put together again.

... and I look at Colombo and Ceylon, I mean changing names, sometimes maybe you deceive the gods, but I don't think you are deceiving the people who live in them. It makes no great difference to the tragedy that is being enacted. They failed because they had weak or wrong leaders.

Preach it, brother. Ceylon/Sri Lanka would have been better off had it been under the benevolent stewardship of the soft authoritarianism of Singapore, South Korea and the Asian Tiger economies, all of which developed fast because they avoided the petty squabbling, tribal loyalties and inefficiencies inherent in a multi-party system. Non-white people are not equipped for democracy.

Excellent BBC documentary -