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Sanga (monk) and veda (doctor) doesn’t mean this in ‘sanga, veda, guru’

01 Nov 2021

The organic fertiliser project of the Government has no fathers. All failures are orphans of course but this initiative is not a mere disaster; it’s a calamity. Minister Dayasiri Jayasekera said that Dr. Anurudda Padeniya was the original conceptualiser of the currently imploding policy initiative. He said that burning effigies of Minister Mahindananda Aluthgamage are therefore futile. Though Padeniya has done his best to distance himself from the honours list, it seems as though he was indeed the originator. He is a doctor, and his claim is that kidney disease is caused by the use of chemical fertiliser and pesticides. However, he is a physician and apparently fails to understand the economic outcome of a project of this nature that seeks to abruptly bring to a halt any use of chemical soil nutrients in the country. Why were the powers that be reliant on the advice of one person in making a policy decision with such far-reaching consequences? It appears that persuasive powers were not needed; the idea of back-to-the-land agriculture was romanticised, while chemical fertiliser was totally demonised as the causative agent for kidney disease. Padeniya also said that these fertilisers are the cause of other diseases such as malignant cancers, etc. Before he could begin to say that he should be on the national honours list, the project idea was bought lock, stock, and barrel by the President, and made a central policy plank of the Government. When the President, before he was elected President and was on the campaign trail, said at various key campaign events that he would develop the tourism industry by launching an organic fertiliser project, everyone thought he had got the pages of his prepared speech mixed up. They were sure that a nearby ceiling fan had blown some of the numbered pages off the bound compiled text, which caused the President to reach the end of a page and start off from another, not knowing that the sequence had been disturbed. Now we know that no such thing happened. That was the speech, and it was meant that way. Yes, all along, his policy czars – Padeniya and his fellow travellers – were hoping to shore up tourist numbers substantially by introducing organic fertiliser as a replacement for chemical plant-nutrient products, now in use. So post-pandemic tourists are rushing to see us use refuse products imported from various parts of the world, because they are awed by this back-to-land miracle? If you are holding your sides, it may be doing some good for you after the gloom and doom of the shutdowns. This was the grand plan – no excuse me, it still is.  Sri Lanka is to be rebranded “organic Lanka” and tourists would scoff at the thought of heading towards the sunny Maldives because here in this resplendent isle, there are people using smelly imported refuse to grow pristine products. It’s not the organic produce per se that was the advantage – but it was the process that was to bring in the backsheesh.  The result of all this is that our tea industry is reeling, and our food production is severely jeopardised, which means that when the economy is least able to, the national coffers would be further burdened for imports. The rural farmer is dealt a death blow, and is basically being commandeered to produce organic fertiliser, even though doing so at short notice is more often than not an impossible task. The loss to the national exchequer is colossal, and it’s all because the President insists on having a physician – a medical doctor – dictate his entire agriculture policy. Is this the meritocracy that was ballyhooed, one in which a physician who politically backed the powers that be, is the last word on a project that has phenomenally far-reaching financial consequences, when we could least afford it after a devastating pandemic? The country is not private property to be used as a lab experiment for romanticised projects being fast-tracked to the point they pose a threat to the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people. Nobody is against the idea of organic fertiliser, but the speed with which the project is being implemented is almost criminal in nature, because of the economic consequences that the nation can ill afford.  There is a name for this type of policy and it’s called “voodoo economics”. The Government that took pride in advertising for the best of brains – and ended up appointing sycophants and hangers-on in the main – seems to have, ultimately, banked on such. That’s taking meritocracy to a new level. But for a dispensation that appoints the Ven. Galagoda Atte Gnanasara to head a presidential Task Force titled “One Country, One Law”, meritocracy has new meaning anyway. It’s the same type of meritocracy that caused Duminda Silva to be appointed Chairman of the National Housing Development Authority soon after he was pardoned and released from prison while serving a sentence on a murder conviction. What if the Indian Government at the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s death, appointed Naturam Godse, Gandhi’s killer, to high office in India, to make policy on matters of religion and language? After all, Godse was a Hindu nationalist, and a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a stridently pro-Hindu paramilitary organisation that has millions of Hindu admirers all over India. Godse believed that Gandhi had favoured British government policy that benefited Muslims in the partitioning of India, and he plotted and killed Gandhi in retaliation. He was sentenced to death for the crime. The then-Indian Government could have pardoned him, and then appointed him as a Head of a Task Force meant to ensure “One Country, One Law” for India. This man, in the final analysis, had impeccable pro-Hindu credentials, so why not?  In the eyes of the powers that be, the appointment of Galagoda Atte Gnanasara is based on merit because he has the best credentials for the job. He has been strident in his call for one nation and one law, so he has proven knowledge of the subject. That he has been called a rabble rouser and perhaps one of the most obnoxious race-baiters of our time is irrelevant, because that does not count on the scale of merit, or so goes the rationale. So it was with other government appointments.  Merit was defined as having shown allegiance to the cause, and the more irrational the show of fealty, the better. Had India been under this system at the time of the murder of Gandhi, it would have pardoned Godse, and made him Minister of National Security. This level of impunity has previously been unheard of in this country, and is now pushing the nation to a very bad place – that’s frightening even to contemplate. It’s creating a level of polarisation that completely undermines the concept of one country – leave alone one country, under one law. The policy apparatus of the Government has come completely unhinged. People are at a loss for words to articulate the sense of bewilderment at what’s taking place. It seems obvious that the envelope is being pushed to win Sinhala votes, but even dog-whistles have their context.  At many levels, it’s an appointment that is crass as it is self-serving. It seeks to upend civilised values in order that the governing party may entrench itself in power – the very definition of being self-serving. It’s very unlikely that the move would reap the dividends expected. Instead it would go down in infamy as a nadir in jingoistic political opportunism. It’s so beyond the pale, that the very legitimacy of this Government has now been brought severely into question. (The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of three national English language publications and a practicing Attorney-at-Law. He is an Editors’ Guild award-winning columnist, and contributing writer and columnist for the Nikkei Asian Review and South China Morning Post, while his editorials have been published in The Australian) The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.


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