The Ass and Sri Lanka’s Flippant and Useless Rules
By Faraz Shauketaly
For over thirty years – most everything in Sri Lanka was blamed on the ‘war’. If you were polite it was the ‘security situation’.
People late for appointments always had an excuse, ‘the checkpoints’, the Army took so long to check my ID and the Police took even longer at the next check-point. So however inefficient one was if you were in Sri Lanka you had a variety of excuses which even heaven could not have sent you.
Thanks to a dynastic political family known as ‘Rajapaksa’ (oh that name again) the people of Sri Lanka have lost their great ally: the ability to use the war/security situ as an excuse to make up for their laid back attitude which invariably made them late for everything including getting to the church on time.
Of course Sri Lanka almost more than anywhere is led by example. President Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga is not fondly remembered for much other than her legendary ‘lateness’ – she was almost always late. So when President Rajapaksa and his mega-strong Cabinet of Ministers totalling 60 resolved to win and succeeded in defeating the terrorists, they unwittingly took away that mega-sized excuse called the ‘security situ’ which was used by all and sundry on this land of tranquillity.
Most anything that needed doing and was not done was blamed on that ‘situ’. Now however that the war is over and most people struggle to remember who Prabhakaran and his boys were and what it is that those boys did, Sri Lanka has an opportunity to repeal some of its more flippant rules and laws which brings to life the saying made famous in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, ‘the law is an ass’.
Take for example these startling facts especially in a day and age when time is money. A routine Police patrol spots a Chinese-looking woman and is then picked up and is charged for ‘loitering’. She is taken to the Station, charged and then produced in Court the next day.
The woman pleads guilty and is then given her sentence: a fine of Rs 10. A slap on the wrist and a stern talking to would have been better use of non-existent resources than this scenario. The Ministry of Justice clearly has better things on their mind than to update (increase) the levels of these fines. At a time when Dr P. B. Jayasundera is juggling to sap black money from the public, Rauff Hakeem perhaps does not appreciate the notion ‘every little bit helps’.
A motorist – having probably taken out a personal loan to pay for the fuel which is now so high it is almost not true – having been stopped by the Police fails to provide his driving licence; he tells the Policeman that he definitely has one but that it is at home, in the other car or any other excuse he can muster. The Policeman gives him a ticket, which the motorist takes to the Police Station, gets a payment voucher, visits the Post Office makes payment and then returns the receipt to the Police Station.
The point of all this exercise is that the motorist having not produced his driving licence to the Policeman gets his ticket and is allowed to continue to drive on. It may well be that he has never passed his driving test or indeed sat for one. Clearly with the millions being spent on new driving licence formats and so on, there is no way in which the Police can immediately establish whether or not the motorist has ever been issued with a licence.
Sri Lanka’s women are under-represented in almost every sphere except in the kitchen and perhaps in the print media industry and of course at the Supreme Court. Parliament led by the ever affable Speaker whose name also happens to be Rajapaksa, has 225 members. The female species of parliamentarians is limited to an unlucky-for-some, 13.
Men in Sri Lanka have a literacy rate of 90.7% with the women coming in at 89.1% though those statistics simply do not come into play when seeking election to this august chamber. In an interesting aside, the man with arguably the most interesting job may well be Tissa Karaliyyada, Minister in charge of Women’s Affairs. Women in Sri Lanka can join the armed forces or the Police in much the same way as their male counterparts. The upside is that of all the media personnel who have been killed unlawfully, none have been women – known terrorists notwithstanding. So women can fight for President and country with the same vigour. But when it comes to engaging in that very Sri Lankan habit of breaking a bottle or two, the women are rather dependant on the male species. Sri Lanka’s Excise laws prohibit the sale of alcohol to women. Strange but true. How many female cashiers have you seen in taverns and wine shops? These antiquated laws – inherited from the colonial British who had quaint ideas like designating Galle Face a ‘place for women and children to relax’ (the men clearly did not need to be there, they were probably in Clubs where women were not allowed membership) have never been repealed although the British have long done away with these laws and brought real equality to their women folk who are now allowed membership of the most pedantic of Gentlemen’s Clubs all over London. A spokesperson for the ‘on your way home’ supermarket chain, Food City, Susith Dharmasena assured me that this was law but that it was hardly enforced even by the Excise department. A number of foreigners he told us frequented the wine shops in their branches although he quite specifically did not say anything about the indigenous females. Perhaps Dharmasena is a diplomat at heart. According to the Excise Department, they agreed that that was the law.
They however maintained that the law was enforced. We sent an associate to the Food City in Mount Lavinia and she came back with a bottle of imported wine, a bottle of Arrack and a bottle of beer. No problems at all. In Tangalle, that city made famous by the same family who claim responsibility for peace in Miraculous Sri Lanka, tourism is second only to fishing. Whilst there are no known female fisher folk going out in the boats, there are a number of females who own and manage restaurants and guest houses. Beer is freely available in most of these locations. We asked if they found it difficult to get the licence. “We have no licence. It has been agreed with the local Police that we will all sell Beer and they will look the other way provided there was no trouble”, said one person whose identity is best kept a secret. So again the Sri Lankan Excise laws in some parts at least, whilst reaching the parts other drinks simply don’t (with apologies to Heineken) is unbalanced and inequitable.
To say that the legislative has become inebriated with power so much that they have lost sight of the woods for the trees would be putting it mildly. A senior member of the shipping industry – a female – told me that she had been asked to come for her siblings’ Parents Day dressed in a sari. Under pressure from her young off spring and her not so young husband to ‘not rock the boat’ she obliged only to be met with howls of laughter from her male counterparts in office who demanded to know if she had been to a wedding. The lady in question has now resolved to ignore such requests from the school – although her male colleagues express the gravest of doubts as to her resolve.
Women it appears are being reduced to second class citizens in the Republic – under the guise of tradition and culture. Some of this is driven by the government but equally by social organizations keen to cling on to the vestiges of antiquated customs and traditions in a rapidly evolving environment fuelled by the latest technological advances including platforms like Facebook. In recent weeks we have been treated to a different drama which some have described as a spectacle. This involves a Magisterial enquiry into an altercation in which Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra a confidante of the President of Sri Lanka was shot dead. MP Duminda Silva also suffered injuries and is now said to be in hospital in Singapore. The Police have named Duminda Silva as a suspect in their murder investigation. The Magistrate has ordered that Silva be arrested and produced in Court. Duminda Silva is not represented in the Court but his father has appointed a Counsel to represent his interests. And what exactly is his interest? That his son is named as a suspect in a murder enquiry? Can all suspects in a murder investigation who have not appeared before Court as directed by Magistrates, send their Daddy to Court in the company of Legal Counsel? In most cases if certainly not all, there are only three parties to a murder case: the State, the suspect and the Aggrieved party – that is to say the victim.In this Sri Lanka that we live in it is difficult to comprehend who exactly is the aggrieved party – the family of the person who was shot dead or that of the person accused of doing it and received injuries and is said to be helpless in a Singapore Hospital. The winds of change indeed swept through South Africa and allowed the indigenous citizens there to be masters of their own political destinies.
Those same Winds of change howled through the Middle East and brought about many important changes although it has not fully resolved the kaleidoscope of issues that has beset that region. There is little need for hypocritical and vote-grabbing programmes such as ‘Mathata Thitha’ which only serves to bring about further division in a land that either way in practice is so far removed from reality, democracy and a balanced equity.
It would however be rather more prudent if Sri Lanka’s legislators did not wait for the Winds of Change to appear here before enacting real change – change that is reflective of the people’s needs. Failure in this will result in Sri Lanka being viewed as a ‘Carnival of Clowns’- if that is not the case already.
(faraz@thesundayleader.lk)
