by Prof.Rajiva Wijesinha M.P.
I must begin by thanking the Secretariat of the
Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats for putting together an
excellent concept paper, which presents us with a very balanced view of
the topic of our general assembly this year.
It is all too easy to think of populism in negative terms, and indeed
the list of what are seen as populist leaders of recent times with
which the paper begins is one that many liberals would abhor.
But the fact remains that the individuals on that list have in almost
all cases been the leading choice of the people in their own countries,
and we cannot dismiss them readily without trying to understand what
makes them popular.
One name on that list however is an exception, and I think it makes
clear to us the difference between populism that must be respected, even
if it cannot be approved of, and what must from our point of view at
least be rejected.
I refer to Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, who was never chosen by a
majority of the people of his country to be its leader. I would suggest
that shows the limits of populism that is based on pure negativity, an
appeal to people that necessarily means rejection of other people.
Wilders did strike a chord with the people of the Netherlands and did
comparatively well, but he did not have a majority, unlike Chavez and
Morales in Latin America, Shinawatra and Estrada in Asia, and Berlusconi
in Europe.
Interestingly enough, the first four appealed to people on the basis
of their poverty, which demanded alleviation. Berlusconi seemed rather
to appeal on the basis of wealth which demanded protection. I think that
suggests another dimension to populism that will become increasingly
important in the years to come, as the privileged use the media with
increasing skill to hold onto their privileges.
Indeed I would suggest in this regard that perhaps Ronald Reagan was
the first populist President on that pattern, using his cinematic skills
to win people to a partisan agenda that, like Berlusconi’s, was based
on the suggestion that the state had been too indulgent to its less
affluent segments.
I still recall John Kenneth Galbraith claiming that Reagan’s
philosophy was that the poor were not working hard enough because they
had too much money, and the rich were not working hard enough because
they had too little. The consequences of that type of populism are I
believe still with us, in the rhetoric that dominates American primaries
and which therefore finds its way into government policy too.
In Asia, though, it is to the deprived that populists generally
appeal, and it is for that reason that, though we may worry about the
policies they advance, that seem to us to be unsustainable, we must
worry too about the sense of deprivation to which they appeal, and which
demands alleviation. The Democrats in Thailand, and the Liberals in the
Philippines, have both realized that they must overcome the image they
project amongst many of the underprivileged, that they are an elite that
does not understand the day to day problems of the peasantry and the
urban poor.
The need then to first develop policies that take those problems into
consideration, and second to explain more clearly and convincingly the
benefits of measures that may seem harsh initially, is better understood
now because of the success of a more simplistic approach to poverty
alleviation on the part of less responsible forces.
In the Sri Lankan context, I believe we too must recognize that some
policies which seemed populist, in catering to the deprived without
concern for wider interests, cannot be condemned out of hand. The shift
in language policy that occurred in the fifties, the takeover of schools
in the sixties, the takeover of lands in the seventies, the
introduction of quotas for university education during that time, are
all seen now as shortsighted, and certainly they were implemented with a
lack of sensitivity and careful planning that has cost us dear.
But we must also realize that they sprang from very real needs, and
it was only the haste with which they were imposed, rather than being
implemented after careful consideration of all options, that caused
problems.
The manner in which Sinhalese was made the sole Official Language of
the country provides an instructive example. The original proposal was
based on the fact that government functioned largely in English, and
this was not a language that was understood by the vast majority of our
people. Mr Bandaranaike, whose party was largely based in Sinhalese
areas, proposed to replace English with Sinhala
The then UNP government, which was more Westernized in its approach,
realized however that change was necessary, and adopted the same policy,
but its leader, then Prime Minister John Kotelawala, declared in Jaffna
that Tamil too would have parity of status.
It was then that all hell broke loose. He was not entirely popular in
his own party, and his opponents called for a special session of the
Party which rejected his commitment and not only declared that it was
for Sinhala Only, but also decided to dissolve Parliament and seek a
mandate from the people to implement this.
The election campaign that followed was marked by both parties
outdoing each other in appealing to Sinhalese voters but, in this
populist campaign, the edge was held by Mr Bandaranaike, who had
initially floated the idea. His majority in the end was massive, for the
UNP lost its Tamil voters, who turned to the Leftist parties in the
South, and to the Tamil Federal Party in the North.
Populism then became uglier, for when Mr Bandaranaike tried to reach
accommodation with the Tamils, the UNP, now in the hands of its more
racist leaders, John Kotelawala having decided to retire and go away to
his farm in England, agitated against this. The scene was thus laid for
the hostilities that dogged us for half a century more.
The SLFP sadly engaged in similar tactics a decade later when the
UNP, back in power, tried to reach similar accommodation with the
Tamils. And we saw the UNP again playing a racist card in 2000, when Mr
Bandaranaike’s daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga made her own efforts.
Sadly by then the main Tamil party, which had been let down twice
previously, did its own letting down under pressure from the terrorist
Tigers, and Mrs Kumaratunga found herself abandoned on both sides.
My argument then is that it was not the policy designed to compensate
for disadvantages that led to the destructive side of populism. Rather,
it was a deliberate decision to exploit the appeal of such a policy, by
also using it to set up an oppositionality that permitted easy
rhetorical flourishes.
It was not pro-poor policies that were the problem, but rather anti,
not the rich, but rather other poor who could readily be victimized. On
such lines did Hitler operate, in using the Jews as scapegoats for the
problems of the German poor, on such lines I believe do the American New
Right operate in condemning immigrants, in order to add working class
Americans to their vote bank.
In Sri Lanka it was Tamils who bore the brunt of policies intended
initially to overcome social disparities. The imposition of Sinhala as
the only official language of the country, through a one line Bill that
made no mention of the use of Tamil, was followed a decade and a half
later by a policy of standardization for university entrance that hit
educationally privileged Tamils hardest.
It is true that educationally privileged Sinhalese in Colombo also
suffered, but they had other outlets for their talents, which the Tamils
of the North did not have. And, appallingly, when the policy, cancelled
in 1977 on grounds of equity, was reintroduced a year later, it was in
the context of unashamedly populist critiques of Tamil examiners,
designed to promote an aspirant for the leadership of the UNP who saw
his own power base as being exclusively Sinhala.
That then is the danger, that political parties which should work
towards developing an inclusive national character decide, usually
because of the ambitions of those without much popular appeal, to
concentrate on deepening a narrow power base rather than expanding
laterally.
In the process, though they may achieve temporary success, it is
against their own party rivals who had wider appeal. Ultimately they end
up destroying their own party, as Cyril Mathew did with the UNP, as
Communist and Trotskyist leaders did during their thankfully brief
flirtation with exclusivist elements in the SLFP during the sixties.
he old left never regained the Tamil support that had helped it to
such prominence in the forties and fifties, while the UNP has faced a
similar situation with regard to the Tamil support in the North that
gave it such healthy majorities in the period before 1956.
In Pakistan we have seen something similar. Indeed its creation owed
something to Mr Jinnah’s realization that his influence in the Congress
Party was waning. He believed however that, while creating a state for
Muslims, he could imbue it with his own more expansive vision. That went
up in smoke in the passions that his rhetoric, and the answering
rhetoric on the other side, engendered, rousing oppositionalities and
forgetting positive perspectives.
A quarter of a century later another political leader who also wanted
to shore up his power base began the process of Islamicization that
Jinnah had tried to avoid, and so we have seen Pakistan slide into more
and more exclusive perspectives that seem to have narrowed its horizons
as well as its influence. I should note that its more enlightened
politicians try hard to resurrect the inclusive South Asian culture
which had in early days made Pakistan a leading light in the Islamic
world as well as internationally, but their efforts have not seen much
sustained success.
In India, though we have had aberrations – and given its size,
aberrations can be very destructive – I believe the Gandhian legacy has
contributed to a pervasive moral imperative to avoid destructive
populism. Gandhi did much to change the Congress, which was very much an
elite institution, into a popular body. But he also did his best to
prevent popular policies descending into violence against the other.
More practical politicians may have despaired when he called off a
satyagraha on the verge of success to protest against the killing of
policemen, but I believe that, in the long run, he was right to demand
absolute rejection of such violence. All too often violence begets
violence, not only as the Buddha said of one side against the other, but
also of fundamentally decent people on the one side following the
apparently successful example of their less scrupulous peers. True
leadership means stopping such excesses through what I would term a
categorical imperative.
Whether this spirit of Gandhism will triumph in India is an ongoing
question. We have seen all too often the rousing of communal tensions,
most notably in what seemed two incidents of state sponsored violence,
in Delhi after the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, in Gujerat more
recently. In the first example, Rajiv Gandhi responded promptly, with an
assertion of decency that was recorded by the Founder of the Liberal
Party of Sri Lanka in a deeply moving obituary that we have reproduced
in the recent publication on the 25th anniversary of the Party
In deeply moving words Raiv Gandhi praised the contribution of the
Sikhs to the making and preservation of India, declared how proud India
was of the great Sikh people being within it and concluded:
nothing would hurt the soul of my beloved mother Indira Gandhi more
than that the great Sikh people who have done so much and sacrificed so
much for India should be harmed because of the act of a few fanatics.
Watching this broadcast in London in October 1984, I could not help
contrasting it with another broadcast by our own President of the time,
President J. R. Jayewardene in July 1983, when amidst the abominable
riots in which our own Tamil minority was killed there were no words of
comfort whatsoever to the victims of the violence, instead of which the
President spoke of the riots as:
the understandable reaction of the Sinhala people who will never allow their beloved country to be divided.
I felt then how noble was Rajiv Gandhi’s spirit and how narrow, how shabby the outlook of our own leaders.
That quotation I think sums up the contrast between the statesmanship
that has characterized so many Indian leaders and the shameful legacy
of our first Executive President, which we must strive to overcome.
But in case we get too starry-eyed about India, we must recall too
what happened in Gujerat, and the dilemma of the main Indian opposition
party, the BJP, as it strives to decide whether a successful Chief
Minister should be its next Prime Ministerial candidate, despite what
continues to be seen as his involvement in communal violence. I can only
hope that, as happened previously, when it put forward the inclusive
figure of Mr Vajpayee, instead of its more populist elements, it will
ensure allegiance in the future too to what I have characterized as
Gandhian ideals.
For, ultimately, it is strong and principled leadership that provides
the only answer to the temptation to pursue popular policies to their
populist conclusions, where they do down some in an effort to strengthen
support amongst the rest.
To overcome the temptation we need constant vigilance, and a constant
building up of awareness of the generally positive effects of
inclusivity as opposed to divisive politics. Promoting the interests of
the poor and the deprived is vital, and should never be seen as populism
in itself.
Doing so while rousing resentment against those who do not or will
not contribute to one’s continuation in power is wickedness, and this is
a lesson all leaders, from Barack Obama and his successors to the
rulers of the smallest Commonwealth islands, should understand.
