Another inferno in the offing?

by Vishvanath

An earth-shatteringly eventful year is drawing to a close, and the chances are that we are about to ring in another year of political upheavals. Political parties and trade unions are threatening to take to the streets against a 60% power tariff hike on the cards.

The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) unionists are against the proposed power price hike, which they consider unconscionable and unnecessary. They have said they will not disconnect power supplies in case the public refuses to pay the tariff hike on the cards. Minister of Power and Energy Kanchana Wijesekera is determined to go ahead with the price hike obviously at the behest of President Ranil Wickremesinghe and the entire Cabinet, but he acts in such a way that he has been drawing all the flak for the government decision.

The Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL), which alone is legally empowered to implement power tariff increases, has said it will not carry out the government decision to jack up power prices. President Wickremesinghe and Minister Wijesekera have been berating the PUCSL Chairman, Janaka Ratnayake.

There have already been several protests against the proposed power tariff hike. Protesters are burning the effigies of Minister Wijesekera, who has become a hate figure like Minister of Agriculture Mahindananda Aluthgamage during the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency. This is how protesters canalize their aggression initially, and then they tend to graduate to other forms of protests, which are often unruly and destructive. Thus, the act of effigy burning may look innocent because it does not harm anyone physically but could lead to trouble if the causes of the protests that lead to them are not addressed.

Massive fires, in most cases, are started by tiny sparks that go unattended or unnoticed. What developed into the Great Fire of London (1666), which left thousands of houses and shops gutted across the city, was a spark from an oven in a bakery. The same is true for flames of public anger, which sometimes result in conflagrations, both figuratively and literally, if they get out of hand, as was seen a few months ago,

A few instances of effigy burning, which began in 2021, led to a situation where scores of houses and other properties of the ruling party politicians were burnt down and a government MP was put to a violent death with several other prominent politicians being beaten, about a year later.

Origins of fiery protests

The origins of the ritual of burning effigies are lost in the mists of time. The consignment of the dolls or sculptural representations of evil beings that were mostly imaginary to flames began as a religious practice among the Christian communities in Europe, the Jewish and the Hindus in India, where a large number of effigies of the mythical king, Ravana, are burnt even at present.

The ritual of torching images can be thought to have originated from the burning of ‘heretics’ at the stake, in Babylonia, ancient Israel, North America and Europe, where many women suspected to be witches were also burnt alive. The practice of burning effigies of humans by way of political protest is thought to be of more recent origin. Some historians trace it to the post-World War I era, but opinion is divided on this. It has however caught on, and today no protest is considered complete without effigy burning across the globe. There is hardly any world leader who has not been burnt in effigy either in his or her own country or elsewhere.

A common political blunder

A common mistake that most governments make is to ignore instances of effigy burning, and more importantly the causative factors which are usually economic, political and social. People do not take the trouble of staging protests, marches and torching effigies, old tyres and other such things on the roads for the fun of it. There may be instances where political activists try to put some zing into their protests by burning effigies as a gimmick, but, overall, such events are symptomatic of pent-up public anger, which, if allowed to go unaddressed, could lead to political upheavals and even real fires.

The Gotabaya Rajapaksa government, in its wisdom, chose to ignore farmers’ protests, where the effigies of the then Minister of Agriculture Aluthgamage were burnt in large numbers, across the country. Farmers were up in arms against an agrochemical ban, which was part of that administration’s ill-conceived organic farming experiment, and the resultant shortage of fertilizers, weedicides, pesticides, etc., and a sharp drop in the national agricultural output.

President Rajapaksa apparently ignored the effigy burning despite its increasing intensity because he was not the protesters’ target. Nobody dared take him on at that time due to his reputation as a toughie who brooked no criticism. Farmers’ threats to march on Colombo were therefore considered mere rhetoric. The government was rock solid, or at least thought to be so, with a two-thirds majority in the parliament. But the flames of public resentment spread like a wildfire fuelled by the shortages of essentials including cooking gas, diesel, petrol and diesel, rice and sugar, and the soaring cost of living due to economic mismanagement on the part of the Rajapaksa administration and a crippling foreign currency crunch.

Hell broke loose after a mob of SLPP goons attacked a group of Galle Face protesters on May 09. That incident triggered a spate of arson attacks on government politicians’ houses in many parts of the country; two months later, violent protesters, during the second phase of Galle Face uprising, which made President Gotabaya Rajapaksa flee the country and resign, went so far as to set the then Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s house on fire.

Playing with fire

Minister Wijesekera has given the people a choice between paying more for electricity and facing extended power cuts. He insists that the CEB is still incurring losses, which have to be recovered to maintain a reliable power supply. Tact does not seem to be one of his traits. Instead of presenting what he considers his case for another power hike diplomatically, he antagonizes the public, who are struggling to make ends meet.

Inflation and various shortages have already made the public scream, but it hurts them more when their political leaders are seen to be unconcerned about their predicament. Most government politicians, as some political analysts have pointed out, not only show a cavalier attitude towards the people’s suffering but also are thought to be enjoying life despite the worsening economic crisis of their making. It is only natural that public anger is welling up. 

One can only hope that the government will care to tread cautiously, and what is feared will not come to pass. Political upheavals will only make the economic recovery process even more difficult, but angry people do not reason from facts. There’s the rub.