No To Drugs, Yes To Casinos!
N Sathiya Moorthy
It is interesting to note that many international NGOs, and also the UN, have come down heavily on the government’s ‘Yukthiya’ (Justice) operation aimed at cleaning the nation’s streets of drugs, citing rights violations. But they seem to have no problem with the government permitting casinos as a part of the IMF-designed economic recovery programme. They are silent on it, and even the Opposition SJB leader Lakshman Kiriella has sought their ban only in pilgrim centres like Kandy, Anuradhapura and Adam’s Peak – and not the nation as a whole.
For months now, there have been news reports particularly based on academic research and international institutional studies on the sudden spike in the use, misuse and abuse of drugs across the country, starting with schools. There were even reports that even high school girls had become addicts and they were being pressured to grant sexual favours when deprived of drugs.
In any other country or situation, it would have been a good one-liner for a film script. It is not so in Sri Lanka, where the 2022 economic crisis is being cited as the reason. Experts have been arguing in the media how the nation could recover from the economic crisis now or later but a generation given to addiction and associated societal behaviour and/or sin leading to large-scale, wide-spread health issues, including mental health issues, had no way to revive itself.
More than the national media, it’s the language Press and also the social media that have been at the centre of what could be dubbed the community’s battle against the menace. For months now – there has been some let-down or respite in recent times – the Tamil Press in the North has been specifically highlighting with names (but not faces) how many children have become addicts.
In the past, their news reports would blame that the government was wantonly encouraging it, if only to allow future generations of their youth to go waste. In the same vein, they would also recall how the LTTE had a full grip over the situation and there was rarely a single case of drug-addiction across the areas under their control and/or influence.
Not anymore. The Tamil media readily acknowledges that the present situation is different and that the government has the responsibility to curb it. In fact, many newspapers in the North have also asked their political leaders to spare time to take the message against drugs and for de-addiction to their cadres and people alike, and set up panels to work on the subject.
A party like the JVP that is believed to be the ‘government-in-waiting’ is cadre-based to be able to work at the grassroots-level. It does not mean that other established parties in the South cannot do it. If anything, they should be doing it in whatever ways possible.
Who knows, in all such cases, their own children, kith and kin may have fallen victim, and thus require rehabilitation.
Relief for deserving
It is in this background the government’s anti-drugs Yukthiya programme needs to be viewed. There definitely may be overzealousness on the part of the enforcement agencies, mostly police but assisted by the Services personnel, stripping of the arrested person in public, that too on television cameras, and that needs to be corrected.
However, those NGOs and lawyers, including members of the BASL, which too has joined the chorus, seem wanting to do the right thing. Can they set up small groups of local activists, knowledgeable practitioners and lawyers to take up individual cases of wrong-doing with the appropriate authorities for finding relief to those that deserve it?
For instance, can they devise ways to separate the victims, particularly minors, from perpetrators, and seek concessions, including instant bail for the former and non-interference other than through proper channels in the case of the latter? The problem is that all those NGOs and INGOs that are talking about rights violations do not seem to count the violations of the victim’s rights, especially when they are minor children and/or first-time users.
From the government’s side, can they encourage to set up those review committees at multiple-levels bottom-up so as to ensure that innocent youth and even first-time users capable of being rehabilitated are spared of the police methods/torture, including mental torture that can accompany an honest legal follow up without physical harassment and mental humiliation?
Inevitable criticism, but…
It is the requirements and circumstances that dictate priorities. For instance, there is criticism of the armed forces assisting the police in the current drug-bust. This is not the first time in this country or other nations of the size and economies that the forces double up as something else, or something more. There is also no denying the public perception, especially of those linked to drug-cartels that have international reach, when they see the soldier with weapons in what otherwise is a police action.
It may be recalled that for enforcing the Covid lock-down the government had to summon the armed forces, yes, to make people sit at home and simply do nothing else. Remember, the entire operation had to be handed over to the armed forces with the CDS commanding it. There were incidents of indecent violations and instant enforcement, and of course, inevitable criticism from the high and low. Looking back, there would be general agreement that had it not been for the forced enforcement, the lockdown would have suffered and the pandemic could have played havoc more than already.
Similar is the way successive governments have been pushing the armed forces into flood relief work across the country every year. If the Services are not to be pressed into assisting the police in law-enforcement where nothing else would prevail, can anyone blame them if they are not called in times of floods and other natural calamities like land-slips?
The optimum position is to make judicious use of the forces and to ensure that neither the soldier, nor the policeman takes law cruelly into his hand. For the US and the rest of the West, whose ambassadors the government ended up briefing on this issue along with others recently, are there not excesses of this kind in their own nations?
Leave aside the insults and abuses they heap on their coloured people, both inside police stations and outside, you have their airport security officials insulted international celebrities like former President A P J Abdul Kalam, and film stars, Shah Rukh Khan and Kamalahassan – all three, Indians, incidentally. Also, what have the American agencies and others done to the drug-lords and their cartels in Colombia and elsewhere for decades? Human rights, did you say?
All of this does not mean that the government’s drug-bust is going to be successful, or whatever results are achieved are going to be long lasting. Time was not very long ago when cohorts of President Maithripala Sirisena (2015-19) wanted the nation to believe that he had become the target of international drug mafias (that use Sri Lanka as a transit-point) after he cleared the execution of drug-pushers waiting execution of their death-sentences for years, because the nation was less crude and cruel (as the West wants it) but was more generous and genuine (which anyway, they do not appreciate).
Before Sirisena, his discredited successor Gotabaya Rajapaksa as defence secretary, post-war, had launched a campaign to eradicate gun-running gangs in capital Colombo in particular and also elsewhere in the country. He who succeeded in getting rid of the terror might of the LTTE did not succeed as much in his civil effort.
And for the likes of SJB’s Kiriella, and of course the government to think that you can run casinos in the country, in Kandy or elsewhere, without the smoke-screen of drugs in the vicinity – possibly including inside – is what political double-speak is all about. When it gets an international lingo, it becomes more acceptable and less sinful, did you say?
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
