2023-09-12
There is complete agreement among everyone who has taken a serious look at what happened in the event that is called the Black July of 1983 was in fact an organised violence by the country’s head of the state at the time together with many of his cabinet members and also active members of his party in many parts of the country. The purpose of this article is not to go into the details of these acts of violence but to examine a different question. That question is what kind of thinking could have existed in the mind of a group of country’s most leading politicians when they themselves are in power used mobs in order to carry out one of the worst series of acts of violence beginning from the capital spreading into the rest of the country.
These rulers of the country did not see a contradiction between the very idea of ruling and the very idea of organising what is mildly called riots but something which was very much worse than just a riot. The burning of houses, killing and otherwise harming individuals, enormous damage caused to properties and above all displacement of a large section of population in many parts of the country.
Under normal circumstances it would have been the duty of the rulers to put down such riots, protect the victims, protect the properties, restore law and order and to ensure that peace prevails. Besides, the rulers will do all they can to identify and to bring the culprits who were involved before the law so as to assert their own authority as against the chaos that those who wanted to cause violence would bring about. Under those circumstances, the ruler becomes the protector and the guardian of the victims in the first place and then the entire society.
If we go a step further and ask that if there is no such authority to rely upon on situations of violence whether in a small scale or in a large scale as it happened in July 1983, how could a society survive? Even more important is the issue that under those circumstances, how could the state survive. If those who are the operators of the state set upon themselves the task of being creators of chaos and violence, what then would happen to that society as a whole and also to that state. This is the question that should have been asked and even now should occupy the minds of anyone who thinks seriously about the nature of the Sri Lankan state, the nature of the Sri Lankan society and the events that have followed ever since these events in July 1983.