Queers for Palestine, Professionals for NPP and irrational quest for self-validation

Those who follow the worldwide pro-Palestine protests against the Israeli military campaign in Gaza in response to the slaughter of Israeli civilians by terror group Hamas might not have missed its moment of magic realism: Queers for Palestine. 

Vocal members of the LGBTQ community are taking over the streets across the world in a show of their solidarity with Palestinians and display of their righteous anger at the Israeli killings of Palestinians. Thirty-seven thousand people, mostly women and children, have died in the conflict.  

Their message seems quite effective but in quite an unexpected way. It made many viewers wonder what would have happened if these scantily clad protesters with their beautiful hairdos and makeup held one of those protests in Gaza or probably more liberal West Bank. Live media footage would not be nice.

In fact, Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar was known to have run a squad to hound gay men and personally killed a gay Hamas commander. Hamas’ main benefactor, Iran, regularly hangs gay people from cranes in public. Many Palestinian gay men seek asylum in Israel. 

Chicken for KFC

Some call this the chicken for KFC syndrome.

 Why do people sometimes campaign against their own interest- just like C.Rajamohan, a leading Indian strategic writer, once wrote that for the good part of the first fifty years of Indian foreign policy has campaigned against their own interest. 

This is where the existential identity crisis of people or nations comes into play, and the quest for self-validation of people or ( their leaders) goes awry, leading to most incoherent outcomes.  

This article is about people. It is natural that people suffer bouts of inner conflict, where they are conflicted over identity, purpose, and meaning in life. The frequency of that might even be higher with LGBTQ individuals, considering existential details, which, combined with the perceived or real grievances and resultant bitterness, could generate realities which are far from real. 

Then, there is the quest for self-validation. Everyone loves to feel validated by friends, family and the wider community. Similarly, as long as the immediate goals of self-validation are achieved, a few would care about its long-term impact or the self-contradiction of the whole endeavour- similar to  TikTok influencers.  

Now, consider a similar analogy in the Sri Lankan context. Those who follow local news might have seen the JVP/NPP ingratiating to professionals and the latter singing pean for the NPP. If you read some opinion pieces penned by well-meaning professionals cheering the JVP, it feels like the messiah has arrived.  

The JVP leader, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, was seen addressing NPP engineers in a rally. Then he welcomed retired military and police officials who joined their electoral pact and finally flew to London to meet JVP’s overseas supporters. 

Two groups

There are two types of ‘professionals’ who are endearing to the JVP or its more acceptable face, NPP.
The first group comprises your usual culprits, who could be found in places of authority anywhere in public and semi-public institutions. This group is insular, insecure, highly self-entitled, and monopolistic, and their professional competencies mirror the abysmal performances of SOEs and the public sector, from the CEB to income tax to customs. 

They are, in many ways, a part of the country’s wider economic stagnation problem. 

They desire to hold on to their traditional privileges, which would be lost in case of reforms and restructuring of their institutions, hence their new love for the JVP, which in its ideological inclination is deeply opposed to reforms.
Then, others fear that Indians would steal their jobs if ETCA is implemented or more doctors trained by private universities would create more competition.

This group is the old wine in a new bottle. Those were the folks who were either with the Viyathmaga or had empathy with its mission. These creatures have much self-awareness and a well-founded yet equally narrow set of self-interests to support the NPP. 

Then there is a second group, which is a nice, competent, accomplished bunch of folks who
are sincerely driven by self-conviction to make the country better. But, just like the Queers of Palestine, they have not read well into the group they are supporting.  

That elusive economic policy of the JVP

Have any of these well-meaning people read even a vague draft of NPP’s economic plan for the country?
 How would it increase the government revenue, which is still at a meagre 9.3 % of GDP, without raising taxes?
 How would it come out of the debt crisis without restructuring domestic debt?

 How would it create more education opportunities for the overwhelming number of students who could not attend a public university without promoting private universities?

How would it attract foreign capital and technology without dismantling a labyrinth of red tape and restrictive local laws and regulations?

And finally, how would it find a political solution – which is the toughest test for any political party given that the Northern Tamil politics are more inclined to keep the toxic pot of real and perceived grievances for their own self-validation and electoral purpose rather than solve them? 

No document of JVP’s economic policy exists anywhere. Ironically, the absence of a coherent position on key national issues has served the JVP’s campaign rather than harming it, mainly because Sri Lankans, and even professionals, are carried away by the noise, not by substance. 

Some JVPers tend to turn to Vietnam and China for inspiration. But there is a hitch. Both the Chinese Communist Party and the Vietnamese Communist Party, in their economic policies, are more on the right than any of the South Asian political parties or even the Labour in the UK. They are communists because they are politically monopolistic. 

Well-meaning professional who are bitter at the country’s sub-par economic performance under successive governments – partly because even the most reform-minded governments were undercut by a cacophony of protests and were lacking the will to bulldoze their reform agenda- are now willing to bet on an untested JVP. This is a function of an existential identity crisis, which many are going through about their intellectual and political positions during the country’s worst economic crisis.

Then, their quest for self-validation discourages them from putting their weight behind a more pragmatic and viable alternative because that might make them look like an acolyte or a sell-out. 

 This is a very dangerous gamble. It is self-harming and intellectually degrading. 

There is one last point. Anyone who peruses Latin American politics may notice a general pattern of parties of revolutionary origin refusing to bow down when they are out of public welcome. That is because the revolutionary origin fosters a peculiar kind of self-entitlement for power. Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela are recent examples. 
This does not suggest a certainty, but certain patterns play out sooner or later, which Sri Lankan pundits might have to worry about one day. 

What Sri Lanka needs at the moment is continuity and consistency in its economic policy, not change. The economy has recorded a decent 5.3% growth in the first quarter this year, and if the delicate economic recovery is scuttled, we will be doomed for another generation.

How could well-meaning professionals not see this commonsense truth?

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