Sri Lankan Youth and their New Discontents
Sri Lanka is very young. Almost a quarter of the population is between ages 15–29 and nearly half the population is under 30.
In the short post-independence history of this country there have been three youth-led insurgencies — in the south as well as in the north-east. While there are a crucial differences between JVP insurgents and Tamil militants, common factors such as diminishing options for social mobility, degrading economic conditions, and a growing distrust against the ruling establishment drove many of them to violence.
What of today’s Sri Lankan youth?
Illusions of self-expansion
The governing global myth of our times is that a commercial society of self-seeking individuals, assisted by a democratic government, would ultimately find economic progress, prosperity, and stability. Why? Peace and happiness even. The central figure — the building block — in this grand narrative of endless human progress is the rational, self-serving, autonomous individual who strives for success and self-expansion.
As Pankaj Mishra writes in Age of Anger:
“. . . (the) notion of self-expansion — through unlimited growth of production, and the expansion of productive forces — steadily replaced all other ideas of the human good in the eighteenth century; it became the central objective of existence, with corresponding attitudes, norms, values, and a quantitative notion of reality defined by what counts and what does not count.”
This idea of the human being which finds its origins in the Enlightenment is now both fully internationalised and — even in deeply religious societies such as ours — wholly internalised. Self-expansion is best reflected — and measured — through private wealth creation. In much the same way that a nation’s worth is measured in terms of GDP and GDP growth rate, a person’s is in terms of his or her monthly income and material belongings.
This is the context within we must understand youth education, employment, and unemployment.
This is the Promised Land upon which the youth of this country arrive — only to find a parched wasteland where there is a war of all against all with pre-destined winners: escalating competition on uneven playing fields. Deep structural inequalities privilege the few over the many. An Ordinary Level (O/L) or Advanced Level (A/L) dropout from Royal College is eminently more employable in the private sector than most state university graduates. Family and social connections determine one’s opportunities much more decisively than individual talent.
Dreams of splendour
Starting with J. R. Jayawardena’s UNP government in the late 1970s, successive Sri Lankan governments promised to turn Sri Lanka into the next Singapore: an economy where the youth would occupy high paying white collar jobs. This dream manifests itself in varied ways and undergirds many a misplaced government priority and white-elephant project.
But four decades on, besides the geographic fact that Singapore and Sri Lanka are both Indian Ocean islands, the two countries do not share much else in common.
In a vivid representation of the state of the economy, the Labour Demand Survey 2017 found that half-a-million jobs in the manual labour sector remain unfilled. Government statistics classify 80 percent of the population as rural. A quarter of the labour force is in the failing agriculture sector. Manufacturing, a critical component of any aspiring economy, contributes a mere 2 percent of the GDP. Sri Lanka’s research and development expenditure in 2010 — the last year in which the government collected comprehensive data on this subject — amounted to only 0.14 percent of the GDP.
Moreover, about 35 percent of those who sit for O/L examinations do not qualify for A/L. The state university system absorbs only 10 percent of those who sit for A/L examinations. In other words, each year discounting those who go abroad or enroll in private institutions — the system leaves behind on average 250,000–300,000 young men and women without a viable option to further their education, facing a future of uncertainty and upheaval. Even the 30,000 or so fortunate who qualify for university soon find out that they are not so fortunate after all. Unemployed graduates spend months on end on the streets demanding state employment. Paradoxically, for a nation supposedly moving towards a knowledge-based economy, the unemployment rate for the ‘A/L and above’ segment is four times as much as for those who drop off before O/L.
For many educated youth in this country, migrating to the West figures as their only escape to sanity and contentment. But the recent proliferation of stricter immigration laws and rising hatred for immigrants in that part of the world further confounds their predicament.
Delusions of the empire
For three decades starting from the 1980s, the civil war proved to be a convenient — and, in some instances, justified — excuse for glaring governance deficiencies and slow economic growth. LTTE terrorism was, for many Sinhalese, the root of all ills. When Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government defeated the LTTE in 2009, there was genuine belief in the South that the battle for the nation was over. A more potent threat than the LTTE was inconceivable. A crass logic of ‘we shall defeat all else as we defeated the LTTE’ was central to the Rajapaksas’ post-war political dispensation.
The Rajapaksas promised a future of unparalleled national glory, captured succinctly by the ‘Wonder of Asia’ moniker. For a while, at least, it did seem like destiny had finally arrived. The government rapidly erected airports, expressways, grand theatres, sports arenas, shopping complexes and theme parks. Colombo underwent a massive makeover. With investment in construction and an influx of tourists, the economy also picked up. In 2011, the GDP grew by a record 8.3 percent.
This honeymoon, however, was rather short-lived. Economic growth soon slowed down. One after the other, the vanity of the Rajapksas’ grand schemes became apparent. Corruption and nepotism reigned supreme. The country’s all-powerful rulers appeared increasingly edgy: they set thousands of heavily armed troops on unarmed villagers demanding clean water. Youth in the south of Sri Lanka woke up to the painful reality that their lives had not really changed after all. The LTTE’s demise had made no meaningful difference.
Soon came the hunt for a new existential threat. Aluthgama burned to ashes.
Deceptions of reform
On January 8, 2015 Tamil and Muslim youth came out in numbers and voted out Mahinda Rajapaksa. There was collective relief at the crumbling of the authoritarian kleptocracy that threatened the very existence of minority communities. For many young Tamil men and women, especially the ones that suffered indiscriminate shelling and inhumane treatment at the hands of the Rajapksa-inspired Sri Lankan military, the premature ending of the Rajapaksas’ dynastic project felt like cosmic justice.
Maithripala Sirisena, the new president, promised an end to corruption, restoration of the rule of law, protection for minorities against majoritarian violence, and justice for war victims. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s ostensibly ‘clean hands’ were to rejuvenate the failing economy. With the two main parties of the country forming a historic national government, the national question was to be resolved through a new constitutional arrangement. Tamil speaking youth imagined an equitable future within this country.
Three years on, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe combination has almost nothing to show for these promises.
Allegations of large scale financial mishandling in the new administration emerged within a matter of weeks of the new government assuming power. Government representatives’ regular pronouncements of the country performing better on macroeconomic indicators make no sense to ordinary youth who are burdened by family debt and an unbearably high cost of living. Entry-level salaries are desperately low, even for positions that have historically paid quite handsomely. Average starting salary for an electrical engineer, for instance, is 35,000–45,000 rupees: standard rent for an unfurnished room with an attached bathroom in Colombo, on the other hand, is 15,000–25,000 rupees.
The 19th Amendment, this government’s only substantive democratic reform victory, is now long forgotten. The government appears to have entirely abandoned the constitution making process. Despite forewarnings, it could not prevent racist elements from recently launching a vicious anti-Muslim riot in Kandy. There is seething anger among Muslim youth against both Sirisena and Wickremesinghe for what they perceive to be an unforgivable betrayal.
Disinformation overload
Ours was to be the Age of Information. Internet was to democratise knowledge. Everyone could learn and comment was free. Social media invaded our lives with the promise of bringing us closer to each other. With friends and family always at one’s finger tips, one could never be alone. Moreover, these technologies were to enhance and empower democracy at large — through creating safe spaces for critical dialogue. Tech enthusiasts proclaimed that in West Asia and North Africa, Facebook and Twitter had, in fact, launched full-blown democratic revolutions.
However, emerging reports of social media platforms’ role in the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office have all but conclusively demonstrated these expectations to be utterly delusional. Far from living in an information age, we find ourselves amidst deliberate deception, fake news, outright lies, and misinformation — in short, in the Age of Bullshit.
A recent Facebook post by a Jaffna-based user claiming that the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was positively enthralled by the intelligence of an Eelam Tamil pilot who performed a heroic refugee rescue mission in Syria received more than 30,000 interactions. Several web-based news platforms reproduced the story on their sites. Internet-popular Tamil Nadu politician Senthamizhan Seeman made a public speech praising the valour of the pilot. The story claimed that the pilot managed to rescue an additional fifteen or so dying refugees — exceeding the carrying capacity of the aircraft — by releasing excess fuel, mid-air. Thousands of Tamil youth reposted this nonsensical story, expressing their delight and pride at being Tamil. Young Muslim men, including university students, conveyed their gratitude to the Canadian prime minister by adding a special frame bearing the man and a message of appreciation to their Facebook profile pictures. The real irony is the person who wrote this piece of fiction meant to demonstrate that the vast amount of avid social media users — mostly youth — are gullible fools.
While most Sri Lankan youth are highly literate they sorely lack in critical reasoning. There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of social media. For example, rather than viewing Facebook as a platform where a wide range of actors — including racist bigots — fervently message, many treat it as the source. ‘Did you read this story on Facebook?’ is a frequently asked question. The lack of appreciation for this detail has devastating effects since everything on Facebook looks equally credible. Moreover, a growing body of research suggests that social media tools drive us apart and into isolated ideological bubbles as opposed to fostering crosstalk between different streams of political beliefs. In the process of making communication efficient, these technologies have eroded open-ended, spontaneous conversation.
Facebook, Instagram, and hashtags have also intensified the violent consequences of mimetic desire — i.e. desiring the same objects as our contemporaries, the primary instrument through which most of us seek fulfillment. Thus, a young person boasting of his apparent singlehood simultaneously loathes his rich friend who regularly posts poolside #CoupleGoals posts from fancy restaurants. Social media sow jealousy and resentment among the youth at a previously impossible intensity and scale.
Destiny
This, then, is the deadly mix of discontents within which the Sri Lankan youth are today trapped.
Mishra observes that, today, better education and affordable communication technologies bring people into a place of hope and aspiration and simply abandon them there. This is particularly true for a vast number of young people in this country. One out of five youth in this country is unemployed. Youth make up nearly 75 percent of the total unemployed population. Even the ones that are employed hardly earn enough to make ends meet.
A gloomy sense of crisis engulfs the country. With an utterly incompetent government in power, there is no trace of stability anywhere or in anything. Chaos looms at every forgotten corner. As anger and frustration brew, desperate young men and women will inevitably fall for false prophets, find new scapegoats, and engage in creative destruction. The recent spate of anti-Muslim violence — from Ampara in the east, to Digana and Teldeniya in the hill country — saw the active involvement of Sinhalese youth both online and on the ground. Despots who promise instant solutions will appear ever so endearing and violence the only recourse.
