The army involvement in providing organic fertiliser and playing a part that goes over and beyond its customary role has provided cannon fodder for those who want to see a ghost or a saboteur under every culvert, and under every mattress.
Recently the first organic fertiliser consignment was presented to the authorities by the Air Force top brass. After the organic fertiliser project per se came under tremendous scrutiny, the army’s intervention is seen as, well, being less than ‘organic.’ The connotation is that the army intervention in this regard was ‘staged’ and that this organic fertiliser contribution by the military was totally orchestrated.
When the Minister of Agriculture Mahindananda Aluthgamage was videoed speaking to some paddy cultivators, that was called an orchestrated act too and he was pilloried for staging teledramas. Even if comment is reserved on the minister’s promotional campaign, the charge of orchestration cannot be made when army involvement includes tangible results.
Organic fertiliser is being provided by the army, and this is quantifiable and is subject to strict accounting. Is that promotional, or is that palpable? The answer should be obvious to those who see the army role as auxiliary to that of the State and, therefore, being supportive. Recently the military has also been coming in for flak from the commentators for having been transformed into a one regiment monolith.
Structured
The accusatory finger is being pointed at the President for using the Gajaba regiment — his former physical location in the army — as an extension of his own base in what they say is a balance of power he maintains, that’s tilted towards one particular section of the military. That the President’s trusted individual point-men in positions of authority are from the Gajaba regiment is not a secret. Among them are of course Gen. Shavendra Silva, and Gen. Kamal Gunaratne. But if the President is one track with his military comrade empowerment, the fact that he has backed Admiral Wasantha Karrangoda etc doesn’t figure.
Also, the organic fertiliser is not being provided by Gajaba regiment hands. If the President as a military man is partial towards his former regiment that’s not something to be overtly surprised about. The military is structured in this way and if not for the regiments the military would function as an unhealthy, unstructured monolith that can’t move because of its own weight.
The recent utterances of Shavendra Silva — and army website literature — has also come in for flak. Silva has said something about the military’s role extending beyond its traditional duties. Considering that providing organic fertiliser was not part and parcel of the routine role of the military in the past, he is not saying anything that’s earthshaking.
But his words have been read as paradigm shifting utterance that would transform the traditional power dynamics in the country and would tilt the State towards full military control. This does not even begin to make sense considering that the president is a civilian and has been a civilian for such a long time that when it suits them his detractors say that he was a “general factotum in some sort of stores complex”, when he was in the United States.
If he was moonlighting in the US the way he was, how is it that when he returns home and takes the political route to power, he is conveniently slotted as a Gajaba regiment helmsman who wants one regiment in the army to alter the power dynamics in the entire country?
That sort of dual projection of the President as a Gajaba stalwart on the one hand and gentleman who spurned the army and sought greener pastures on the other, just does not make sense. The army now necessarily sees the President as a civilian leader and the military personnel have been somewhat flattered they have been getting the attention they are now getting from an essentially civilian high command.
Kowtowing
This has not happened for a long time and to that extent whether it’s Gajaba or the Gemunu Watch that’s in the limelight the army is enjoying its moment under the sun. This was not always the case and those who say that it wasn’t the case under the former president Mahinda Rajapaksa are correct as well.
The other factor that’s discounted by the critics is that the army has surrendered some decision-making to the civilian high command led by the president. Somebody quipped though only tongue in cheek that even the Gajaba regiment is these days being run by the president and his close ex Gajaba colleagues.
That’s not so of course but the meaning if the quip is to emphasize the extent of the civilian command. It’s the civilian Government that is getting the army to supply the cultivators with a regular supply of organic fertiliser and basically the military is kowtowing to the civilian high command and not vice versa.
How on earth any of this could be interpreted as handing over civilian control to the military is mesmerising? They say that a military can always goose step to the command of a civilian, but those militaries are an adjunct of the civilian high command. They do not strain to stamp the authority of the civilian leader by saying that we will offer ‘side support,’ to use the Sri Lankanism.
In any event docile militaries are followers and not leaders and the fact that Shavendra Silva says the military would go beyond the usual call of duty is to say that the military would in an act of supplication of sorts defer to the civilian policymakers and do their bidding. No doubt that the president is able to obtain this sort of deferential treatment from the military is down to the fact that he was a military man in the first place.
That’s not unusual or out of place. In this regard the Japanese example of military deference to the emperor and the civilian high-command is edifying.
The Japanese military structures had ‘personality’ so to say after the war, but the Japanese government had decided that Japan would not have a military at all. The Japanese people had enough. The Generals were not in a position to counter any of this. But the army was converted into a force that would assist the new emerging leadership to rebuild the nation. That was never read as Japan veering once more towards military adventurism.
Leadership
That simply wasn’t the case because the Japanese had by then had enough of that. In Sri Lanka the military has had enough of the leadership role that was thrust upon it during the war. Particularly in the northern and eastern theatres of battle, the army was forced to take on a leadership role that was too much of a responsibly for a military that never had leadership ambitions.
Besides that, the military came in for a lot of stick with regard to alleged ‘war crimes’ and so on, alleged being the operative word there. All this has meant that there is little appetite in the military — the entirety of the tri-forces — to assume a preeminent position when it comes to interactions with civilian entities.
The Gajaba regiment ethic, however, is very much in operation and there is no doubt that its regimental fervour that’s coming to play rather that military fervour per se. But the military is not run on the basis of regiments — not now, not ever. Those who are worried that the military would take over or go much beyond the call of duty as to usurp command over civilian affairs should relax. There is no military that deferred to a regiment and then tried to take over the entire show. A regimental sideshow is the best evidence there is that the Sri Lankan army is playing a supporting role to a former army officer who is now the civilian commander in chief.