By Rohana R. Wasala

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

The latest developments in the Sri Lankan political arena including diplomatic mockery in the form of a staged abduction episode by a minion of the global hegemon brought to my mind those lines from the short narrative poem ‘Jabberwocky’ (written in ballad style) included in the novel ‘Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There’ by Lewis Carroll (1871).

Many of the words used in the little ‘ballad’ are not normal English words; some of them are archaic terms that are no longer in use and some are coinages that Carroll made out of fragments of common English words for telling this story that is embedded in his longer tale. One evening, a father warns his young son about some fearful beasts that he must be careful of: the Jabberwock, the Jubjub bird, and the frumious Bandersnatch. The brave son sets out looking for the Jabberwock (presumably, the first evil monster he determines to destroy). On his way, he sits under a Tumtum tree to rest, and spends some time there thinking. Soon the deadly creature appears and the young man engages it in battle and cuts off its head. The hero goes home to his father with the severed head of the Jabberwock. The father chortles in his joy

‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’.

 But the ballad ends where it begins with ‘slithy toves’ boring holes and spinning in the wet hillside, wretched ‘borogoves’ swirling, and ‘raths’ roaring and squeaking having lost their way in the dying light of the dusk. (Toves, borogoves  and raths can be taken to refer to badgers, parrots and turtles respectively.) The repetition of the opening lines suggests that the death of the Jabberwock is not the end of the struggle against these evil creatures. 

For me, ‘Jabberwocky’ provides an interesting little allegory that depicts the positive and negative dynamics of the current political scene in Sri Lanka. In my imagination, the ‘frabjous’ (fabulously joyous) father in the story is the jubilant Fatherland/Motherland that is just emerging victoriously from almost five years of mostly externally-inflicted anarchy. Each animal mentioned can be imagined to correspond to one of the monstrous evil forces behind that parlous state of affairs. Those evil forces appear in countless different manifestations in the Lankan political landscape and outside.

The Jabberwock represents the set of self-seeking politicos  who have been doing great harm to the country by trying to grab and hold power for its own sake, merely to satisfy their own petty mental and physical urges at the expense of the wellbeing of the nation. In the Bandersnatch we have a symbol for the menacing hegemonic powers of the West, and their grumbling poodles with the voting right where they are economic refugees. The other evil creature is the Jubjub bird which answers to the twofold fundamentalist religious menace represented by certain mutually antagonistic extremist Christian and Islamic sects anchored to two conflicting global proselytizing movements, geared respectively to the allegedly predicted arrival of the heavenly kingdom of Moses (Ref. Chapter 9 of the Report of the Presidential Commission on Buddha Sasana, 2002) and the similarly anticipated establishment of a worldwide Muslim caliphate through the jihad or holy war. These determinedly subversive groups  have been infiltrating Sri Lanka’s mainstream minority Christian and Muslim communities while principally targeting and encroaching upon the religious spaces of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu minority from the early years of independence. It looks like that this Jubjub bird of religious extremism is being clandestinely adopted as an auxiliary by the other two evil forces for the promotion of their own evil ends. These forces are those that I feel inclined to compare to the Jabberwock and the Bandersnatch. 

 Fortunately for Sri Lanka, the recent decisive electoral rejection by Sri Lankans of the usurping Yahapalanaya under the UNP and the SLFP rump, barely surviving with the assistance of a few racist minority politicians  or, to put it differently, the emphatic victory of the SLPP presidential candidate, seems to have driven mad all three enemy camps: the strong jawed and sharp clawed Jabberwocks, the worrisome Jubjub birds, and the most powerful of all, the Bandersnatches. They had almost reached the culminating point of a well coordinated joint operation of at least a decade to bury Sri Lanka with her unique political and cultural identity as a unitary sovereign state that has existed for over two thousand five hundred years, having survived many foreign invasions and internecine dynastic struggles in its long history. 

The Jabberwocks are plotting  to wrest power again at the parliamentary election due to be held around April 2020. Their frenzied efforts include making mud slinging videos against the newly elected president and his close associates, a staged abduction episode with foreign support as a smokescreen to conceal exfiltration of  moles and agents who were active during the previous UNP-SLFP administration, alleged pre- and post-presidential election assassination attempts to eliminate the Rajapaksas, and alleged cases of fallopian tube restriction by a Muslim doctor during child delivery to cause infertility in Sinhalese mothers, and numerous other anti-national traitorous acts, which the media have brought to the public domain with plausible circumstantial evidence that seems to deserve proper investigation by state law enforcement authorities. The mad activism of these satanic forces cannot help but betray their sinister motives. So, Sri Lankans of all the communities are now in a position to identify their common enemy well in advance of the parliamentary elections which will be held in about four months’ time.

The  principal plotters of the successful 2015 conspiracy, which nearly nullified the gains of the 2009 victory over separatist terrorism, are not incapable of repeating such treachery to neutralize the effects of the recent triumph of democracy. But they are not likely to be able to enlist enough support even among their followers this time in view of the unprecedented growth of public awareness, particularly among the fresh thinking youth, in recent years, about the country having been ruled from outside under the previous regime. Surely, even its most diehard followers cannot be insensitive to the cogent message of hope and rejuvenation  conveyed through the spontaneous efflorescence of natural creativity in the form of mural paintings in towns and cities done by educated young people across the country including Jaffna in the north, consciously or unconsciously inspired by the change at the top being initiated by a nonpolitician who insists on work, meritocracy, and on the highest priority being given to national security, economic development and the education of the young generation. 

(This is a personal point of view presented for what it is worth. It’s open to criticism.)