Read The Hindu Notes of 19th January 2019 for UPSC Civil Service Examination, State Civil Service Examination and other competitive Examination

The Hindu Notes for 19th January 2019
  • Topic Discussed: The Hindu Notes of 19th January 2019

    • Some call it democracy

    To call for the overthrow of a stale and fearful social system is not sedition. It is democracy

  • Sedition and conspiracy charges have been filed against three former students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and seven others. If these charges are established, 10 young Indians could be sentenced to life-term imprisonment. A great deal has been said and written about the need to banish a 19th century law, introduced by Lord Macaulay, from the statute books. It may be time to ask another question: what kind of a government wages war on its own students? History tells us that short-sighted governments do precisely this.

    • The spirit of 1968

  • In May 1968, students in universities across France rose in revolt against hide-bound, patriarchal and class-governed structures, from the family, the capitalist market, to the government ruled by the conservative President Charles de Gaulle. In early 1968, students at the campus of the University of Paris at Nanterre, located on the outskirts of the capital city, had launched a protest. They campaigned against the involvement of Western governments in the Vietnam War, against sexual unfreedom, and for the realisation of liberty that the French had, less than 200 years ago, fought for. In May, students at the Sorbonne expressed solidarity with their fellow students, and revolted.
  • Young women and men took to the streets, and as a result were beaten up by the police. Hundreds of them were arrested. This led to the closing down of the prestigious university. Ironically, police brutality incited even more students to join the movement. The police assaulted young people with tear gas and swinging batons. But students were determined to re-enact the spectacular 1789 revolution that had been left unfinished in some respects. They constructed hundreds of barricades in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The slogan that inspired them to defy the police was: politics is the art of the impossible.
  • On May 13, workers from the Renault factory joined the protests and struck work. Factories were closed, trains ground to a halt, and the French government came to a standstill. De Gaulle had not taken student demonstrations seriously; he had to pay for this serious lapse of judgment. He dissolved Parliament and mobilised hundreds of supporters to counter the protest. His party came back to power after the elections, but in the following April he resigned after his government lost a referendum. He had thought the results would demonstrate his acceptability to the people of France. The French did not forgive him for going to war against his own students.
  • Fifty years later, May 1968 is remembered as the month and the year when university students launched a political, cultural and sexual revolution. And the world recollected the words of the English poet William Wordsworth, who in The Prelude wrote of the 1789 French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! O times…When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights.” Wordsworth was perceptive. The vision, the energy and the language invented by rebellious young people inject a breath of fresh air into our jaded and bankrupt political discourses. If the young do not struggle for emancipation, who will?

    • Three years ago

  • Students assembled on the grounds of JNU more than three years ago spoke of liberation from a caste-ridden and inegalitarian society. They reiterated the need to abolish capital punishment, which many fine legal minds have also condemned. They pointed out that the government should address escalating tensions in the Kashmir Valley. Some elements, reportedly outsiders, shouted anti-India slogans. This is hardly sedition. Will our great country and ancient civilisation collapse because of some idiotic slogans? We ought to have confidence in the capacity of India to endure youthful indiscretions, the country has survived infinitely more serious attacks on its territorial integrity. It is ridiculous to charge students with sedition when all that they were asking for was the breaking of shackles.
  • There was no violence, no call to use force or grind the capital city of Delhi to a halt, no suggestion that the gathering lay siege to official institutions, or ask for the resignation of the government. The conversation was in perfect conformity with the spirit of public universities. The public university is not a teaching shop. Within the metaphorical walls of the university we find classrooms and libraries. We also find open spaces where students assemble and discuss political predicaments, cafes and dhabas where they interact with co-students who come from different regions of the country, and statues of leaders that form a rallying point for protests. The Vivekananda statue outside the main library in the North Campus in Delhi University has been a fulcrum of student politics since my student days.
  • Through these activities, students become familiar with the notion of citizenship. They connect with others, they learn that they have the constitutional right to challenge the power of elected representatives. It is in the university that they absorb the virtue of solidarity. It is here that they learn that in a democracy they have the right to make their own histories, even if they make these histories badly.
  • University students have the right to acquaint the public and the government with depressing tales of how lives are led in an inegalitarian society. In a representative democracy we are supposed to communicate opinions and demands through elected representatives. But representatives, we have found, are too busy manipulating public opinion to get power. Fairly early in the biography of representative democracy, citizens realised that they would have to put forth their needs, their interests, and their aspirations into the public domain through networks of associations. The intent is not to contest elections or take over the state — the idea is to raise issues, and provoke debates on what the good society is, and how it can be brought into existence.
  • This is precisely what young people were doing some years ago, and more of them should be discussing problems that have been left unresolved by unresponsive governments all this while. People in power should recognise the importance of political debate in civil society, they should learn to heed demands catapulted into the public domain by student associations. If some hotheads shout objectionable slogans, ignore them as long as these do not lead to harm. This is how mature democracies behave.

    • The political impulse

  • The age when young people were infatuated with the politics of the impossible, 1968, ended, but it threw up several movements that changed the world. They re-cast gender relations, emphasised civil liberties, empowered alternative sexualities, and familiarised us with the tyrannies of power. That was fifty years ago. Once again, the young need to experience the “blissful dawn” and call for the overthrow of caste discrimination, inequality, patriarchy and other remnants of an oppressive order in India. This will complete the objectives of our freedom struggle, for political equality is inadequate without social and economic equality.
  • To call for the overthrow of a stale and fearful social system is not sedition. We call it democracy. We fight for democracy not, in Wordsworth’s words, “in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island…But in the very world, which is the world/ Of all of us, the place where in the end/ We find our happiness, or not at all.”

    • The danger of reciprocity

    It is vital the Supreme Court collegium remains firmly independent

  • Independence, impartiality and fearlessness of judges are not private rights of judges but citizen’s rights. Ultimately judicial legitimacy/ power rests on people’s confidence in courts. We have yet another controversy surrounding the Supreme Court, with the collegium revisiting decisions made at an earlier meeting and recommending the elevation of two junior judges to the Supreme Court. No one has any doubts about the competence or integrity of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dinesh Maheshwari, but the manner in which it was carried out puts the spotlight once again on the controversial collegium system of judicial appointments.
  • This seriously undermines the independence of judges and raises unnecessary doubts about the credibility of the highest court as the government is not only the biggest litigator but also the greatest threat to the abuse of power. Judicial review as a concept is supposed to control the government and keep it in check.
  • How has this panned out in the past? Let’s look back at the Justice K.M. Joseph case. He had struck down the Modi government’s imposition of President’s rule in Uttarakhand and saw the government returning the recommendation for his elevation to the Supreme Court to the collegium last April — his appointment was cleared in August. This time the government not only did not return the recommendation to the collegium for reconsideration, but approved the appointments instantly.

    • Learnings from the past

  • Take the case of Justice A.N. Ray, who was appointed Chief Justice of India (CJI) in 1973 superseding three senior judges, or Justice M.H. Beg, who was appointed CJI superseding Justice H.R. Khanna in 1977. Both Justice Ray and Justice Beg were excellent judges, but favoured the government. They were considered not forward-looking judges but judges who looked forward to the office of the CJI.
  • In the bank nationalisation case (1970), while as many as 10 judges went against the government, Justice Ray approved the government’s action. Similarly, Justice Beg, in the Indira Gandhi election case, held that while democracy is the basic structure, free and fair election is not.
  • The National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) was struck down by the Supreme Court because it would have compromised the independence of the CJI and given a role to the government in the appointment of judges. Unlike in the U.S. where judges are appointed by the President and are known to be leaning towards the Democrats or Republicans, Indian judges are not supposed to have any political affiliation. But is it possible to completely insulate judges from governmental influence? The answer is no — as George Orwell pointed out in 1984, the government is everywhere, and judges as fellow human beings do get influenced by it. The judiciary asserts its position only when the government is weak. This collegium system was asserted when we had weak Central governments in the 1990s.

    • Power and influence

  • ‘Power’ and ‘influence’ are fundamental concepts in society. ‘Influence’ is sometimes considered to be an aspect of ‘power’. Indira Gandhi was influential because she was powerful. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, similarly, not only powerful but hugely influential. According to the American sociologist, Alvin Ward Gouldner, the universal norm in human societies is that individuals are obligated to reciprocate favours received. Gouldner articulated the “norm of reciprocity” in the following manner: “people should help those who have helped them” and “people should not injure those who have helped them”.
  • In his NJAC judgment (2015), Justice J.S. Khehar discussed the issue of reciprocity at length in striking down the commission. He referred to Laura E. Little’s work on American judges who felt obliged to the President for nominating them and Senators who helped them in the confirmation process. Justice Khehar therefore preferred exclusion of the political executive from the appointment of judges as a feeling of gratitude towards the government impacts the independence of the judiciary. It was for this very reason that even B.R. Ambedkar wanted to insulate the judiciary from political pressures.
  • In his autobiography, Roses in December, the former Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court, M.C. Chagla, who also served as a Minister in Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet, boldly stated the adverse impact of supersession when he said, “the effect of these supersessions was most deleterious on the judges of the Supreme Court who were in the line of succession to the Chief Justiceship. Each eyed the other with suspicion and tried to outdo him in proclaiming his loyalty to the Government either in their judgments or even on public platforms.” A similar depiction of the apex court was made by Justice H.R. Khanna, who himself was superseded, in his book, Neither Roses Nor Thorns, when he recalled, “one of the new trends was the change in the approach of the court with a view to give tilt in favour of upholding the orders of the government. Under the cover of high sounding words like social justice the court passed orders, the effect of which was to unsettle settled principles and dilute or undo the dicta laid down in the earlier cases.”
  • The Hindu right’s opposition to the Constitution is an open secret. The prospect of a 15-judge bench overturning Kesavananda Bharati . v. State of Kerala (1973), which outlined the basic structure doctrine of the Constitution, does not look too remote in the near future if the government continues to exert pressure on the collegium and if the collegium, due to reciprocity, does not effectively assert its power and independence. Most governments prefer pliable judges but many of our judges remain wedded to their oath and decide cases without fear or favour. True reciprocity affects humans but since our judges are addressed as ‘Lords’, let them not have any feeling of gratitude towards anyone.

    • Nudged into action

    After long delays, a Supreme Court push is needed to establish the Lokpal

  • It should have never come to this on the Lokpal. That it requires a Supreme Court order to nudge the government to make any progress towards establishing the anti-graft institution is a poor commentary on its functioning. The court has asked the eight-member Search Committee under the Lokpal Act to recommend a panel of names before the end of February. This shortlist has to be sent to the Selection Committee, headed by the Prime Minister. It has taken five years since the Lokpal Act, 2013, received the President’s assent on January 1, 2014, for a Search Committee to even begin its work. It was formed only on September 27, 2018, after Common Cause, an NGO, filed a contempt petition against the government over the delay in constituting the authority despite a Supreme Court verdict in April 2017. It is true that setting up the Search Committee requires some groundwork, as its composition should be drawn from diverse fields such as anti-corruption policy, public administration, law, banking and insurance; also, half its membership should consist of women, backward class, minority and SC/ST candidates. However, it is the government’s duty to expedite this process and not cite it as a reason for delay. Even after it was formed, the Search Committee has been handicapped because of lack of office space, manpower, infrastructure and a secretariat. The court has now asked the government to provide the required infrastructure. In the past too, the court has admonished the Centre for the delay in creating the institution. In its April 2017 verdict, the court brushed aside the reason that the government was awaiting the passage of an amendment based on a parliamentary committee report and said there was no legal bar on the Selection Committee moving ahead with its work even if there was a vacancy in it.
  • There is a good deal of politics behind the delay. The Selection Committee, which includes the Lok Sabha Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition, the Chief Justice of India and an eminent jurist, has met in the past without Mallikarjun Kharge, who heads the Congress in the Lok Sabha. He has been skipping meetings, as he is aggrieved that the government has not made him a full member, and has roped him in as a ‘special invitee’. The government sticks to its view that he has not been recognised as the Leader of the Opposition by the Speaker. This minor issue has been resolved in respect of appointments to other posts such as CBI Director and Central Vigilance Commissioner by a simple amendment to treat the leader of the largest Opposition party as the Leader of the Opposition for this purpose. This amendment has not been brought about despite a parliamentary committee report endorsing the idea in December 2015. Nothing except the lack of political will to establish the Lokpal can explain years of delay.

    • Shape of the slowdown

    China’s capacity to manage its economic transition has implications the world over

  • The Chinese growth juggernaut is slowing down. The world’s second-largest economy has reported that its exports for December fell by 4.4%, the sharpest fall in two years amidst rising trade tensions with the United States and fears of a global economic slowdown. China’s trade surplus with the U.S. has increased to $323 billion, its highest level since 2016 and up 17% from a year ago. This is likely to put added pressure on Chinese exports to the U.S. Besides, China’s factory activity contracted to a two-year low by the end of December while car sales in 2018 dropped for the first time since 1990, pointing to faltering demand from Chinese consumers. There are increasing fears that the Chinese government may further drop its growth target to 6% this year, from 6.5% last year. Given its implications for global growth, markets across the world have naturally been worried about the fate of the Chinese economy. Its stock market, in particular, was the worst-performing among major economies last year. Apple, Jaguar Land Rover and other companies have warned of weak earnings due to a slowdown in their sales in China. Responding to fears of a serious slowdown in the economy, the People’s Bank of China on Wednesday injected cash worth $83 billion into the economy through open market operations in order to boost bank lending and overall economic growth. It is believed that the Chinese government may be prepping for a stimulus worth trillions of yuans to step up spending in the economy.
  • China has been struggling to transition from its earlier growth model led by cheap exports and huge capital investments into a more domestic consumption-led economy. In particular, the government and the central bank have in recent years tried to wean the economy off cheap debt that fuelled its impressive growth run. The Chinese central bank fully opened the credit taps of the economy in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis that threatened to derail growth. But even as it tries to steer the economy towards more consumption-led growth, the state has been wary of allowing economic sectors like real estate that were earlier boosted by the availability of cheap credit to go bust. A true restructuring of its export- and state-led economic model will not be possible until China allows the liquidation of uneconomical projects that were begun only because of the availability of ample amounts of cheap credit. This will be the first step towards building a more market-driven economy. But it is not clear whether China is willing to bite the bullet and stop feeding its economy with cheap credit. It may be tempted to go further and look at socialising the losses coming from defaults on business loans. None of this will be good for the long-term health of the Chinese or the global economy.

    • Grave secrets from a troubled past

    The recent discovery of a mass grave in Mannar town in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province has raised fresh questions about the island nation’s history of violence. It has also re-opened old wounds and triggered traumatic memories among the survivors of the deadly conflict that ended barely 10 years ago. Meera Srinivasan reports

  • From 10 feet away, it looked like a grin, the row of teeth stretching from ear to ear. Freshly dug out from many layers of soil, the mud-covered skeleton lay on its spine, awaiting a number.
  • “That would be 283,” says W.R.A.S. Rajapaksa. He is standing on an elevation inside the site, located at a busy junction in Mannar, an island town in Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority Northern Province. In his blue smock, the Consultant Judicial Medical Officer at Mannar District General Hospital looks like a surgeon, except that this operation is taking place under the sun, inside a messy soil pit. So he is also wearing a cap and rubber boots.
  • On a Monday morning earlier this month, at least four skeletons were clearly visible at the site, while parts of another were protruding from the soil. Where they lay — some piled one on top of the other and a couple to the side — it was at least two metres below ground level, says Rajapaksa, the chief investigator of the latest mass grave to be found in Sri Lanka.
  • As of Friday (January 18), 300 skeletons, including those of 23 children below the age of 12, have been identified. Members of his team that comprised fellow judicial medical officers, forensic archaeologists and analysts had resumed excavating the skeletons after a break for Christmas and the New Year. Wetting their brushes in a cup of water, they gently pried aside the soil deposits over the bones, making them visible, little by little, to the world they had left behind.

    • ‘Scene of crime’

  • “We consider this a scene of crime until proven otherwise,” says Rajapaksa on what happens to be the 125th day of the excavation, being undertaken following a directive from the Mannar magistrate court. The bodies had been found “dumped”, instead of being “laid to rest” beside each other, as would be the case in a cemetery.
  • In March 2018, construction workers stumbled upon human remains while preparing to build a new outlet for the state-run cooperative Sathosa (in place of its old building that had been demolished). Little did they know that they would be uncovering one of Sri Lanka’s largest mass graves almost a decade after the civil war ended in 2009.
  • Says Rajapaksa, “Of the 283 skeletons identified here so far, we have excavated 277 and stored them at the court premises.”
  • Samples will be sent to a laboratory in the U.S., in Miami, Florida, possibly next week, for carbon dating analysis. The process, which is often used in archaeology and forensic study, would ascertain the amount of Carbon-14 in bone and teeth samples. This could help establish the approximate period in which the person lived, before it possibly leads investigators to the likely year of their death or to those behind it.
  • At 9.45 in the morning, the shops in the area are open and teeming with customers. With the post office, market and the bus terminus all in the same vicinity, a number of vehicles criss-cross the grand bazaar area, or periyakadai sandi as the locals call it. Motorists on their way to work slow down and turn their heads 90 degrees to catch a glimpse of the grave site that has drawn media attention to their otherwise neglected town.
  • Pedestrians stop and watch for a few seconds. Perhaps deterred by the uniformed policemen and Special Task Force personnel stationed under a neem tree adjoining the site, some move a safe distance away before pulling out their smart phones for a picture of the ongoing exhumation.
  • Mannar district, along Sri Lanka’s north-western coast, is part mainland and part small island, connected by a causeway. The mass grave has surfaced at the district’s main town on Mannar island, a thin patch of land jutting into the Palk Strait like a little fin. On the western tip of this little island is Talaimannar, the closest point to Dhanushkodi in India, in Tamil Nadu’s Rameswaram district. Some 30 km apart and with a narrow stretch of the Indian Ocean running between them, Talaimannar and Rameswaram were once connected by a popular ferry service that, since the 1980s, has been defunct. In the nearly three decades of Sri Lanka’s civil war, waged by the state armed forces against the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), both towns bore witness to mass displacement, rough boat rides, and prolonged separation but also a precious solidarity among the common people.

    • Business as usual

  • Says Meeramohideen Salman, a vegetable vendor who has a small shop right opposite the mass grave site, “It has not been a great season. I have had to slash prices to make sure I sell enough. On a good day, I make about LKR 3,500 a day [about ₹1,360], and it is barely enough to feed my family.”
  • The lull in business had little to do with the excavation nearby. Months of erratic weather — a severe drought followed by flash floods — had affected both the harvest and prices, adds Salman. He has been running the stall here for 12 years, he says, from the time he returned from Kalpitiya in Puttalam, some 240 km south, where many Muslims like him had fled after the LTTE ordered their expulsion from the north in October 1990.
  • He says, “Had the cooperative store come up across the road as planned, they would have sold vegetables like onions for at least five rupees lesser. That would have hit me harder.”
  • Even at the other shops adjoining the site, managers spoke only of practical hindrances. The trucks bringing their supplies from Colombo now stop at the main road, since the excavation site is cordoned off, along with the lane to these shops. The load is physically carried to the stores by workers, unlike earlier, when the trucks could drive into the lane. For the row of shops here, the implications of having a mass grave unearthed in their midst seemed, at best, logistical.

    • Cycle of distress

  • However, for some residents a little further away from the site, the excavation and the sighting of skeletal remains has meant another cycle of distress. Especially if they happen to be like the thousands of mothers looking for a loved one who forcibly disappeared during those tumultuous war years.
  • A war that spanned 30 years, a savage state unleashing mass violence, armed militant groups offering resistance — at times with their own brand of brutality — have meant a massive human cost. The casualties were more than a lakh, as in some estimates. With the unresolved mysteries of the deaths and disappearances of Tamil rebels, activists, journalists, and scores of civilians haunting them for years, the survivors in the north struggle to recover from the everyday imprint of trauma. Even if they choose to look ahead rather than behind, healing is not easy as they strive to make ends meet in a battered economy with no promising jobs and few sympathetic political leaders who chose action over rhetoric.
  • Amarasingam Ranjini’s son, who was in the LTTE, went missing in the summer of 1999. He was born when she was still in her teens following her early marriage. “They [army] took him for questioning, and he has not come back in these 20 years,” she says. While her other son and daughter now live in India, Ranjini, 60, stays in her hometown all alone.
  • She still hopes to see her son one day. “I do believe he is alive somewhere and I will continue looking for him. But when I saw this mass grave site and heard about the hundreds of bodies being unearthed, I wondered if one of them could be my son. The thought did cross my mind,” she says, breaking down, torn between denial and resignation.
  • It was this “double-edged” fear that the Sri Lankan-born writer Michael Ondaatje described in his novel Anil’s Ghost. “There was always the fear, double-edged, that it was their son in the pit, or that it was not their son — which meant there would be further searching,” he wrote, of a fictional grave site with submerged bones.
  • Mothers of those who disappeared in the run-up to the final phase of the war in 2009 — many after being reportedly taken by state agencies for “questioning” — are far from accepting that their child could be dead. Those looking for relatives who went missing in the 1990s allow for that option, but have no way to reconcile with it in the absence of evidence, says Jena Jayakanthi, a Mannar-based activist working with the families of the disappeared. “If you haven’t seen your child’s body, how do you begin to believe that he is dead?” she asks.
  • The Sri Lankan Army has repeatedly denied having played a role, but has done little else to explain what happened to those its personnel picked up for “questioning”, or the others who were seen surrendering to its officers.
  • Manoharan Vetrimalar, who is looking for her disappeared son and son-in-law, raises her grandchildren in Mannar while her daughter works in Saudi Arabia as a house help to support the family. She says, “The grama sevaka (village officer) told me to obtain a death certificate for my missing relatives, so that I can receive some financial assistance for their loss. My daughter said nothing doing, we have not seen the body and we cannot accept that.” But the families, she adds, are fatigued after years of petitioning different state commissions and repeating their stories. “And then when a mass grave like this is found, it is very disturbing.”

    • Getting to the bottom of it

  • Apart from the troubling reality of unresolved cases of enforced disappearances coexisting with unexpectedly found human remains in the heart of town, the mass grave has also set off considerable speculation within and outside Mannar. Stories travel, supplemented by recollections of senior citizens —some of whom remember a bank building at the site before the now-demolished cooperative store was built — and acquiring new details and narratives.
  • Home to nearly 1 lakh people, mostly Tamils (Catholics, Hindus) and Tamil-speaking Muslims, Mannar is the most religiously diverse district in the north. During the war, the LTTE was in control of mainland Mannar, part of the Vanni region sandwiched between the Sinhala-majority south of Sri Lanka and the northern Jaffna peninsula. On the other hand, Mannar island itself was, for the most part, under the jurisdiction of the Sri Lankan Army and Navy, recalls Ranjini, quickly pulling out her 1999 “Army IC” or the identity card distributed by the Army, that was used to keep track of those moving between Mannar island and the mainland.
  • Says Vetrimalar, “Our district has seen a lot. I have very vivid images of shells piercing through walls, people falling dead, and of the many who were badly injured. Now, 10 years after the war ended, we are desperately looking for our missing relatives but no answers have been forthcoming. Shouldn’t we know what really happened to them?”
  • The Sri Lankan government set up the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) in 2016 to investigate the scores of cases of missing persons, reported from both the former war zones in the north-east, and during the state’s ferocious crackdown on radical Sinhala youth in the south in the late 1980s. Amnesty International estimates a total of at least 60,000 disappearances in the country.
  • The exact number of missing persons from Mannar is not clear. The OMP has so far not put out lists or numbers, perhaps because its own task includes comparing and verifying figures mentioned in previous lists compiled by other commissions.
  • Says OMP chairman Saliya Pieris, “The OMP has been acting as an observer in this case since June 2, 2018 as it is a mass grave site that may relate to cases of disappearances and missing persons that fall under our mandate.” The office stepped in last year to financially support the excavation efforts and will also help transport the samples to a testing laboratory in Florida.
  • Some among the families of the disappeared are sceptical of the OMP’s ability to provide them the answers they have been chasing for years. Most of them have already testified before multiple government-appointed panels earlier, to no avail.
  • Says Jeyakanthi, “This is a state institution. How can a party accused of committing a crime probe it fairly and deliver justice to the victims?”
  • It was in March 2018, just around the time of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) session in Geneva, that Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena appointed the commissioners to the OMP. The OMP has held at least seven public sittings in different districts in the war-affected north, east and the south, where disappearances have been reported.
  • Says parliamentarian Charles Nirmalanathan at his party office a few hundred metres from the site, “So far the OMP has at least been transparent about what they can and can’t do. We need a thorough and complete investigation into this mass grave. People want a resolution.”
  • Reacting to the discovery of mass graves in Mannar, the international non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch says, “Sri Lankan authorities should ensure that the Office of Missing Persons is able to operate properly, and should set up an impartial transitional justice process that was pledged at the Human Rights Council.”
  • The last time mass graves were alleged in Mannar was in late 2013, near the famed Thiruketheeswaram Shiva temple, and later in 2016, in a well not far from this temple. The investigation into the 2013 ‘sighting’ by the residents of the area is yet to be completed, with some officials reportedly declaring the grave to be a part of a cemetery. For locals, though, questions linger. In the 2016 case, investigators told the magistrate court that there were no human remains.
  • The inquiry into the Matale mass grave found in 2012 in the island’s Central Province has also stalled, despite the left-wing Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s (JVP) demands for a full investigation of the site where, some believe, its activists and sympathisers could have been interred during the state repression of the JVP in 1971 and again in 1987-89. Yet another mass grave in Kaluwanchikudy was found in the eastern Batticaloa district in 2014, but the excavation did not see much progress.
  • In the recently-discovered site in Mannar, the team is working largely on a voluntary basis. Says Rajapaksa, who has led teams at two other mass graves in the past, “There are no standard operating procedures in place in Sri Lanka to deal with mass graves.”
  • He says, “We haven’t finished excavating yet. We will continue until we get to what we call a bone-free margin, to rule out any more bones,” suggesting that the number of skeletons could increase further. Giving no room for speculation on who the dead may be and when they were killed, he adds, “We cannot resort to any pre-judgment without evidence. These are bodies that have been heaped up. And no one knows who did this. No one, except those who did it. We have to find out.” His observation echoes those of many mothers who desire to unearth the truth buried with the bodies. Until then, they will remain bare bones, carefully wrapped and safely stored, bearing only a number.