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FINALLY PROFESSOR NALIN DE SILVA IS BACK IN A UNIVERSITY, TEACHING AFTER A DECADE, BUT JUSTICE IS YET TO BE DONE TO HIM.
By Walter Jayawardhana reporting from Los Angeles During the last so many years hundreds of thousands of the common people in Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese majority of the population, realized that they were still alive, only through the writings and other media outpourings of writers that could be counted with the fingers of one’s hands. It does not mean that they were extremely free to express since ours is a multi-party democracy. Then there were officially appointed censors. Now they have been replaced by powerful “media units”. All these overpowering authorities, surely remnants of old colonial powers, pointing an accusing finger at the Sinhalese told them they were the worst people in the world. Their writers were chauvinists . Though they were the majority they should accept equal status with the minority unlike in any other place in the world. Because the majority of them were Buddhists they should not fight and simply give away part of their country to the people who fought against them. Their country’s enemies should be treated as equals in their own country. In this process, writers of the Sinhalese had to do great sacrifices, to keep on writing and providing a leadership to the people and reminding them that their country was being sold for a song. Professor Nalin de Silva is one such man who had to stay without a job for not being a yes man for well over a decade. He is going back to teach mathematics at the Kelaniya University on January 1st not because the university authorities of the Colombo University, who fired him, thought to do justice to him. They are still fighting , spending large amounts of public money to keep him out of his job. But thanks to a strongly nationalist lawyer, S. L. Gunasekera, Nalin is till fighting on. The labor tribunal case he filed is yet to be decided after a decade. So fair is Sri Lanka’s justice system in industrial disputes. The corrupt governments of the country did not understand that justice delayed was justice denied. br> If not for the great obstacles placed against him by real powers in the country, changing their positions from government to government, surely not representing the common man, he would have been employed in a different university, long time ago. But thanks to conscious politicians like Dinesh Gunawardena, who relentlessly fought against all odds he is once again in the university lecture rooms and labs where he should be for the benefit of mother lanka, this time employed as a new employee of the Kelaniya University. At no other time in the academic history of Sri Lanka, the nation’s state owned press joined hands with the government to persecute a university teacher for the ideas he held and what he thought right for the benefit for his motherland as in the case of Professor Nalin de Silva. Going on the prejudices created by the state owned press the hanging judges of his inquiry sent him home without a job and kept him unemployed for over a decade. Ideas, very welcome in other academic institutions in the world , in this case became the enemy of Nalin de Silva and the ideology he preached ,Jathika Chintanaya was branded by hired writers of the state owned press like a plague that should be avoided at all costs with all kinds of misinterpretations. Colombo university sources said to this writer , “It was an organized witch hunt against Nalin de Silva with the connivance of a very powerful University head. His power faced no change for prolonged periods since he went from government to government.” His main conflict with Nalin was that , according to many sources , Nalin saw through him. As an individual this Western qualified man was no man with new ideas “He was and is only a sterile educated person who has not created any new knowledge in the form of concepts or theories,” the sources said. But mesmerized by the academic titles government after government has let him drag the country into more and more muddle and disaster, they charged. University sources say many of the Western oriented people did not understand what was meant by “Jathika Chintanaya” by Nalin de Silva. “All these people were against Jathika Chinthanaya (JC). At that time the English educated did not know anything about JC and they thought it as either a front organisation for the JVP or a party like the JVP. There were some people who thought of Nalin as the ideologue of the JVP! The NGO people propagated this view and it reached even the foreign journalists in Sri Lanka,” one said. The JC as formulated by him (it was then not the same as Gunadasa Amerasekara’s JC though he has now slowly come over to Nalin’s view.) was and is a very simple idea. It says that knowledge is created due to Avidya of Anicca Dukka Anatta and is relative to the mind the sense organ and the culture of a person. Further the theories are created in a Chinthanaya (deeper than a paradigm- there could be several paradigms in a Chinthanaya) and according to Nalin JC is nothing but our Chinthanaya. He believes that all the western knowledge since the fifteenth century had been created in what he called a Judaic - Greek - Christian Chinthanaya that gave rise to western modernity. Capitalism, western science etc., were created in this Chinthanaya. According to some writings of Nalin De Silva as most of these ideas in 1992 were published in Sinhala (the present position is slightly improved as there are a few articles in English on these aspects now) the English educated were generally ignorant of them. So the politico-academic head with the help of the Lake House was able to manipulate the public opinion (of the English educated) against Nalin de Silva. In 1990 the Universities were reopened after the long closure due to JVP troubles and the Colombo Science Faculty started what was called a rapid programme to clear the backlog of students. As the rapid programme shortened the terms and the vacations the students were at a disadvantage and there was a demand by the students union to go back to the criteria of the previous years to determine passes and classes at the special degree in Science. As Nalin de Silva was of the opinion that the students were penalized due to the rapid programme he supported their demand in the Faculty board. This was not to the liking of G.L.Peiris and some senior professors in the faculty as well as in the university and ultimately over certain incidents alleged to have taken place during the months of October and November of 1992 over the demand of the students to go back to the criteria of the previous years he was first suspended and then sacked after an enquiry conducted by three gentlemen who had been brainwashed by the Lake House newspapers. There were seven charges against him. Two were on alleged abusing of two teachers. Two were on issuing statements to the newspapers and one on inciting students. There was a charge on apparently conducting a meeting of the lecturers to solve the problem in the faculty of science. The other charge was on an alleged statement by Nalin at a meeting convened by the Vice Chancellor G.L. Peiris to solve the problem in the science faculty. The charge on inciting the students was not proved. Neither was the charge on conducting a meeting. The situation in the faculty of science towards the end of November 1992 was chaotic. G.L. Peiris was never a good VC and he did not know how to handle a situation. The students had started an upavasa over the criteria issue after they could not negotiate a settlement over 8 months and the VC had canceled all the lectures and the practical classes. The VC summoned a meeting to find a solution to the problem (upavasa over criteria) and wanted a frank and candid discussion. In the process after a certain member said something Nalin said “I also had reliable information on the same matter”. He was charged for making that statement but not the other person! The VC could not arrive at a solution and he promised to summon a meeting of the Faculty on the following day. However in the meantime he had advised the minister to close down the University and the meeting he promised was not to take place. However some staff members had come for the meeting without knowing that the University had been closed down and held an informal meeting. They were able to discuss the matter with the students and to arrive at a compromise solution. The students accepted the solution and called off the fast. Thus the staff members who were present at that meeting were able to avert a possible bloodshed. The University instead of appreciating the work done by the staff members in the absence of a VC who had abdicated power to the minister and closed down the university charged Nalin for allegedly conducting the meeting. He was the president of the Federation of University Teachers Associations at that time and he had issued statements to the press in that capacity. In any event the University lecturers are not like the public servants and could criticize even the government on policy matters. After he was sacked he wanted Nalin’s trade unions to take up the matter. But at the initiation of people like Drs. Jayadeva Uyangoda and Bertram Bastianpillai he was not given even an opportunity to place his matter before the trade unions of which he was a member. So much for the human rights practiced by these people. It has to be mentioned that Bastianpillai was subsequently made the ombudsman by GL Peiris when he became the minister of justice In 1995 and 1996 Nalin applied to various positions in the other universities. The application to Kelaniya university was made in December 1995. He applied even for Senior lectureships though he had been an Associate Professor. He was living on his wife's salary and the life was not very rosy. The universities rejected his application quoting the establishment code (EC). They interpreted the EC to say that a person who had been expelled from one university could not be recruited by another university He went before the University Services Appeals Board (USAB) against the position taken up by the various universities and finally in November 1999 the USAB gave an order to a number of universities to consider his application. According to the USAB it was the UGC that could take a decision on appointing those who had been sacked from another university. Some universities in the meantime had complicated matters by re advertising the posts irregularly while there were cases against the procedures they had adopted. As nothing was happening or rather the universities other than Kelaniya were acting against the order given by the USAB Nalin got Dinesh Gunawardena MP to raise the matter in the Parliamentary consultative committee of the ministry of higher education, in the latter part of 2000, that is soon after the PA came to power. The committee wanted the universities to expedite matters. The UNF government came to power in 2001 and finally the Kelaniya and Jayawrdhanapura universities called him for interviews. Kelaniya had recommended him for an Associate Professorship in Mathematics. However the UGC was dragging its feet Finally when it came before the parliamentary consultative committee for the fourth or the fifth time the MPs and the Minsters had asked the UGC to take a decision. That is how the decision was taken to appoint Nalin de Silva as Associate Professor in Mathematics at the Kelaniya University. Thus ended one of Sri Lanka’s long drawn persecutions due to an academic’s treasured beliefs and faith in his motherland. (EOM) (01/01/03 go2lanka.com) |