Bodhi Dhanapala, Quebec, Canada.

Dr. Sudath Gunasekera has used the up-coming 150th anniversary of Tea plantations to present a patriotic lament which we should resonate with. But we  should remember that when Sri Wickrama R  was captured in Kandy, the situation was qualitatively no different to what we have today., with a bunch of traitors running the country.  The country was handed over to the British by a set  of Adigars” who were scheming against each other and some of them were already in cahoots with the British. Half of them signed the Kandyan treaty in Tamil. Meanwhile, Britain was  a nation already into the industrial revolution, and reigning mightily over half the world, from the Americas and India to the Orient. Historical evolution is also government by Darwinian evolution. If we cannot acquire the tools and the know-how that the west has, and continue to go back to traditional knowledge” while condemning scientific knowledge,  we will be doomed for ever.

The plantation technology that the British brought to Ceylon was the very best available at the time, and  some of the best British brains from the top Universities came here as administrators and used their talent in this country. They excavated and validated  the archeology, the historical  ruins etc., that had been dismissed as being mere legends, re-exposed the historical chronicles,  and  made catalogues of animals, plants, fishes, geology and  drew maps when our culture did not really have any. Even today, when scientists need to identify a butterfly, bird or plant, they go to Western compilations, specimens in Kew Gardens etc. The ruined cities were re-discovered and repaired by them. The village tanks, as well as many of the major tanks were repaired by them; a superb rail and road infrastructure as good as any in the Empire at the time was built here using the new know-how and tools coming from rising industrial revolution blossoming in  Manchester and Birmingham in the 19th century. The British infrastructure served until the Rajapaksa era when a number of new highways, bridges  and railroads were built.

Why did the British  do all this? Of course, to exploit the wealth of the land more efficiently and more  knowledgeably. This WAS sustainable agriculture as it did last 150 years, compared to some of the things we do today that crumble even before they are built.  Those modern” (for the 19th century) methods also led to the availability of more food, and a rapid increase in population, the population in 1800 was less than half a million, while by 1900 it was close to 4 million;  all this  actually brought the country from a medieval feudal society where the peasants lived under the autocratic york of the Adigars and the Rate Mahathhayas. The local lord,  when he went about in his Dolawa”, if he saw a pretty girl, he would require her  to come and sleep with him that night – the right of the Lord and the girl was expected to be thankful!  Most other things, properties etc  were his and done as he wanted and there was no recourse to any other justice. There was much mal-nutrition, vector diseases (even dengue), influenza  epidemics, small pox, TB, dysentery, hookworm etc, etc.,  and high infant mortality. If you allowed for infant mortality the average life expectancy was about 35 years or less for the ordinary man (hence there was hardly any  cardio-vascular and chronic diseases which take time to develop).

The Adigars were replaced by the White Masters who  exploited the peasants in a more uniform and efficient manner. Some of the turn-coat leaders and Pandankarayas”  won  special favours and became   Gate Mudliyars and such  officials of the invading regime. These same Pantharanaike and Ramanathan types   were given vast extents of land taken from the peasants;  their kith and kin  are still in power today.

Unfortunately, after  70 years of Independence, things have not improved from what it was in 1948. There is less justice and fair play in the courts than under the British judges. Even Gandhi good a good deal under the British judges.

Today the  Local Lords” do  not go in Dolaws”, but they go in expensive fleets of cars that they get duty free at state expense. They can  even black-market their cars  at 40 million rupees a piece and import a new car periodically. They do not need the pretty village girl as they have pretty courtesans brought for them from Russia and Thailand and other countries, complete with packs of Viagra, paid for from secret bank accounts held abroad.

Filing cases against the British for damages
And yet, in spite of what our leaders are, Dr. Sugath G proposes to  file a case in the international courts against the Government and people of the United Kingdom claiming compensation for all the crimes and conspiracies they have committed against us including….”. Someone who does not know Dr. Sugath might think that he  must be dreaming! So he thinks that our Mankalai Samarahora,  Ranil Westenpuppet, Maiththiram Thirisanaa will file a case!. No, they will file a case stating that it is Sri Lanka itself which is guilty, just like at the UNCHR in Geneva. They will say the following instead of
what Dr. Sugath says (in italics).

1.Sinhalese as a people have lost their traditional Home land on the hills first to the British and now it is on its way to losing to South Indian estate Tamil labour:.  Surely, Sinhala leaders willingly divided the land and the resources and gave it to the British in the name of cooperation with his majesty George-III who is going to look after us. The British are not guilty. We are guilty.

2. The divide and rule colonial policy they have left behind to destroy the Sinhala Buddhist Civilization had already been invented by the Sinhalayas and that if any one should be punished, then the Sinhalayas should be co-punished. The British learned the Divide and rule policy from the Mahawamsa after Turner translated it from the Pali for the first time in the latter half of the 19th century.

3. Demanding  to repatriate all our archaeological and literary treasure is a good thing, but on second thought, why not keep half in Britain and divide the rest between the good supporters of the West like Mankalam, Chanthrika Pantharnaik,  Ranil and  Maiththiram Thirisanaa?. The Sri Lankan museums are really not safe, and not dependable, just as the Sri lankan cops and the judges are not dependable. We need foreign judges, foreign cops and foreign guards, and foreign museums. When our children go abroad to study they can look at them there. Why bring it here and let it get stolen?

4. Demanding  the British  to take back all Indians they have left behind when they left the shores of this country in 1948 is after all a silly request because there are already enough curry joints and Dhose Kades”  in London by now;   it is hard to find any real Briton anyway. So who do you ask? Even Chandrika lives there most of the time. Do we ask her or The Global Tamil Forum?

5.  Demanding  both the British and Indian Governments to immediately stop interfering with the internal affairs of this country at least now as we are a fully pledged free and independent Nation and ceased to be a colony of theirs long time ago” is just rhetoric. Who said that we are a fully pledged free nation? Or no, we are always ready to oblige all the US diplomats, Indian diplomats, and Chinese diplomats to tell us what to do; it is simplest to let them run our ports, our airfields, and even our businesses and they will also write our constitution.

6. Demand them to apologize for all crimes they have committed against our country and its people.
Indeed we can demand that, but remember, we are equally guilty, and Lanka  should say mea culpa” as we did in Geneva when Mankali Samarahora formulated our very wise policies drawn up in Washington with the help of our Eelam friends.

7.  We should immediately declare all land over 5000 ft as strict forest reserves and restore the physical stability of the nation’s watersheds lest this green paradise Island become semi arid country for lack of perennial water. Why limit it to 5000 feet?  Of course a Gazette notification will be made to  that order right from 100 feet above sea level; but you see, our  friend Mr. Bathurdeen needs to also settle some displaced people coming not only from SL, but from Pakistan; and some of us need holiday bungalows in these forests; and Maiththiram’s  Brother runs a tourist business and we need more hotels inside these forests. We need development, not forests. Mr. Champi Ranaya  and Venerable” Rasputin are setting up this toxin free nation” and most of it is going to be located as a megalopolis built on that  wonderful place known as the ever expanding  Meethotamulla (i.e., the place where we export honey=mee),  where only fools think we have garbage  rather than honey.

What shall we do about the tea estates?
Dr. Sugath thinks that the tea estates are not profitable. Surely, Dr. Sugath, it is simple. Today the estates are run inefficiently, by local CEOs who warm chairs and draw high salaries. Kick them out and hand over the Estates to Brook Bonds and Liptons to run them. They will run them efficiently, beautifully, and with a profit, as they did before. Again, Lanka should say, mea culpa”, we are at fault. Mr Ranil Wickemasinghe will readily  agree to leasing the Tea estates for the next 150 years to Liptons , so  the problem is solved. Of course he will say” that it will be run by a Liptons and Sri Lankan consortium!

Dr. Sugath G and the toxins in our rivers.
Of course  Dr. Sugath G knows very well the kind of  political set up we are having in Sri lanka today.  He knows that we are a free and sovereign nation only in name; he knows that we are run by a bunch of traitors and ruffians who are dismantling the country and selling the family jewelery and even the old pots and pans.  What we have to discuss is not how to file a case against the British, but how to get rid of this bunch of cutthroats, without putting back the previous set of cut throats in power. There are new leaders emerging from among the Ranviru, and civil activists like Kodithuwakku, and perhaps Wiijedasa R?

But there are other matters where Dr. G  is actually in error  (here I am being serious).  Dr. Sudath G  has taken Ven. Ratana and the  Vasa-Visa Naethi Ratak” stuff  seriously and writes:
The destruction of the natural forest cover led to eroding down millions of tons of fertile soil in to the ocean converting the central hills once covered with dense natural forests to an eroded, degraded, unfertile and almost barren land. This situation required heavy use of chemical fertilizer, insecticides and pesticide’s to keep the tea plantation going. The enormous toxic matter annually washed down the rivers from these vast stretches of plantations and extensive vegetable cultivations has polluted all rivers in the country killing valuable aquatic life and particularly filling the Dry Zone Tanks with toxic matter where water gets stored still. The resulting toxic deposits have been the main reason behind the widespread kidney disease which might turn the entire Dry Zone completely unsuitable for human habitation in future”

This lament is actually a commonly held view of the public not familiar with the available scientific information. To blame agrochemicals for all our problems is the most common wisdom found in the internet and forms the basis fake panic. But even though  seemingly  the earth is  flat, the real truth is different.

The soil in the country is NOT TOXIC, as seen by the hundreds of egrets (Kokku”) that crowd behind every farmer who is tilling the soil as has been pointed out repeatedly by Dr. Amarasiri (a retired Directior General of Agriculture) in his articles criticizing Ven. Ratana’s disastrous agricultural policies . The Kokku come to eat the earthworms and other bugs in the soil. They live in the soil because the agricultural soil everywhere is quite healthy. Even though fertilizers have been increasingly used since the 1960s, they do NOT lead to any toxicity if used correctly. This is true even in countries like New Zealand where they use 25-35 times more agrochemicals per hectare per year than Seri lanka does  (see some of the articles by Prof.  Dhramawardana, Dr. Waidyanatha and others) . However, the  main problem today is overuse which has led to excessive inputs of phosphates into our water streams. But even so, there is much less phosphate in our waters than in a glass of Coca Cola.

So, fortunately the very opposite of what Dr. Sugath G says  is true regarding toxins. Anyone with any knowledge of plant growth will know that if we are to extract so many tons of tea leaves(or any other crop)  per hectare, then you need to input the corresponding amount of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium and water  etc into the soil.  Until about 1978 the correct amounts (as dictated by scientific agriculture) were added and there was NO excess fertilizer washed off from the hill country. Then came Yankee Dikee” Jayawardena who decided that fertilizer sales  should be handled by the free market”  (Mudalalis beholden to politicians) and not by the technical men of the agriculture department. This led to vegetable farmers (but not tea estates) using sometimes  as much as five times the needed amount of fertilizers! And yet, a recent study of the Mahaweli waters by the Geology department of the Peradeniya University concluded that there were  only negligible amounts of metal toxins in the Mahawel water (see: Diyabalanage S, Abekoon S, Watanabe I, et al, Has irrigated water from Mahaweli river contributed to the kidney disease of uncertain etiology in the dry zone of Sri Lanka? Environtal  Geochemistry & Health,  volume 38, pages 439– 454, DOI 10.1007/s10653-015-9749-1, year 2016). The WHO-NSF study of the water and soil in the Rajarata published in 2014, the Japanese study (which resulted in the Kawakami Atlas of metal toxin levels in Sri Lanka), as well as the   Jayasinghe-COSTI study of water inputs to reverse osmosis (RO)  machines,  all  unanimously show that the irrigation waters and water in our tanks, rivers are  NO TOXIC.  People have been scared into believing that such water is toxic so that NGOs can sell their RO machines and trap the country into a regular buying cycle.

Peradeniya scientists and the Kandy Center for Research into Kidney Disease (CERKID) have shown that the killer kidney disease is caused by drinking stagnant well water in certain areas of the Rajarata. These wells contain high amounts of naturally occurring fluoride and hard water (Kivul watura”). This has been shown to be a deadly nephrotoxic combination by many experiments including feeding such water to laboratory animals (as shown by a research report in the prestigious journal Nature, 2017). Unfortunately, instead of following the advise of scientists, the government has followed the advise of the most  Venerable” Ratana (now not so venerable as he has been found to be engaged  in selling duty-free  cars in the black market).

Ven” Ratana  pushed the  ban on glyphosate claiming to get rid of the killer disease, although even traces of this herbicide have not been found in the affected areas or in the blood and urine of the sick people. According to several Chinese studies, glyphosate is actually beneficial to the soil and soil organisms because it removed metal toxins by converting them to insoluble matter.

So, even if we convert the tea estates into forests, ban fertilizers and agrochemicals,  we will still have Kidney Disease unless we provide clean water (i.e., free of  fluoride and hardness) to the affected areas. The most successful strategy seems to be the harvesting of rainwater. This however is unpopular with the NGOs selling RO machines (and even with Ven”. Ratana?).