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Agree to disagree

As the country greets the New Year with a new government we have also been treated to a new concept. The government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has announced that today, January 1, will be celebrated as the Day of Brotherhood when the party of government will extend the hand of friendship to all political parties and invite them to take part in the task of nation-building.

New Year's eve has been traditionally the occasion for bacchanalian revelry on the part of the country's privileged classes who see the New Year in style in their five-star temples and it will certainly take a leap of imagination for the country at large to identify the first of January as a day of high idealism. However, the advent of a new government should make it easier to get used to new ideas and it will certainly be an auspicious beginning if all political parties can start the year on a footing of cordiality.

But after we have partaken of kiribath, kavum and kokis and hugged our traditional foes and rivals and sworn undying love towards them what are we going to do? Obviously it will take more than a gesture on the part of a new government to obscure, erase or wish away political differences. Certainly we do not think the UNF Government is given to wishful thinking to the extent that it thinks that it is possessed of a magic wand to bring about such an erasure of differences but what the Day of Brotherhood can do is to bring about an understanding that political parties can oppose one another without recourse to the bloodshed and the crass violence which has been the hallmark of recent elections.

Let us then usher in the New Year on that note of hope. Differences there will be but, how wonderful if all of us can get together, whatever our differences might be, and agree to disagree?

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