Integrating our estate workers

Those supporting the establishment of a multicultural Sri Lanka are bound to receive with immeasurable joy the news that President Mahinda Rajapakse is attaching top priority to alleviating the hardships and frustrations of our estate workers.

Our estate workers - a considerable number of whom are of Indian origin - are an integral part of Sri Lankan society and should be treated on terms which are equal to those on which other sections of our working population are cared for. President Rajapakse's contemplated measures for the benefit of our plantation workers are a fulfilment of this important principle.

According to reports, some of the areas in which relief would be brought to our plantation workers are: health, education, economic conditions, youth unemployment, drinking water, land erosion and passenger transport.

Members in the rest of the Lankan polity would perhaps never realise the gruelling hardships to which our estate workers are subjected. It is an open question whether the political forces which are today maintaining a high profile presence in our plantation areas have brought substantial succour and support to this vital section of the working class.

What is adequately clear is that this section of our workers has time and again proved pawns in the hands of parasitic elements who have used their lingering hardships to achieve their vaulting political ambitions.

These are the reasons why direct Presidential intervention is necessary to ease the lot of our plantation workers. Decades of oppression suffered by these workers reveal that an enlightened and caring political leadership at the centre could do much to relieve them of the yoke of deprivation and President Rajapakse has taken on himself to prove that he is that ideal centre.

A central point in current political discourse is that neglect of the regions by the central authorities justify political struggles on the part of these regions or peripheries for greater autonomy and control over their geographical regions.

However, if the political centre takes on itself the task of ensuring that its regions are fended for and brought into the mainstream of life, there would absolutely be no reason for discontentment or political agitation on the part of these outlying geographical areas.

This is the rationale for President Rajapakse's caring intervention in the lives of our plantation workers and we urge him to continue to explore ways and means of integrating all our regions into the Lankan body politic.

Tea, rubber and coconut continue to play a vital role in Lanka's economy. Tea in particular, is a very important source of the country's revenue. This is reason enough to ensure the continued well being of our estate workers but nothing short of the granting of equity and equal status to these workers would ensure their loyalty to the Lankan State.

This means that the Lankan State is obliged to go well beyond mere paternalistic care and comfort in the task of integrating our plantation workers further into the Lankan State structure. That is, equal citizenship and equality of status is the long-term answer to the problem of national integration. To be sure, all plantation workers of Indian origin are citizens of Sri Lanka now.

However, citizenship on only paper would not suffice in answering the need for ethnic equity. This could only be achieved through the granting of equality of opportunity and condition. In other words, Lanka should go farther along the road to multiculturalism, where no single group would have pretensions to absolute power.

President Rajapakse has apparently seen the need for these political conditions. This is the reason why he intends persisting in granting our plantation workers material conditions which every other section enjoys.