Queuing for Food Again in Sri Lanka

Colombo, Sri Lanka. 24th March, 2020.

Today, I stood in line with hundreds of thousands of other Sri Lankans; not in solidarity, but for food. A 72-hour police-enforced curfew, one of the harshest and most rigid of lockdowns seen amidst the global panic over COVID-19, was raised for a few brief hours, so that we could go out and try to resupply our homes. Instead of ensuring that essential services such as supermarkets, groceries, and pharmacies were available to the public during the lockdown, the government of Sri Lanka fell back on its familiar anti-terrorism and anti-riot tactic of a complete clampdown. Leaving home before dawn to get groceries for myself and my elderly parents, I stood in line for two hours (those behind me for longer, some until afternoon) to get into a supermarket where I was told that butter and eggs were no longer available. Most other things were rationed. I wasn’t there for Norwegian salmon or French camembert; I just wanted butter and eggs. And maybe a beer. I had to barter with a friend for alcohol. The government had decided that people confined to their homes would be more docile if kept sober, and refused to allow liquor stores to reopen during the short window.

Sri Lanka is not at war. There is no riot. We have no famine. But there is no butter or eggs. There should be better ways to do this. Food and medicine need not be cut off from the population to enforce social distancing and other anti-Corona measures. The government gave the public less than 12 hours warning of the impending curfew, causing panic and crowding in supermarkets before the weekend, creating the very conditions we are told must be avoided. Then it announced the ban on alcohol after the curfew came into place. Then it extended the 60-hour curfew by 12 more, leaving many who had shopped for two days to run short of food and other essentials. People generally mistrust the government. The government seems determined to give them one more reason to do so.

Throughout most of March 2020, the government of Sri Lanka did very little to combat the Corona virus, comfortable in the belief that there was no serious danger; a belief that still holds amongst many in the government and public. Sri Lanka has less than a hundred cases of COVID-19, most of them mild. No one has died. The hysterical coverage of the so-called pandemic by the international media, however, has been relentless, fixated on a ground-level view of the carnage that presents no perspective. Predictably, this sensationalism, unbroken in intensity and separated from reality, had the intended effect on even our island mentality of “not to worry”. The population began to crack. The hashtag #LockdownSL began to trend, and a reluctant government was forced to react. Sri Lanka’s president, Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his cabinet of ministers, less than a year in their respective jobs, will be fully aware of what brought them to government; the ineffectuality of their predecessors under whose watch hundreds of Sri Lankans were killed in the Easter Bombings of 2019. Facing an imminent general election, practically on the anniversary of the bombings, one that is vital to establishing a parliamentary majority, they cannot be seen to be doing nothing now; and so they are doing something, anything, regardless of its usefulness.

Sri Lankans aren’t newbies when it comes to curfews. We’ve been having them since independence in 1948, but most regularly in the 1980s and ’90s, in the darkest days of the civil war. We should be experts at this by now. We shouldn’t have to queue for hours to get eggs and butter. We have the right to expect more of our government. We have the right to a cure that is better than the disease.

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