THESE DAYS OF RUMOUR AND HUMOUR

It must be election time. Otherwise rumours would not be flying fast and furious. The mud is being churned, bucketfuls are being readied, the victims identified. The trouble with throwing mud is that others can throw mud back too and what some thought was a game in one-upmanship begins to look like a mounting mud bath.
Don’t get me wrong. It is not that in normal times the rumour mill grinds to a halt and the juicy stories that are now doing the rounds would have remained firmly locked up in the imaginative minds of their makers.
Sri Lanka-and especially Colombo- is an open mouthed society. It does not necessarily take an election to get the rumour mill started. Far from it. Those who flit from party to party in Colombo’s cocktail circuit and from club to club like some commission agent or a casino king know that stories circulate by the hour maligning people who have done no wrong.
In Sri Lanka, innuendo and rumour kill reputations and characters as much as those private buses that career along our roads as though road rules are not meant for them.
More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, wrote some poet ages ago. Well, in this paradise isle of ours more characters are ruined by rumour than anybody ever imagined.
We are not strangers to assassinations as those who aware of our history-past and recent-know only too well. So character assassination comes easily to us. After all, this does not require plotting and planning, no carefully- prepared conspiracies, no sophisticated weapons.
All that is need is a germ of an idea, a fairly fertile imagination and a little bit of fire to start the smoke billowing and spreading it far and wide.
Just in case there is some misunderstanding here, let’s get this straight. All rumour is not false. Quite often there is at least a kernel of truth. But equally there is more than a kernel of truth in some of them. Stories are built around what is visible to the eye, incidents and events that cannot be denied because they have indeed happened.
Rumours then are of two kinds, at least. Those rumours that are fabricated with the sole intention of slinging mud at opponents, in the hope of lowering their esteem in the public eye.
Then there are the rumours that have an embedded truth and are spread with the intention of exposing the culprits who are at the receiving end of bribes, who are engaged in graft, who steal and plunder public resources to enhance themselves or their kith and kin.
In recent weeks, we have seen both varieties of these rumours. That is because elections and the desire for power makes contestants and their political parties, hangers-on who have personally gained or intend to gain from being close to centres of power, sycophants and the thugs who attain importance from leaders by supplying the muscle, resort to any means to sustain or win power.
The process of rumour-mongering and mud-slinging has been greatly facilitated by modern means of communication. In years gone by the spread of rumour was largely by word of mouth. While State radio was used for electioneering purposes by every government in power, character assassinations were few and far between because of the fear of legal action.
So it was with the newspapers that were mainly in private hands. While they might have leaned- sometimes heavily- towards one party or the other in the coverage of news and the expression of opinion, they were very careful about maligning individuals for fear of litigation.
How different it is today. The rapid development of the means of communication from messages and news carried by mobile phones to the unprecedented growth of websites some passing off as impartial news sources to blogs and other odd sounding names, have resulted in the spread of rumour and allegation at speeds never known before.
A rumour that originates in Colombo reaches destinations round the world in milliseconds of nanoseconds or whatever the correct term by which such incredible speeds are called in the world of communication technology and the cyber world.
It is not just the technology that has contributed to the spread of falsehood and rumour. It is also the growth of websites and similar means of communication based outside the country.
The fact that these sources exist beyond Sri Lanka’s borders have made it difficult for the Sri Lanka government and for individuals to act against them. The government at least has the means of blocking websites considered inimical to its interest. Even then the government cannot stop the news and views contained in those sources from reaching Sri Lankans by other means.
But individuals even falsely maligned by such offending sites have no recourse to legal action. Even if legal action is possible, it would be a tortuous and expensive process because these websites operate outside our jurisdiction.
So these websites engage in hurling allegations and maligning people without corroborative evidence, sometimes without an iota of evidence and sometimes on mere conjecture, knowing only too well that they will not be prosecuted by defamed individuals.
Curiously one such website that has more recently resorted to vituperative political and personal attacks hiding behind the fig leaf of journalism has itself called for the expunging of news and views on other websites when its editor came under attack for his disgraceful journalism.
Thanks to computer technology one can now even hear a lyrical Mervyn Silva on Youtube.
It is certainly not his vocal talent that attracts listeners. It is the man making a clown of himself. Elections are not bad for how often can one have the delightful experience of hearing dear Mervyn gargling his tonsils.
Elections, as you see, do throw up Malvolios too.