Editorial
A notable anniversary
October marks the 40th anniversary of the Sunday Island and we celebrate this occasion today by publishing two articles, one by the first editor of this paper, Vijita Yapa, and the other, a condensed translation of another that appeared in the Irida Divayina last week. Upali Wijewardene who founded Upali Newspapers Ltd. (UNL), was a nephew of D.R. Wijewardene, the Beaverbrook of Sri Lanka, whose Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. (ANCL), best known as Lake House, publishing in English, Sinhalese and Tamil, played a significant role in winning Independence from the British; this not by bloodshed but through negotiations. Unlike India, we had no Mahatma Gandhi, nor did we go through as protracted a struggle as in the neighbouring subcontinent to win our freedom. The stakes, of course were different. Though ours was a green and pleasant land, second only to Japan in Asia in terms of development and lack of abject poverty, then Ceylon though not the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, was blessed with many resources including a largely literate population, a relatively sound infrastructure, an efficient public service as well as a favorable climate.
There is no doubt that Upali Wijewardene founded UNL in furtherance of his political ambitions. A nephew of not only D.R. Wijewardene, but also J.R. Jayewardene who had become Sri Lanka’s first executive president in 1977 with a stunning electoral landslide. JRJ was to later boast that this victory empowered him to do anything he wished to do ‘except make a man into a woman.’ Jayewardene handpicked Wijewardene, among the most successful enterpreneurs of his day, to head the Greater Colombo Economic Commission (GCEC) created to attract the ‘robber barons’ as he styled them to invest in Sri Lanka. Ours was a long-shackled, controlled economy that had been boldly opened by virtually a single stroke. Wijewardene had both the verve and the ability to deliver on that front, as well as an ambition to succeed his kinsman on the national throne. Once asked by the then Colombo correspondent of the Hong Kong based Far Eastern Economic Review whether he aspired to be president, he responded saying “what else is there to aspire to?” The publication of that remark infuriated Prime Minister Premadasa who too had presidential ambitions. Wijewardene sent a copy of the magazine to Premadasa with a mischievous note above the article saying “I hope you’ll enjoy this as much as I did.”
By the time UNL was founded, ANCL had been taken away from D.R. Wijewardene’s heirs by Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike’s United Front Government which included both the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Ceylon Communist Party who had been implacable foes of the UNP (and of Lake House) from pre-Independence days. The takeover was on the pretext of broad basing the ownership of the company which has not happened over 50 years later. Lake House remains the propaganda trumpet of whoever is government. That perhaps well served Upali Wijewardene, married to a niece of Mrs. Bandaranaike, because his strategy for his new newspaper toy included recruiting as many of the country’s top journalists he could attract by offering three or four times what they were then earning. With the ANCL takeover, he didn’t have to poach talent from his cousin’s newspapers. Though he didn’t get all the people he wanted, he did get most, including Edmund Ranasinghe, who played a major role building up UNL’s Sinhala newspapers and shaping their political direction.
As last Sunday’s Irida Divayina article noted, many of the journalist that were recruited by UNL were to later become editors of other national newspapers as the news industry expanded in recent years. There were people like cartoonists WR Wijesoma, undoubtedly the country’s best since Aubrey Collette who cut his teeth at Lake House, photographer Rienzie Wijeratne and Ajith Samaranayake, a brilliant bilingual journalist who was head and shoulders above his contemporaries. There were others who are not mentioned here for reasons of space. The Irida Divayina made the point that just as much as Lake House was the mulgedera (principal home) of most of the best journalists of the time, UNL became a training ground, or a university, for others nurturing what was to become the Jatika Chinthanaya (national vision) that influenced the shaping of contemporary politics.
Despite Wijewardene’s close kinship to JRJ, he was no lapdog. What he published at times in his papers infuriated the president who once attempted to starve Upali companies of bank credit. Jayewardene also did not thwart his prime minister by allowing his nephew an opportunity to enter parliament. But he did protect Upali when Premadasa attempted to kick him out of the GCEC through a Parliamentary Select Committee. Upali Wijewardene’s life was tragically shortened when he and some companions returning in his private Lear jet to Sri Lanka from Malaysia where he had business interests, was lost somewhere over the Straits of Malacca. But UNL and its newspapers continued to soldier on and notch the present anniversary. While times have changed and the print media here, as in the broader world outside, is no longer what it was and is eclipsed by the electronic and social media, it is by no means dead. Many new entrants have come into the field with businessmen in countries like ours embarking into that space more for reasons of influence than of commerce. How Upali Wijewardene would have piloted his ship, had he been alive today, is an imponderable. His father died young and he believed that would be his lot too saying that was why he focused his later years on enjoying life.
Saturday 8th June, 2024
It was with shock and dismay that we received the news about death threats to COPF (Committee on Public Finance) Chairman Dr. Harsha de Silva over the ongoing parliamentary probe into the on-arrival visa scam. Dr. de Silva yesterday told Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena, in Parliament, that he was facing death threats and intimidation, and it was incumbent upon Parliament to ensure his safety. He stopped short of naming names, but revealed that some ruling party MPs were among those who had ganged up against him. The Speaker only said there had been no complaint, and he would look into the matter.
The SLPP-UNP government has been doing everything in its power to have all parliamentary committees under its thumb. The COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises), which once helped restore public faith in the legislature by exposing state sector corruption, has now become a mere appendage of the incumbent regime, thanks to the appointment of SLPP MP Rohitha Abeygunawardena as its Chairman. The SLPP-UNP combine also tried to oust COPF Chairman Dr. de Silva, but in vain. However, it knows more than one way to shoe a horse.
The COPF, under Dr. de Silva’s chairmanship, has been a thorn in the side of the government, which is struggling to cover up numerous corrupt deals. Dr. de Silva yesterday told Parliament that he found it extremely difficult to function as the COPF head due to severe resource constraints his committee was facing; he himself had to pay the salaries of some of his staff members besides burning the midnight oil.
The sheer workload he had to cope with as the COPF chief had taken its toll on his health, he said, informing the Speaker that he was at the end of his tether, and at times thought of resigning from the COPF. This is exactly what the government wants him to do; resource squeezes and threats are aimed at making him quit.
On 26 May, Dr. de Silva revealed, in an ‘X’ post, that the COPF had uncovered some vital information about the visa scam and it would reveal everything after its final meeting on the issue; the COPF was committed to exposing the truth behind the controversial tender, he added. In an editorial comment on 27 May, we warned him.
While thanking him for his bold stand, we pointed out that by making such a statement, he had thrown caution to the wind, and become a marked target, with the government making an all-out effort to delay the COPF investigation lest the truth should come out much to the detriment of its interests in this election year. Unfortunately, what was feared has come about; Dr. de Silva is complaining of death threats and government moves to strangulate the COPF financially to derail its investigations.
Dr. de Silva’s predicament exemplifies the fate that befalls the few good men and women in Parliament. It is hoped that all those who seek an end to the state sector corruption will rally behind Dr. de Silva, and bring pressure to bear on the government to ensure his safety. Let Dr. de Silva be urged to reveal the names of those who have issued threats, veiled or otherwise, to him and are trying to scuttle the COPF probes.
Friday 7th June, 2024
The SLPP-UNP government is going hell for leather to make bad laws as if there were no tomorrow. It is abusing its parliamentary majority, which has been retained with the help of some crossovers, for that purpose. The Opposition, the media and trade unions are up in arms, and understandably so. The incumbent regime is a dead man walking; it is so desperate that it is capable of anything. Hence the need for it to be restrained.
The Electricity (Amendment) Bill (EAB) plunged Parliament into turmoil yesterday, but the government secured its passage. The Supreme Court (SC) determined the entire EAB inconsistent with the Constitution and recommended changes thereto. After unveiling the Bill, sometime ago, Minister of Power and Energy Kanchana Wijesekera hailed it as an excellent piece of legislation aimed at straightening up the power sector to serve the public interest better.
The SC determination left him with egg on his face. He reminded us of the proverbial curate who, while eating a stale egg, assured his host, a Bishop, that parts of it were excellent. Wijesekera’s egg, as it were, made Parliament stink yesterday, but he sought to please his masters by praising it as a silver bullet.
EAB should have been discarded and a new one drafted in consultation with all stakeholders. But the government is apparently driven by an ulterior motive; its aim is not to serve Sri Lanka’s interests but to look after those of some moneybags.
It is not uncommon for Bills to contain some flaws, which are rectified either before or during the committee stage. But there is something terribly wrong with draft Bills that are full of sections inconsistent with the Constitution. The drafters of EAB have demonstrated their sheer ignorance of the supreme law, and that they are not equal to the task of drafting Bills. If they had read the Constitution at least perfunctorily, they would not have drafted such a bad law.
Ignorant and incompetent, they do not deserve to be paid with public funds and must be sent back to law school. They must be summoned before Parliament and questioned on their serious lapses, which have caused public faith in the national legislature to diminish.
Curiously, the MPs who demand that judges, doctors, Central Bankers, and other public officials be summoned before Parliament have taken badly drafted Bills for granted. The power sector trade unions yesterday alleged that EAB was of Indian origin and geared towards furthering the interests of Adani Group at the expense of Sri Lanka.
Most critics of EAB are agreeable in principle to the need for power sector reforms; the Ceylon Electricity Board should be given a radical shake-up, and transformed into a modern organisation capable of providing a better service at a lower cost. They only asked the government to tread cautiously, consulting all stakeholders and taking action to ensure that the country’s interests prevailed over everything else. But the government was in a mighty hurry to steamroller the Bill through Parliament, making the Opposition ask whether it was doing so at the behest of some external forces involved in controversial power generation deals here.
What is passed by the current Parliament can be either amended or abolished by a future parliament in a constitutionally prescribed manner. But that does not mean that a government is free to pass bad laws, making the country enter into long-term agreements with powerful nations and their investors. It looks as if the SLPP-UNP regime did not care two hoots about the consequences of its actions.
Thursday 6th June, 2024
The outcome of India’s parliamentary election (2024) has led to a ‘perspective ambiguity’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost no time in declaring victory for the BJP-led NDA alliance, which secured 293 seats in the 543-member Parliament, but he must be a worried man. The BJP is short of 32 seats to form a government under its own steam; it has lost 63 seats or about 20% of its parliamentary strength. It had 303 seats in the previous Parliament, and that number has dropped to 240.
Modi has become the second Indian Prime Minister to win a third term. The first PM to do so was Jawaharlal Nehru. But Nehru won an outright majority in Parliament in 1962; Modi has had to depend on smaller parties in his alliance to retain his hold on power. Modi must be reeling from a sharp drop in his victory margin in his own constituency, Varanasi; it has decreased to 152,000 from 480,000 in 2019 whereas Modi’s bete noire, Rahul Gandhi, won Raebareli by a staggering 390,000 votes.
Modi, who reigned supreme with 303 seats in the previous Parliament, is now dependent on parties such as Nitish Kumar’s JD-U and Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP to form a government. He has had to lead an alliance of strange bedfellows. Both Kumar and Naidu were bitter critics of Modi. Kumar helped form the oppositional alliance, the INDIA bloc, before switching his allegiance to PM Modi. Naidu also closed ranks with the BJP in the run-up to the election. These politicians have been described as extremely ambitious and highly unpredictable, and whether Modi will be able to manage them and consolidate his grip on the NDA alliance remains to be seen. They will demand plum ministerial posts in return for their support. The TDP is said to be eyeing Transport and Health portfolios! That is the name of the game in coalition politics, where it is not uncommon for the tail to wag the dog, so to speak. These two political leaders are however not the only problem Modi will have to contend with. The next five years will feel like an eternity for PM Modi.
Nothing would have been more shocking for the BJP than its defeat in Uttar Pradesh’s Faizabad constituency, where the Ram Mandir has been built. Modi may have thought he would be able to win the Lok Sabha election hands down after the consecration of that temple, which became a centrepiece of the BJP’s election campaign. The BJP lost that seat to the Samajwadi Party! Modi must be disappointed that the Ram Mandir hype failed to trigger a massive wave of support for his party. This particular defeat signifies a massive setback for the BJP’s ethno-religious agenda.
Modi’s divisive election campaign failed to yield the desired result. The BJP’s failure to secure an outright majority could be attributed to a host of factors, some of them being the suppression of the Opposition, the arrogance of power, chronic unemployment, and the rising cost of living. The BJP also did not care to reimage itself in a positive light to attract the youth.
Modi will hereafter see the Congress-led INDIA bloc with 223 seats, in his rearview mirror. The Congress (99 seats) and its allies have eaten into the BJP support base considerably, but they have a long way to go before being able to capture power.
The bumpy ride ahead for the BJP-led coalition government to be formed may improve the INDIA bloc’s chances of bettering their electoral performance and turning the tables on the BJP and its allies in time to come. Modi will have a lot to worry about in his third term.
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