Confusion confounded

Thursday 21st December, 2023

Sri Lankan politicians are adept at obfuscating issues and confusing the public beyond measure. Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a master of shifty and cagey responses, was shown on television, the other day, fielding a barrage of questions from a group of hectoring journalists. When he was asked to comment on the economic woes of the public, he expressed concern, and went on to say in answer to another query that the solution was to form a government. That was a response one would have expected of an Opposition politician, for Mahinda’s party, the SLPP, is in control of Parliament. Curiously, speaking at the SLPP’s national convention, last week, Basil Rajapaksa also said something to the effect that the SLPP needed to form a new government!

Do the Rajapaksas think they have lost control over the incumbent government? Is it that differences between the SLPP leadership and President Ranil Wickremesinghe have come to a head, and therefore the Rajapaksas want to form a government with one of them as the President? Or, are they trying to dissociate themselves from the unpopular measures the government has had to adopt to clean up the economic mess of its own making?

UNP Chairman Vajira Abeywardena, MP, has been quoted by the media as saying that President Wickremesinghe is successfully carrying out the task of reviving the economy, which had been declared bankrupt when the latter took over the reins of government, last year. Only a true national leader is equal to such a task, Abeywardena has said, ingratiatingly praising his boss to high heaven. His hosannas to the President remind us of Brecht’s poem, ‘A worker reads history’, wherein it is asked rhetorically:

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?

One may recall that when President Mahinda Rajapaksa sought to keep credit for defeating the LTTE in 2009 to himself and leverage it to ensure his re-election the following year, the UNP let out a howl of protest. It argued that credit for war victory should go to the military, especially the then Army Commander General Sarath Fonseka, whom it fielded as the Opposition’s presidential candidate in 2010. Doesn’t the UNP want to share credit for whatever gains so far made on the economic front with the SLPP parliamentary group and the state officials who are toiling to straighten up the economy?

What is reported from the realm of the divine is as confusing as the news about the unholy domain of politics. Many Sri Lankans are in the habit of seeking divine interventions to have thieves and other such lawbreakers punished because their faith in the police has severely eroded. They make various vows and offerings and perform rituals such as dashing coconuts and grinding chillies at devales for that purpose. Even protests where politicians crack coconuts near courts of laws, beseeching deities to punish offenders, are common in this country. But the police have been called in to probe the theft of a gold plate donated by the wife of an underworld killer, of all people, to a famous devale. A junior lay custodian of the shrine was arrested and granted bail on Tuesday. The chief custodian wanted for the theft was at large at the time of writing. Why haven’t they faced divine retribution?

The government does not allow legal action to be taken against the theft of cricket funds, insisting that the matter is best left to the International Cricket Council (ICC). It has sacked a Sports Minister for daring to combat corruption in the cricket administration and antagonising the ICC in the process. But it had no qualms about entrusting the police with the task of investigating the theft of gold at the aforesaid shrine. Has it placed the ICC grandees, especially Indians with links to the Modi government, on a higher pedestal than the local deities?