Courting danger

Wednesday 28th September, 2022

The Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe regime has received a stern rebuke from the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) for suppressing the people’s democratic rights. But it is doubtful whether the HRCSL will be able to knock any sense into a bunch of politicians intoxicated with power and determined to bulldoze their way through.

The government is running around like a headless chicken while the economic crisis is worsening. It is busy appointing ministers and setting up committees! It is all at sea. Public anger is rising, and the Opposition parties are all out to tap it to compass their ends.

Chief Government Whip and Minister Prasanna Ranatunga has recently called the SLPP dissident group a three-headed donkey. This term, in our book, suits the government better, for the current administration consists of the SLPP, the UNP, and some crossovers from the Opposition. None of them are capable of steering the country out of the present crisis. No wonder the government has failed to live up to the people’s expectations and is resorting to strongarm tactics to neutralise protests against it. The invocation of archaic laws, among other things, to suppress the people’s right to protest is an unmistakable sign of the government’s desperation, which obviously knows no bounds.

The HRCSL has said in no uncertain terms that the Official Secrets Act cannot be used to declare High Security Zones (HSZs), which violate the people’s fundamental rights. A crumbling government is like a dead man walking; it poses a grave danger to society, for it never baulks at anything to consolidate its hold on power, as could be seen from Saturday’s brutal police attack on a group of protesters in Colombo. The country is fast becoming a police state.

The HRCSL has urged the government to withdraw the gazette declaring the HSZs and ‘take measures to ensure that national laws are following the accepted international and national human rights norms and standards and to preclude declarations that violate those norms and standards’. It is only wishful thinking that the government will heed the HRCSL’s wise counsel unless sufficient pressure is brought to bear on it to do so.

Now that the HRCSL has determined that the HSZs have a foundation of sand, the government will have its work cut out to defend itself in courts.

Meanwhile, the JVP has declared that it will launch the next phase of Aragalaya, which is the name given to a leaderless mass protest campaign, which subsequently became politicised. It may be able to hold anti-government protests like the one which the police crushed on Saturday. It has thousands of highly-motivated cadres scattered across the country, and they can be brought to Colombo, from time to time, to stage protests, but there will not be a popular uprising as such unless the people take to the streets of their own volition, the way they did a few moons ago, causing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country.

The government continues to test the people’s patience, which is wearing thin. Crooks have crawled out of the woodwork and are having a field day. They are involved in various corrupt deals, and making a killing at the expense of the people. Those who bankrupted the country and inflicted untold suffering on the public are now using force to suppress the people’s constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The people have also been denied their right to vote; the Provincial Council and local government elections have been postponed, and there is no way the public can give vent to their pent-up anger democratically. The government is playing with fire.

At this rate, the day may not be far off when unbearable economic woes, abuse of power, rampant corruption and the suppression of people’s democratic rights triggers a tsunami of public anger, which will be far worse than the July uprising; the HSZs will face the same fate as the country’s littoral pummelled by the Boxing Day killer waves that barrelled across the Indian Ocean, in 2004; no one connected to the government will be safe. The people are driven by anti-politics, and the odds are that even the JVP leaders who have undertaken to play a messianic role may have to head for the hills in such an eventuality.