Crime of booing

Tuesday 28th March, 2023

The efficiency of the police is truly amazing, the only problem being that it is selective. Our brave cops sprang into action and arrested a person after giving chase in Homagama over the weekend. His crime? He booed Minister Bandula Gunawardena while driving past a ceremony where the latter was laying the foundation stone for the construction of a Buddhist shrine.

What is the world coming to when those who have plundered public wealth, committed many crimes including murder and bankrupted the country are given police protection and citizens who express their displeasure at the government by booing are arrested? The Buddha forgave those who even tried to kill him, didn’t he? So, it defies comprehension why anyone should be arrested for jeering at a politician at a Buddhist religious event.

There is reason to believe that the police went above and beyond the call of duty to please Minister Gunawardena. Opinion may be divided on the protester’s action and the reaction of the police, but that is not what we intend to discuss, today. Suffice it to say that booing is symptomatic of bubbling public anger, which the government cannot contain with the help of the police. When a youth was arrested in April 2021 for sounding the car horn in protest against the police closing a road in Borella for a motorcade transporting a group of foreign dignitaries to pass, the media rightly questioned the wisdom of the government and warned that the situation was likely to take a turn for the worse. Police action did not deter the public from protesting. Subsequently, the then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa himself was booed while he was passing a long line of people near a milk food outlet. A few months later, the people took to the streets and ousted the President. That is how public anger wells up and fuels uprisings.

The police have reached peak performance during the past several months; their remarkable feats include using batons as magic wands to make unruly protesters in robes levitate over tall walls of the Education Ministry! While hunting down undergraduates, they have also arrested some underworld kingpins. When a restaurant owner was gunned down in Hanwella recently, not many expected his killer to be even identified, but the hired gun, known as Booru Moona was arrested in record time. The crime busters have also taken into custody some key figures in a drug cartel run by a criminal known as Harak Kata, who was arrested in Madagascar and extradited.

Curiously, the police lack this kind of high-octane performance where some crimes are concerned. The killers of a large number of persons including The Sunday Leader Editor Lasantha Wickrematunge and ruggerite Wasim Thajudeen are still at large, and their family members and friends have been seeking justice for more than a decade.

Worse, the police sometimes choose to turn a blind eye to serious offences committed under their nose. A few weeks ago, there was a public outcry over the presence of a large number of ‘unidentified’ armed men in uniform similar to that of the army near a university students’ protest in Colombo. Armed with assault rifles and clubs and iron rods, they were operating alongside the army and the police in full view of the media and the public. Both the army and the police have said those men are not their personnel. If so, who are they? It is a non-bailable criminal offence for anyone to carry firearms without permission and he or she must be arrested and produced in court. The police should have arrested those characters before cracking down on the protesting undergrads.

Will the police, who swing into action and arrest jeerers before one could say ‘boo’, so to speak, explain why they have not cared to identify the armed men who were seen with them near the Colombo University recently?