Cut the Gordian knot

Thursday 14th July, 2022

Protests are intensifying despite President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s exit. They forced themselves into the Prime Minister’s Office, and a state-owned television station, yesterday. The President’s resignation had not been officially announced at the time of going to press. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has been appointed the Acting President, according to Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena. Wickremesinghe is now exercising the powers of both the President and the Prime Minister! Parliament is scheduled to elect a new President on 20 July 2022.

It is a supreme irony that a President elected by 6.9 million voters has undertaken to step down, and a person who lost his seat at the last Parliamentary election has become the Acting President! Nowhere else in the world has such a thing happened! Speculation is rife that the Acting President is likely to manipulate Parliament and have himself elected President, next week.

One may have reservations about the modus operandi of the protesters, their ideologies and excesses, but the general consensus is that the incumbent government, which is responsible for the country’s bankruptcy and the people’s misery, has to step down without inflicting any more suffering on the public. With President Rajapaksa’s tail-between-the-legs exit, the government has lost whatever legitimacy it may have had, and the only way it could pacify the irate public is to resign without further delay.

The next President to be elected by Parliament must be an elected MP, and no defeated candidate who has entered Parliament through the backdoor, must be elected to that post. The successor of the elected President, who has promised to resign, must be someone elected, and not rejected, by the people. Let that be the bottom line.

Wickremesinghe, after being sworn in as the Prime Minister, urged the Galle Face protesters to continue with their struggle, thereby granting them legitimacy. In doing so, he endorsed their mission. Now, they are asking him to step down, and there is no way he could justify the use of force instead of heeding their call. He has chosen to call them fascists!

The person to be elected President by Parliament next week will lack legitimacy, and not be able to govern the country unless he is acceptable to the people, who turned against even Gotabaya, who received a mandate from 6.9 million voters. This is something that the presidential hopefuls planning to contest the election in Parliament next week have to bear in mind.

The SLPP MPs must realise that if they continue to back the proxies of the Rajapaksas, who have run away, they will be committing political suicide. Never will they be able to go before the people, ever again, seeking votes if they side with the puppets of the Rajapaksas, who are responsible for the people’s untold suffering, and have amassed enough wealth to live like oil sheiks while the hapless Sri Lankan are languishing in fuel queues, skipping meals and facing the prospect of dying in hospitals without lifesaving medicines. The least they can do to escape the wrath of the public is to ask Basil Rajapaksa to go to hell, where he belongs, and vote against the candidate of his choice. Young MPs like Manusha Nanayakkara and Harin Fernando have to decide whether to follow the dictates of their conscience and do the right thing, or to support Basil’s proxy and thereby ruin their political careers.

Meanwhile, the party leaders must stop fighting among themselves and speak with one voice. Let them be urged to cut the Gordian knot, and arrest the country’s slide into anarchy.