Doublespeak and reverse speech

Thursday 26th January, 2023

The Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government is in overdrive to delay the local government (LG) elections while pretending that it is ready to face them. Experience is said to be the best teacher, and the public, having been taken for many a ride, tends to believe the obverse of what the ruling party politicians say. President Ranil Wickremesinghe has asked the UNP, which he leads, to get ready for the LG polls, and the UNP has given a lot of publicity to his directive, the subliminal message being that the government is intent on holding the mini polls, but those who have some acquaintance with reverse speech will argue that the SLPP-UNP combine is trying to mask its intent to postpone the polls.

Not all members of the government are adept at subterfuge and doublespeak unlike their leaders; most of them are blunt about their efforts to make a case for postponing elections. State Minister of Finance Ranjith Siyambalapitiya is prominent among them. Whenever he meets the press, he sounds like a broken record; he talks nineteen to the dozen about revenue shortfalls as if to have the public believe that the only way to overcome them is to postpone the LG polls and save the funds to be spent thereon! His latest claim is that during the current month there will be a shortfall of Rs. 10 billion in revenue from the Customs and the Excise Department. This particular figure is of interest; it is exactly the amount of money the LG elections are expected to cost! It is a pity that Secretary to the Finance Ministry, Mahinda Siriwardena, who was once widely considered an upright public official, has also blotted his copybook badly by becoming a ventriloquist’s dummy; when he speaks, one hears the voice of the Minister of Finance. One need not be surprised even if the government stoops so low as to create a fuel shortage and give the people a choice between petroleum imports and elections.

Meanwhile, the SLPP has reportedly launched its LG polls campaign from the precincts of Sri Dalada Maligawa, Kandy, where some of its leaders paid homage to the sacred tooth relic, the other day. That event could be considered an affront to the holy shrine, for the SLPP has become a metaphor for corruption and caused untold suffering to the public; its actions are antithetical to the teachings of the Buddha. Asked by a group of hectoring journalists to comment on the allegation that the government is trying to postpone the mini polls, SLPP National Organiser Basil Rajapaksa refused to be drawn in on the issue, claiming that he was not in the government. Paradoxically, his claim is true and false at the same time. It is true because he is not even a government MP. It is false because one does not have to be in a government to control it. That Basil is an eminence grise is public knowledge.

In the early 1920s, cynics used to say the Soviet Union did as the Communist Party said; the Communist Party did as its Central Committee said, and the party Central Committee did as Lenin said. Likewise, the incumbent government of Sri Lanka does as President Wickremesinghe says; Wickremesinghe does as the SLPP parliamentary group says, and the SLPP MPs do as Basil says.

In 1994, the then President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga said the entire Northern Province would be handed over to Prabhakaran for ten years without elections if he eschewed violence. Prabhakaran rejected the offer out of hand. About three decades on, those who boast of having defeated Prabhakaran are apparently trying to rule the entire country at least for ten years without elections on the pretext that electoral contests are far too expensive to be held due to the economic meltdown, which they themselves have caused. If they succeed in having their own way, they will perpetuate the economic crisis so that they and their kith and kin could stay in power without elections indefinitely and continue to live the high life while the people are suffering; in other words, instead of being punished for their economic crimes including that of bankrupting the country, they will be rewarded! It is like a rapist being given the custody of his victims so that he can continue to abuse them! Nowhere else in the world is such a thing possible! One can understand why this unfortunate country has come to be dubbed ‘a land like no other’.