Friday 26th January, 2024

The recent burglary of the residence of former President Maithripala Sirisena’s daughter has triggered a social media feeding frenzy. Sirisena has come under a cyber piranha attack, as it were. He took great pains in Parliament on Wednesday to have the public believe that there was no truth in the media reports that a gold-plated camel statuette gifted to him by a foreign leader, when he was the President, had been among the valuables the burglars had made off with from his daughter’s house. He insisted that all gifts he had received as the Head of State were in the President’s House. He claimed that only some food items had gone missing from his daughter’s house.

Sirisena said he had been a victim of a social media vilification campaign, and what was published in the digital realm had to be regulated, but the Online Safety Bill in its current form was not the solution; it had to be rid of its draconian features, he maintained. This may be considered a principled stand, but what Sirisena left unsaid was that he had achieved his presidential dream with the help of social media, which carried out a series of propaganda attacks against the then President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

He himself provided ammunition to social media activists in the run-up to the 2015 presidential contest. He claimed that the Rajapaksa family had bought what he called ‘a golden horse’ from Buckingham Palace and kept it in Nuwara Eliya, where Mahinda’s sons frequently went in choppers for the sole purpose of riding it. He made many such claims much to the glee of social media, which played a pivotal role in turning public opinion against Mahinda and his family.

Three years after the 2015 regime change, President Sirisena patched up a compromise with the Rajapaksas and tried to sack the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and wrest control of Parliament with their help, but in vain. Today, Mahinda, Sirisena and Wickremesinghe are in the same government, which is all out to control social media on the pretext of safeguarding the rights and interests of the ordinary public vis-à-vis the Internet abusers.

Sirisena’s position on social media has however remained consistent; he does not want them muzzled. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about that of President Wickremesinghe, who also realised his presidential dream thanks to a devastating social media campaign against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Rajapaksa family and the SLPP government.

Anti-government activists were mobilised mostly via social media during Aragalaya in 2022 to oust President Rajapaksa, paving the way for the appointment of Wickremesinghe as his successor. Interestingly, a video containing a fiery speech made by Wickremesinghe in defence of social media, when he was in the Opposition, has resurfaced on the Internet. His current policy towards social media smacks of Machiavellianism. Is it that social media activists, who tend to obey the herd instinct and serve the interests of wily politicians either wittingly or unwittingly, have got their comeuppance?

Sirisena’s claim that burglars removed only some food stuff from his daughter’s residence is intended to make the public believe that there were no valuables there. Those housebreakers must be really dim-witted. Otherwise, they would have been aware that politicians and their kith and kin did not keep their riches in their houses lest they should lose them in case of mob attacks like the ones carried out on some ruling party MPs’ residences in 2022.

One may recall that several Lamborghinis which had been frequently sighted in Colombo during the Mahinda Rajapaksa government mysteriously disappeared ahead of the 2015 government change. The FCID (Financial Crimes Investigation Division) failed to trace either those cars or the cash stashes belonging to the political opponents of the Yahapalana leaders. Not even the intelligence agencies of the powerful nations that backed the Yahapalana government were able to ascertain information about Sri Lankan politicians’ wealth that had been stashed away overseas. So, it is an exercise in futility for local burglars to break into the houses of politicians and their family members.