Long wait for new IGP

Wednesday 12th July, 2023

What’s the world coming to when a country is unable to find a successor to an outgoing police chief? The Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government has undertaken to accomplish the gargantuan task of eliminating the netherworld of crime and drugs, but regrettably it cannot ever so much as appoint a new police chief!

IGP C. D. Wickramaratne retired after completing a service extension recently, but the government has, in its wisdom, asked him to serve as the police chief for another three months.

How can a government that is not equal to a simple task like appointing a new IGP claim to be able to neutralise the underworld, much less restore the rule of law?

Perhaps, the granting of another service to the retired police chief after a lapse of about two weeks should not surprise anyone because it has been done by a government that is all out to reconvene the local government authorities several months after their dissolution.

The Opposition is right in having urged the Constitutional Council (CC) to intervene to prevent the government from giving another service extension to Wickramaratne. It has said there are a dozen Senior DIGs and one of them should be appointed next IGP without further delay. But the question is whether the CC will have the courage to frustrate the government’s effort to delay the appointment of a new IGP.

It is believed that the government is dragging its feet on the appointment of a new IGP because it is under pressure from the Catholic Church not to consider some senior DIGs for the high post on the grounds that the Presidential Commission of Inquiry, which probed the Easter Sunday carnage, has recommended criminal proceedings against them for their failure to prevent the 2019 terror attacks. These SDIGs are in the good books of the leaders of the SLPP and the UNP, and the government is trying to elevate one of them as the IGP. The SLPP-UNP combine, however, does not give a tinker’s cuss about even criminal convictions when it makes vital appointments.

The government has appointed, as its Chief Whip in Parliament, a person the Colombo High Court has fined and sentenced to a two-year jail term suspended for five years, in an extortion case. Prasanna Ranatunga is his name. The lame excuse it has trotted out for not expelling him from the SLPP and disqualifying him as an MP is that he has appealed against the HC judgment. (In India, Rahul Gandhi has lost his parliamentary seat due to a defamation conviction. His appeal against the verdict in question has not helped him retain his seat.) Besides, the Supreme Court has ordered former President Maithripala Sirisena and ex-Director of the State Intelligence Service SDIG Nilantha Jayawardena to pay Rs. 100 mn and Rs. 75 mn, respectively, as compensation to the Easter Sunday victims for their failure to prevent the terrorist bombings. Sirisena continues to be an SLPP MP and Jayawardena is still in service. Moreover, the incumbent regime did not heed protests when it had Parliament elect Ranil Wickremesinghe as the President last year. It also derailed the local government polls by refusing to allocate funds for them, and has undertaken to restructure vital state institutions amidst stiff resistance from trade unions and the Opposition. Strangely, it has baulked at appointing a new IGP.

If the government is biding its time until it is in a position to appoint one of its favourties as the next police chief, it may have to keep giving Wickramaratne service extensions indefinitely because the Catholic Church is not likely to abandon its protest campaign.

It is high time the government stopped dilly-dallying and appointed a new IGP without causing an injustice to the eligible candidates among the SDIGS.