Mystery Mansion of Malwana

Friday 23rd February, 2024

The Mystery Mansion of Malwana is in the news again. Justice Minister Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe visited the supposedly ownerless palazzo, or rather the skeletal outlines thereof, the other day, and declared that it would be used to house a state institution after being renovated. The stately structure suffered an arson attack at the hands of violent protesters in 2022. The rebuilding project will be a drain on the public purse.

The story of the Mystery Mansion has all the ingredients for detective fiction. The imposing structure stood majestically on a 16-acre land almost overlooking the Kelani Ganga at the time of the 2015 regime change. The architect who designed the mansion and the person who paid for its construction are known, but its owner remains a mystery. The general consensus, however, was that it belonged to Basil Rajapaksa, who vehemently denied having anything to do with it.

The Yahapalana government did its best to trace the ownership of the manoir to Basil, but all its efforts were in vain. Not even the CID investigators handpicked by the Yahapalana leaders could prove that it was owned by a member of the Rajapaksa family. A case filed against Basil collapsed, and the ownership of the unclaimed mansion was vested in the state.

The news about nobody’s Mansion, as it were, could not have resurfaced at a more appropriate time, for it has evoked the people’s memories of the Yahapalana campaign against bribery and corruption and abuse of power by the Mahinda Rajapaksa government. The Malwana chateau became a symbol of the acquisition of ill-gotten wealth, an issue that Yahapalana leaders, especially Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe, flogged very hard in a bid to sway public opinion against the Rajapaksa family. Their efforts bore fruit; Sirisena became President and Wickremesinghe Prime Minister in 2015.

Those who voted the Yahapalana politicians into power, expected Sirisena, Wickremesinghe and their allies, including the JVP, to have the Rajapaksas punished for corruption, etc. But nothing of the sort happened, as is public knowledge, and the Yahapalana regime became corrupt instead and was exposed for the Treasury bond scams. The JVP continued to back the UNP-led government despite the latter’s corruption; it helped PM Wickremesinghe retain a parliamentary majority vis-à-vis attempts by President Sirisena to wrest control of Parliament with the help of the Rajapaksas.

Today, Sirisena, Wickremesinghe and the Rajapaksasa are in the same government, savouring power and living the high life while the people are undergoing untold hardships. The JVP, which controlled the Yahapalana government’s anti-corruption committee to all intents and purposes but failed to fulfil its promise to have the Rajapaksas and their cronies thrown behind bars, is seeking a popular mandate to fight corruption! The SJB seems to think the public has forgotten that its leaders were Cabinet ministers in the UNP-led Yahapalana government and had no qualms about defending the Treasury bond racketeers and supporting PM Wickremesinghe.

The Mystery Mansion of Malwana, in our book, is a monument to the duplicity of the leaders of the current regime and the self-proclaimed champions of democracy, who denounce violence during the day but unflinchingly engage in it at night, and above all, the stupidity of the Sri Lankan public, who voted the Rajapaksas into power again in 2019/2020. Going by the barbaric manner in which an organised group of violent elements in the garb of democrats unleashed retaliatory violence countrywide in 2022, following an SLPP goon attack on Aragalaya protesters, one can imagine how aggressive they would turn in protecting their extremist interests if they succeeded in capturing state power by infusing the desperate public with false hope.