Sins and crimes

Saturday 22nd October, 2022

Chief Opposition Whip and SJB MP Lakshman Kiriella has told Parliament that the person responsible for bankrupting the country should be in a temple instead of an official residence, enjoying retirement at public expense. He has not named names, according to what has been reported of his speech, but it is obvious that his reference is to former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

One cannot but agree with Kiriella that no more public funds should be spent on maintaining the person on whose watch the country went bankrupt. In fact, none of the former Presidents should be provided with official residences or maintained at public expense. They may be given security based on proper threat assessments. No politician has died poor in this country during the last so many decades; the ex-Presidents can look after themselves well.

Kiriella, however, seems to have mistaken a serious crime for a sin that one can redeem oneself from simply by staying at a temple. The act of bankrupting a country and inflicting untold suffering on the people is, no doubt, a sin, but the legal aspects thereof should not be glossed over; it is a very serious economic crime. Those who commit such offences may go to temples or other places of worship and try to have themselves redeemed, but they have to be made to face legal action. Reflected in the Chief Opposition Whip’s statement at issue is Sri Lankan politicians’ leniency towards one another. They never go flat out to have their opponents imprisoned; they only bellow rhetoric.

No wonder the Yahapalana government, of which the current Opposition MPs were members, opened escape routes for its opponents while pretending to be out for their scalps. Its policy has paid dividends for its leaders. President Maithripala Sirisena threw in his lot with the Rajapaksas towards the latter stages of his term and avoided a whitewash at the last general election; the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has become the President with the help of the Rajapaksas, whom the Yahapalana government undertook to throw behind bars but protected on the sly. As a quid pro quo, the Rajapaksas did not have the Treasury bond scams probed after regaining power, and one need not be surprised if all the crooks who benefited from the bond rackets walk free. The people who voted for the Yahapalana government in the hope that it would ensure that the thieves of public wealth would be punished, and then supported the Rajapakasas to bring the Yahapalana crooks to justice are going through hell. Their suffering may be considered a kind of divine punishment for the sin of voting for crooks.

Gotabaya deserves all the flak he is receiving for what he did, as the President. But he is not alone in having ruined the country. All his predecessors earned notoriety for economic mismanagement, reckless borrowing, abuse of power, corruption and waste. Unsustainable debt, which sent the economy into a tailspin, is not of recent origin. The economy had experienced debt stress for decades under different Presidents, who did precious little to bring about debt sustainability. All those in the current Parliament, save a few, have contributed to the ruination of the economy, albeit to varying degrees.

Most of the holier-than-thou SJB MPs were in the Yahapalana government, which borrowed heavily thereby worsening the country’s debt burden, allowed corruption to thrive and neglected national security. They had no qualms about defending the Treasury bond scammers and other such crooks. The JVP is raking the Rajapaksas over the coals for corruption, economic mismanagement, abuse of power, etc––and rightly so––but the latter would not have been able to obtain power without the former’s help in 2005. It was the JVP which made Mahinda Rajapakasa’s victory in the 2005 presidential race possible. Its second uprising crippled the economy and led to the destruction of state assets to the tune of billions of rupees in the late 1980s. The TNA supported the LTTE, whose terrorism took its toll on the country’s economy besides destroying thousands of lives. The SLFP has also made a tremendous contribution to the ruination of the country on its own as well as by coalescing with the UNP and the SLPP. The less said about the UNP, the better. It is now shamelessly riding on the saatakas of the Rajapaksas!

It is only natural that the resentful people are demanding that all 225 MPs go home. Gotabaya should be severely dealt with for what he has done to the country, but others must not be allowed to get away with their crimes by bashing him.