Thursday 23rd November, 2023

A famous artiste once incurred much public opprobrium by arguing that the then President Mahinda Rajapaksa was of the same royal lineage as Prince Siddhartha. We lack expertise in genealogy, and therefore cannot either confirm or deny the veracity of such claims but the reason SLPP MP Namal Rajapaksa has given for his absence in Parliament, on Tuesday, when a vote was taken on the second reading of Budget 2024, makes one wonder whether the SLPP leaders are descendants of P. T. Barnum, the 19th Century American showman, for they also seem to believe that there’s a sucker born every minute.

Namal is reported to have said that he skipped Tuesday’s vote because Budget 2024 has not granted relief to the public! His statement could be considered an indictment of his father, Mahinda, who voted for the budget. Are we to conclude that Mahinda, unlike Namal, does not care two hoots about the public being denied relief, and that is why he has voted for the second reading of the budget? By the same token, all those who voted for the budget on Tuesday, have endorsed the denial of relief to the public.

Namal and some other SLPP MPs seem to think that they can hoodwink the public by running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. There is no way the SLPP can absolve itself of responsibility for Budget 2024 presented by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom it backs, having elevated him to the highest position in the country. The UNP has only a single MP and therefore President Wickremesinghe cannot have anything ratified by Parliament without the SLPP’s support.

Now that Namal has refused to vote for Budget 2024, or the second reading thereof, on the grounds that it does not offer relief to the public, how can he expect the public to vote for SLPP, which has ruined the economy, reduced most people to penury, and left them with no alternative but to beg for relief from the government, which has ignored their pitiable pleas? President Wickremesinghe, delivering his budget speech, said what the people had experienced in 2022 was an economic hell. It was the SLPP that caused the country’s slide into the dark economic abyss.

Namal is not alone in having struck a discordant note on the Appropriation Bill. Some of the disgruntled former ministers in the SLPP parliamentary group issued a veiled threat, a few weeks ago, that they might not vote for Budget 2024, but they made an about-turn on Tuesday. Prominent among them is MP Rohitha Abeygunawardena. The public must be sick of the theatrics of these hypocrites.

Will the SLPP explain why it is supporting Budget 2024, which Namal, who is described as its future leader, has rejected?

Leniency and indiscipline

Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena finds himself in an unenviable position. He is doing one of the toughest jobs in this country, and even risks his sanity during stormy parliamentary sessions which, more often than not, get worse than fish-market brawls so much so that schoolchildren have to be removed from the public gallery of Parliament.

Speaker Abeywardena has suspended SLPP MP Sanath Nishantha from Parliament for two weeks for misbehaving in the House on Tuesday. Far be it from us to tell the Speaker how to run Parliament and/or punish the MPs for misconduct, but it needs to be said that punishment meted out to MP Nishantha, in our book, is not in keeping with the severity of what he did. SJB MP Ajith Mannapperuma was suspended from Parliament for four weeks for merely touching the Mace.

The Chair and the Mace must be respected and nobody must be allowed to trifle with those symbols of parliamentary authority, but the question is whether the act of touching the Mace can be considered a severer offence than accosting the Opposition Leader in the parliamentary chamber menacingly and snatching documents from him? The boorish and aggressive behaviour of the ruling party MPs like the ones who went berserk on Tuesday, among other things, triggered last year’s tsunami of public anger which led to a spate of arson attacks on the ruling party politicians’ properties and an abortive attempt by a mob of anarchists to march on Parliament.

Leniency towards transgressors promotes indiscipline, which is one of the causative factors for a severe erosion of public faith in Parliament and the phenomenal rise of anti-politics, which is gnawing away at the very foundations of parliamentary democracy. Hence the need for the rowdies in the garb of MPs who resort to violence to compass their sinister ends to be dealt with severely.

Shame on the self-righteous political party leaders who look on when their MPs go on the rampage, bringing the legislature into disrepute!