Mr. President, You Have Blood On Your Hands: Modern Day Dévadatta Is Going Berserk On A Seemingly Cursed Path

Gotabaya

By Vishwamithra –APRIL 23, 2021

“I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.” ~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

In the sixties and the seventies Ceylon’s scourge was the Bandaranaikes – Sirimavo, her children and Felix Dias. The massive parliamentary election victory of the then Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1970, which led to a near-extinction of the then United National Party (UNP) led by Dudley Senanayake, lent the Bandaranaikes a false sense of permanency of political power. The two Bandaranaikes, Sirimavo and Felix Dias were the prime movers in the then SLFP-led government. The SLFP was backed by the traditional left at the time. That traditional left which consisted of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party (CP) were led by N M Perera and S A Wickremasinghe respectively.

Never had Ceylon seen such scarcity of essential items; food such as rice, bread, dal, dry fish etc., kerosene oil and clothing were selling at premium prices. Price-controls that were enforced contributed to a further exacerbation of the situation, creating a black-market that was an integral part of an inefficient socialist economy. But the people did not have to wait for another term of the Bandaranaikes. Passing away of Dudley Senanayake, the UNP leader, on the New Year’s day, April 13, 1973, while making many a Sri Lankan shed his or her genuine tears, also brought a glimpse of hope when J R Jayewardene took over as the leader of the Party.

The SLFP-led coalition government suffered on all possible fronts. Albeit the fact that S W R D Bandaranaike made the ‘Ape Aanduwa’ concept an oft-repeated slogan in 1956, it was the Sirimavo-led government in 1970 that gave a whole new meaning and weight to the slogan. With the entry of the left-wing parties into the Sirimavo-led Cabinet and with the introduction of People’s Committees (Janatha Committee), Ape Aanduwa  became a slogan in action and every household assumed the wrong and misguided notion that political power vested in the representatives in Parliament is an essential instrument to control all facets of life of all citizenry. Janatha Committees, Five Year Plans, Upahasa (tributes) for living politicians and friends of the government gathered momentum in the vernacular used by not only government politicians but also the average citizen.

It’s rather redundant to canvass opposition to the failed regime of the Bandaranaikes of that era. But its ironic similarities to the current Rajapaksa regime, its basic ideological premise and the protruding character consisting of incompetence, nepotism and corruption seem to remain the same. Not only have these three salient features, namely incompetence, nepotism and corruption been the base of their below-average performance, it would invariably contribute to its own implosion. In the Seventies J R Jayewardene created the rift amongst the Bandaranaike siblings, Anura, Chandrika and Sunethra. But unfortunately for the UNP of today, there is no such political chess grandmaster like J R.

Let us examine the similarities and contrasts between the then SLFP and today’s ‘Pohottuwa’ cabal. They will be centered on these main characteristics of their respective regimes: 1. Incompetence, 2. Nepotism and 3. Corruption.

Incompetence

Ever since the so-called 1956 revolution, the advent of the ‘common man’ to the upper layers of the political ladder and the corresponding fading away of intellectualism and sophistication of mind from politics could not be stemmed. The ’56 revolution, even though provided a proverbial ‘place in the sun’ for the common man, it did not make provision for equivalent education for the emerging common man whose essential dwelling was in the remote rural hamlets in the hinterland. This ever-expanding gulf so created between cities and rural regions, especially in the field of education and knowledge of English as a linguistic tool, in turn began to produce a widening dynamic of jealousies and unfair competition between them. This new reality is not only true amongst Sinhalese Buddhists, it was also the case with the Northern and upcountry Tamils.

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