An angry PM and the betrayal of a revolution

by Rajan Philips-January 30, 2016, 9:10 pm 

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe is an angry man these days. The winter in Davos has not cooled him down. He lashed out at GL Peiris before going to Davos. He lambasted the journalists, just last Thursday, after returning from Davos. Peiris came under fire in Jaffna where the PM had gone to celebrate Thai Pongal, just as Mahinda Rajapkaksa used to fly to NuwaraEliya to preside over the CWC’s cow-milking ceremony to mark Pongal. A milky way to reconciliation, you might say. But GL Peiris fully deserves the PM’s wrath for the once great professor has as little credibility left in him to lecture about the constitution as one time Chief Justice Sarath Silva has to talk about the Supreme Court. The latter seems to have finally come to terms with keeping his mouth shut, and the former must smarten up and lock up his gab for good, politically speaking.

Coming back to the Prime Minister, it is not clear who he despises more – Peiris or journalists? On Thursday, in parliament, it was verbal flailing at the media gallery by an angry Prime Minister on his feet. His anger and his frustrations at the goings on in the country are understandable, even welcome, given the perception many have of him as being a man with, for all his cleverness, not enough fire in his belly for politics. He is obviously sincere about turning the country in a new direction for the better from the disastrous last five years. But the turning is not happening. It is even worse than one step forward and many steps backward. Nothing seems to be unfolding the way the Prime Minister would have wanted the Sri Lankan universe to unfold after January 2015. While this is a serious problem for the PM and the government, or those in the government who stood for genuine change in January 2015, it is not going to be solved by scolding Peiris and the journalists in public and in parliament.

Was there a revolution?

Talking about January 2015, was there a revolution in Sri Lanka one year ago? There is more curiosity than debate if the term, revolution, is apropos or not. There are those who say there was, and others who think it’s a joke to think that there was one. But there is greater agreement about an unfolding betrayal. I am not suggesting that if there is betrayal there must have been a revolution. The accusation of ‘betrayal’ comes not only from those who worked for the victory of President Sirisena in January 2015, but also and more stridently from those who called him a traitor for leaving his leader and worked to defeat him (Sirisena) in the election.                      

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