By Vishwamithra –

“He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.” ~ Joseph Conrad

The expected pace is not there to be seen; it’s so minuscule, it remains immeasurable; its lackadaisical meandering is frustrating the general public; those who steer the wheel, except perhaps Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD), do not seem to care. This is what ‘power’ does to any and all political leaders. The intoxicating effects of the demon called political power could enwrap the victims, whether they be leftists or right-wingers, and eventually consume them to their bone and marrow. it is a universally acknowledged human dynamic which no power on earth can prevent, nor retard. The question is whether it’s happening to Anura Kumara Dissanayake too.

While the party was elected on a platform of anti-corruption and, by November 2025, had fulfilled some of the key promises, they are currently facing significant criticism, including accusations of failing to fully reform the political culture, handling educational reforms poorly, and falling short on addressing minority concerns. From purely a journalistic point of view, it is rather an easy and envious job to sit back and critique the current regime. Its Cabinet of Ministers, some holding enormous powers attributable to that level of discretion and degree, have been learning to tread water; not knowing the deep end, they dare not swim, even in pools of still waters.

Those who expected a system change in a literal sense have been thoroughly disappointed; with their Utopian dreams shattered, and having spent their adult life in the meadows of high expectancy and dreamlike surface, it is yet to dawn on them that what lies beneath is much more hideous, vulnerable to defilement and decay.

The unfortunate aspect of this current social reality is that the Opposition to government benches is virtually muted; the benches may be physically occupied, but those who warm them have proven to be utterly incapable of constructing even a simple sentence of coherent argument against the current government, its Ministers and President. That fact alone is a great tragedy for the country. AKD and the NPP are Gullivers in a land of political pygmies.

The quagmire has captured skin and bone of the politically sensitive segment of our citizenry; its unquenchable thirst for new experiments may have come to a temporary halt; but its intentions to persist along the same unstoppable lines and pathways are becoming clearer by the day. The citizenry’s patience and willingness to lend more time and space to the new NPP government does not seem to falter. A timely pause may have come to be tolerated, but a wild and violent reaction to promises unfulfilled and pledges not met is yet to reach a due climax.

Instead of engaging in a governance of crisis-management, the NPP government machinery must be more involved in a strategic management of a country struggle to rise from financial bankruptcy and  social barrenness and cultural vacuum.

Our successive governments have failed not because they lacked quality and astute leadership at the top; most of our governments did have the essential characteristics of sharp and clear-thinking men and women at the top. Beginning from D S Senanayake’s Cabinet of Ministers all the way up to the present Cabinet, one can easily pick out the best and the worst.

For instance let’s take DS’s Cabinet:

D S himself, SWRD Bandaranaike, Sir Oliver Goonatilaka, Sir John Kotelawala, Dudley Senanayake, JR Jayewardene, T B Jayah. Sir C Sittampalam, C Suntharalingam, A Ratnayake, Sir Lalitha Rajapaksa, E A Nugawela, RSS Gunawardena and George E de Silva.

Every one of them could have easily walked into any government, any day of our post-Independence history. Did they adopt a strategic stance in the governance of Ceylon? Or did they just adopt to stay afloat in not-so-stormy geopolitical waters of the middle of the twentieth century? They did have a very strong and ideologically committed coalition of opposition, comprising of left-wing politicians. NM Perera, Colvin R de Silva, Peter Keuneman, Dr SA Wickramasinghe were no spring chicken.  They could not fight a giant like DS Senanayake; but his successor, the son, Dudley, did not last two years under the stress of Hartal and parliamentary opposition of the then left-wing school of political thought. One rarely pays attention to the fact that when Dudley Senanayake became Prime Minister, he was only 40/41 years old—determinedly young by any standard to be elected to lead a country. JR Jayewardene, the then Minister of Finance, one of Dudley’s closest political comrades at the time, was decidedly steadier, more poised and ideologically committed than the young Senanayake.

That Cabinet of DS Senanayake still stands out today as one of unique nature, in that every member, except DS and JR, was educated abroad. Purely based on formal academic qualifications, DS was the least qualified, while some prominent lawyers, medical doctors and eminent civil servants crowded the parliamentary and administrative corridors of the then regime. JR himself was a very successful lawyer, apprenticing under HV Perera, KC While the rest of DS’s Cabinet was educated overseas, JR was one hundred percent product of the local education system.

Then came the common man’s hero, SWRD Bandaranaike and his Cabinet. The pendulum swung from one end of educated elites to the uneducated non-elites. The common man celebrated while the country had to whisper her lament to unhearing ladies and gents in exclusive social clubs. SWRD, a scholar and debater of Oxbridge genre alone could not tackle the multiple challenges with which the changing sociocultural paradigm flooded the political landscape. Mere platform sloganeering was not sufficient. In the absence of sound and studied approach to the country’s largest developing sociopolitical issue, Tamil question, Bandaranaike and his SLFP cohorts fell victim to the populist solution they offered at the election time.

The verdict of the ’56 elections was not merely the rejection of elitism, it embraced an emerging novel Ceylonese: a one hundred percent local politician whose ambitions and intentions fell in line with the vast majority of Sinhalese Buddhists. SWRD, Philip Gunawardena and the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) could not confront this challenge with any modicum of success. Sandwiched between a nagging Tamil leadership from the North and relatively fresh demands from Sinhalese Buddhists extremists in Deep South, the MEP government had to deal with more than what it bargained for in the wake of the ’56 elections.

Unlike many other professions, politics is not one in which one could learn on the job. If one chooses to engage in such a naive exercise of ‘learning on the job’, he or she is bound to come across many obstacles that would not only impede his or her advance, it may very well cost the practitioner the whole ‘job’.

Is AKD being subjected to such a perilous exertion? If he is so, can the NPP, his own party, risk being  alienated by the masses as a political entity that cannot relate to them at all? This is the same kind of artificial wall that was built around the Bandaranaike family, not during the times of SWRD, but exclusively when Sirimavo and her immediate family used to rule the country. Beneath a veneer of ‘common man’, lay an utterly decadent system of nepotism, feudalism and family bandyism.

What seems to be happening today is the total reverse of that same sociopolitical dynamic playing its maddening circle to a finish. That will be disaster for AKD, his Party NPP and eventually for the country. Having tried out failed systems over and over again for three quarters of a century, in 2025, the general masses elected a new party and a new leader with no bloodshed. If that experiment fails again, what would entail such a cascade of failed attempts could be beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

It’s so effortless to analyze, argue and come to the right or wrong conclusions. Proximity to India and China should be to our advantage. A clever and crafty leaders would exploit the geopolitical advantages that accrue to the very location of the country in the midst of the Indian Ocean. I am sure Anura Kumara Dissanayake is crafty enough to place his country’s interest far above those of his personal and party’s to carry on come what may. Remember, politics always teaches us that we have become what we allow.

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com