By Vishwamithra –

“If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Placed precariously in the annals of contemporary times, Sri Lanka has had to confront many situations which are apparently conspiring to drag it down to a pit where only failed-states inhabit. Her current rulers have unqualifiedly subordinated the national interests to their own greedy and selfish profits. Relegating their own subjects, the voters of the country, to a second or third-hand tier, the President and his Cabinet of Ministers are being held in a choking grip. Sheer political impotence is their invisible badge- a shameful one indeed.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa

The popular judgment amongst the rural folks is that Sri Lanka is a ‘cursed nation’. The traditional values based on teachings of most scientific and compassionate religious beliefs, also known as Buddhism, discovered, revealed and widely expounded by Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, have all fallen by the wayside. The kings and queens who ruled ancient Ceylon, although they all assumed such high office to rule the country as a ‘one-man-rule’, at least an overwhelming majority of them, were never questioned as to their patriotism and commitment to the rule of law. Examples are many as to their rule and their modus operandi in dealing with multiple crises, economic, military or social, their principles of governance and above all their abiding obligation to law and order are lastingly chronicled in various historical records, including the Mahāvaṃsa, the Great Chronicle.    

Historians have fact-checked and recorded these events and incidents carefully. Their painstaking commitment to telling the truth and their verification of the authenticity of the contextual pertinence is beyond question. However, as usual, any historical record of a nation is gravid with exaggerations and when the proverbial flowers are picked out and discarded, what remains as a factual record is palatably digested by the subject generations that followed the real-time citizenry of the country.      

Almost all- political pundits, University academics, private sector CEOs, higher echelons of the government service, , rich, poor, the middleclass, Sinhalese, Tamil, Burgher and Muslims, they all knew that Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was the worst political leader Ceylon produced, at least since Independence. Now she can exhale a sigh of satisfaction that she is no more considered to be occupying that contemptible bottom layer of the ladder anymore. She’s been outdone by the present fellow, Nandasena Gotabaya Rajapaksa. In incompetence, lack of empathy, dishonesty, cynicism, corruption and political impotence, Gotabaya is miles ahead, not a very teeming station to be in, in nation-building or state-governance.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa came into power with a bang. He had built his reputation as a ‘master doer’, a man who could produce results from almost nothingness. His advertising agency did a masterful job of creating and then projecting a colossal image of a modern day ‘Dutu Gemunu’; liberating the country from the manacles of Tamil expansionism was an integral part of his persona so created. Despite the widely-held belief in the country that his family’s rule from 2005 to 20014 was brazenly corrupt, downright dishonest and unyieldingly nepotism-rooted, the gross failure on the part of the Ranil/Maithripala combo government to prosecute the Rajapaksas to a permanent political end ensured the comeback of the same family, this time led by an untested ‘anti-hero’ who ran away from the Northern war when the going got tough. So was written another sad chapter of Sri Lanka’s post-independent history.

The victory at the Parliamentary elections that followed the Presidential elections further tightened the stranglehold the Rajapaksas had on the wretched citizenry of Lanka. This untested ‘anti-hero’ is being tested by mother of all tests. The Covid-19 pandemic is running rampant in the country and its third wave seems to be more threatening and all-encompassing than the dreaded LTTE soldiers. The Covid pandemic is no isolated event; its consequences have generated many effects that in themselves have performed the dubious task of being cataclysmic causes. The cause and effect theory is having its own cycle of life, making a mockery of the Rajapaksa-incompetency and corruption.

The so-called ‘Viyathmaga’ pundits couldn’t foresee nor forecast the resultant economic debacle that followed. Viyathmaga is supposed to be an assembly of men and women, well-educated, placed in high offices in both public and private sectors and equally well-versed in contemporary events and futuristic phenomena. Yet when their real knowledge, experience, skills and competence were put to a crunching test, all that knowledge, experience, skill and competence seemed to have flown out the window. They are as impotent, weak and incapable as an ordinary street vendor. At least a street vendor is equipped with that rare quality of street-smartness and common sense and above all undiluted patriotism. A street vendor would not barter his love for the country for a quick buck.

The pure evil in the Rajapaksas and their henchmen is now bursting at its seams. The chief characteristic of the evil that has been in display over the last eighteen months is its unparalleled avarice. The masters have shown the way and the subordinates are following willfully and even with more greed as if there is no tomorrow. Their policies are no more founded in political ideologies; they are not being practiced and implemented in any plausibly proficient fashion; the land of Buddhism, the seat of the teachings of the Tathāgata, the custodian-nation of one of the most illuminating religions in the world is being ransacked by her rulers and they seem to be doing it with a license to kill, literally.

Evil has overwhelmed good and greed has buried compassion and care. A nation once known for her hospitality is being led by some of the unkindest and most inconsiderate members of a cabal whose head is another Rajapaksa who fled the warzone in search of greener pastures in California. So what else can the average voter in Sri Lanka expect from these deserters of a noble cause?

But a greater tragedy awaits the nation today. The alternative to the present gang of rulers seems much more incompetent and less empathetic. It requires a tremendous leap of faith to repose confidence in Sajith Premadasa, the presumptive alternative to Gotabaya Rajapaksa. After the drubbing the United National Party (UNP) received at the last Parliamentary elections, the official UNP seems to have breathed its last. But the alternative Sajith has not brought more votes into the party; as a matter of fact, more than two and half million voters stayed home without voting for the Party he led or the UNP at the said elections in 2020.         

See the following table:

Where can the voter turn now? Both Patali Champika Ranawaka and Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) are being considered as plausible alternatives. Champika is yet to build a national image and AKD has to carry the burdensome baggage of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). While Patali Champika represents a left of center ideological school of thought, the JVP and its romanticist appeal to the youth of any nation seem far too narrow to be considered as consequential in the context of a general election.

Yet the cruelties of the Covid pandemic cannot be foreclosed. The rapid increase in the spread of the virus and the consequent rise in deaths have had an irrevocable effect in the psyche of the local population. As much as Maithripala Sirisena’s election victory in 2015, defeating a popular leader such as Mahinda Rajapaksa was a surprise to some self-appointed pundits, one cannot underestimate nor claim as a fantasy if a resounding defeat for Gotabaya and his corrupt party in the next elections is caused. Many incidents, events and socioeconomic data seem to be conspiring to that end.

The average voter might not pay undivided attention to the pardoning of Duminda Silva, the convicted and sentenced to death-murderer; but it certainly leaves no sweet taste in one’s moth to learn such a national tragedy. Pardoning of Duminda not only proves the pure evil of those who decided on the issue, its timing boggles one’s mind as it was done in such a traumatic time when the country is caught up in a whirlpool of a pandemic cum economic disaster.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his famous masterpiece, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”  Acts as such, pardoning of Duminda, whether it really affects the average voter or not, the evil of the psyche of the cabal was so vivid and indisputable. When one goes to sleep with dogs, one has to rise with the fleas.

Solzhenitsyn did not write in vain.

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