THE PRESIDENT: Tough action soon

But whilst the joint sport may have served to keep the public amused for a while, the vacillations, the procrastinations and the seeming lack of concerted will to pursue the promised crackdown and bring it to its logical conclusion must worry the Government; and the President, aware of the credibility crisis, has risen magnificently to the occasion — not to answer his critics and to shove some lame duck excuse — to explain his predicament and to handle the situation in a pragmatic way, considering the dilemma he faces having to deal with two pledges that may be mutually exclusive when it comes to fulfilling both to the letter simultaneously.

Two weeks ago President Sirisena came out from his corner in a fighting mood and declared to his cabinet colleagues that “tough action would be taken against members of the Rajapaksa family for their alleged wrongdoings. The delays had been misconstrued. It was by no means due to any weakness. It was only for reasons of good governance since investigations had to be carried out according to proper procedures. But now action against them would have to be expedited”.

What he was saying — to put it somewhat bluntly — was that enough was enough; and that he intended to finish off the Rajapaksas once and for all with a knockout punch by expediting the legal process to bring them to the bar of justice.
On July 26, even as his arch rival Mahinda Rajapaksa was marshalling his troops to set them on a five-day foot march from Kandy to Colombo while he cruised in his luxury Merc behind as their leader, the President was already counting the damage inflicted by the failure of his Government to fulfill the election promise on which he had ridden to assume the purple as president.

He knew that the people had expected him to sting like a bee the moment he was installed in office. But instead he had been perforce constrained to dance like a butterfly. The much vaunted power of the executive presidency had remained impotent in his hands. But it was not due to any inherent weakness in the President as many tried to portray it to be. It was an illustration of his commitment to establish the Yahapalana principles he espoused. His reluctance to personally crack the whip and instead let the legal process follow its due course was an act that distinguished the true democrat in him from that of the devilish autocrat who believes nothing can happen except on his orders.

For nothing could compromise the sacred pledge he had also made to the nation: to restore democracy to the country’s corpus; to revive it from its moribund state and to make it once more a living, breathing, palpitating organism vibrant in the masses’ midst. The torch of Yahapalanaya ennobling the ideals of democracy had been lit by the Venerable Sobitha and, he, Maithripala had sworn to carry the flame to brighten the land. And sometimes though the flame appeared to some to be flickering, he had never wavered in his commitment.

That also meant that the rigid demands of the due process had to be adhered to. Expediency, as had been the norm, practised by successive political leaders to achieve their political agendas and gratify their private vendettas had to be dispensed with; and the country shown it had no place in the new order of things.

The system, with its checks and balances, had to be in place. It had to weather the storms. It had to bear its full brunt to survive and see the tempest through. The state had to respect all legal rights that are owed to a person, come what may. It had to be done if Lanka was to emerge as a thoroughly modern democratic state and not remain one by name only, its import limited to the grandiose title it officially bore in its sacrosanct constitution.

But the long awaited jailing of the corrupt members of the Rajapaksa regime has still not happened. The people who had clamored to see those who had plundered the nation behind bars and had voted for Maithripala Sirisena to do just that immediately upon coming to power in January 2015 are still clicking their heels, frustrated that their public demand had not yet materialized.

Simultaneously this has also given the villains a breathing space which they have used to good stead to hold the perceived inertia of the government as evidence of their saintly innocence. It has further emboldened these wretches to such a degree that they have dared to challenge the Government on every front and even have had the effrontery to expressly state that their aim is nothing less than to topple the Government. In any other country, and at any other time, such political leaders would have been possibly charged with sedition.

When Wimal Weerawansa at the Lipton Circus meeting on August 1 turned hysterical and screamed that the Pada Yatra crowd would return in bigger numbers soon and lay siege on Colombo if the Government does not halt what he called ‘the political hunt’ of the Rajapaksa regime members, it was only a few decibels short of a ‘call to arms’ against the Government: A brazen attempt to threaten the government with anarchy on the streets if the guilty were not allowed to go scot free. What he and many others like him did not realise was that the attack was not an attack against the Government alone. But against the sovereign will of the people who had elected the government not even a year ago and the president 19 months ago.
The sooner the President ends the shadow boxing and dons his gloves for real, the better. Strictly in accordance with the Queensbury Rules, of course.

RAJITHA: Announces need for more certainty

The 200 per cent threshold of certainty before arrestsApart from the few herrings, pikes and eels that have been reeled in and placed on the slab and sent to the slammer, the barracudas, the sharks and the whales roam free the seven seas of Lanka’s seven Sinhala dominated provinces.
This had also led to conspiracy theorists to cast their rods in troubled waters and to claim that the UNP had struck a deep sea deal with the Rajapaksa fraternity to slash a large enough gash in the Yahapalana net for them to make good their escape provided they in return continue to split the Sirisena SLFP asunder and tear the party apart.

But isn’t it to misconstrue the rigid nature of good governance which dictates, even as the President told his cabinet colleagues on June 26, that proper procedure must be followed? This commitment to following norms scrupulously was further amplified when on July 29 cabinet spokesman Rajitha Senaratne told the media that the Prime Minister had advised the FCID and the CID to be 200 percent certain when instituting legal proceedings with regard to allegations of corruption.

This in itself reveals, does it not, the extent to which this Government will go to safeguard the rights of even its political opponents? That even where it has the power to move the FCID, CID officers to make arrests on the flimsiest of evidence, it still insists that – unlike a judge who has only to be satisfied that there is evidence ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to justify a conviction – FCID, CID officers must first be satisfied ‘beyond all doubt’, before contemplating a simple arrest?

However, won’t such a pronouncement make seasoned investigators pause for thought; and make them wonder whether though the dossier they have so studiously compiled on a ‘corruption’ suspect passes the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ test – or even 100 per cent – that would have justified arrest in normal circumstances, it may not quite make the grade and fall a wee bit short of the required criterion of 200 percent?

But such are the rules by which the game is played. Even though Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake said in Parliament on Tuesday that the Supreme Court, when it held that the VAT bill was null and void because procedure had not been followed, should have been more ‘flexible’, the rules applicable to investigations into public corruption are rigid.

They are not meant to be elastic, like a hundred-yard tape stretched to cover two hundred yards. Even if it means that the investigations now conducted will drag on at snail’s pace, expanded to cover the next four years – beyond the tenure of the present Parliament.

HIRUNIKA: Indicted

On December 21 last year, Hirunika was accused of allegedly kidnapping a man and having him brought to her office by her goons on account of a relationship he was having with the wife of one her supporters. Playing agony nangi to him, she admitted in public she had delivered a moral sermon to him and had advised him to mend his amorous ways.
But gone are the days when politicians could detain people against their will for whatever reason, in the manner Mervyn tied a Samurdhi official to a tree under Rajapaksa rule without fearing legal consequences. Hirunika was arrested on January 9th and produced before the magistrate who released her on bail.

This week the Attorney General indicted her and 8 others on 29 charges of kidnapping. Did she say – or could she say – that she was a victim of political victimization, that Sirisena had some vendetta against her for having once been in the Rajapaksa fold and claiming to be the adopted daughter of the former president, before crossing over to Maithri’s side when the tide turned and the Mahinda fizz evaporated? No.

Unlike the selective law enforcement policy of the previous regime, it mattered not a jot that she was a member of the ruling party. Thus is an instance of Yahapalanaya at work. Another was when UNP Deputy Minister Thewarapperuma was charged last month with unlawful assembly when he stormed a school principal’s office.

What makes members of the joint opposition, so investigated and similarly so arraigned, any different from the two UNP members? What gives them a special right to say and hold it up as a credible defense before the people that it is all due to political victimization? That it has nothing to do with any suspected guilt, for they are clean as a whistle, God promise, cross the heart and swear to die? Or, as that permanently white clad chap would put it in Sinhala, ‘deyinpallah, budunpallah, ammapallah, api ahinsakai, api pivithurui!’

That is perhaps why many behold the present state of Lanka’s democracy and bemoans its chaotic ways. They compare it to the mature democracies of the western world, to that of America, to that of France and to that mother of modern democracies, England. What they perhaps fail to realize is they are unfairly comparing the ripened result to the infant’s struggle to rise erect from a four limbed crawl.

What all Lanka is presently experiencing is the struggle, even as the peoples in the western world experienced it, endured its vagaries and triumphed at the end. No savior through a miracle can give it, no king by divine right can make it fall like manna from heaven; and no executive president can, by any legislative act, make it work.

Only the people themselves can make it dawn from the night of darkness and work with diligence and vigilance to make it last the day. Only after the struggle has been triumphed, can a nation and her people enjoy the fruit. And that, too, only as long as the people are prepared to make the personal sacrifice to defend it with their lives, if need be.