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Before and after his inauguration as president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa spelt out his vision for relations with other countries. While non-alignment, Sri Lanka’s traditional policy — though it has now and then veered one way or another — was to form the bedrock of policy coupled with evenhandedness and friendship with all.

Udaya Gammanpila

But if our relations are determined by outside influences that behave like a bull in one of Xi Jinping’s noodle shops without engaging in sober study, then President Rajapaksa’s vision of crafting balanced foreign relations which does not unnecessarily or without aforethought rush to judgment, then his initiative is going to suffer before long.

Less than three weeks after Gotabaya Rajapaksa assumed office, the first blow was struck to measured policy-making. Parliamentarian Udaya Gammanpila rushed to speak to the media with the British Conservative Party’s manifesto for the December 12 general election in hand, accusing the Tories of prescribing a two-state solution for Sri Lanka.

Quoting chapter and verse, Mr Gammanpila read out the offending paragraph which if I remember correctly was 53.

“We will continue to support international initiatives to achieve reconciliation, stability and justice across the world, and in the former conflict zones such as Cyprus, Sri Lanka and the Middle East, where we maintain our support for a two-state policy.”

Just in case some of our colleagues from the media did not comprehend the English language as well as he did, the paragraph was translated into Sinhala for the greater edificiation of the media. He had some trouble in finding a Sinhala word for initiatives.

As I have commented several times previously Mr Gammanpila loves to address the media. Each time somebody drops a diphthong somewhere, there is the redoubtable parliamentarian summoning the media to spill his thoughts all over the floor.

The other day was no exception. In fact he not only castigated the Tory party for trying to do the dirty on Sri Lanka and divide the country in two but also chastised the Sri Lanka High Commission in London for behaving like a bunch of Rip van Winkles sleeping off the winter cold, as it were.

Had Mr Gammanpila checked with the authorities before diving into the deep end he would not have accused the High Commissioner and other diplomatic officials of sleeping on the job.

Long before Gammanpila’s penchant for summoning the media overtook him making him a laughing stock among those better acquainted with what was going on, High Commissioner Manisha Gunasekera had already penned a letter to the head of the Conservative Party giving her thoughts on what was claimed to be the offending wording in the paragraph.

It looked like she had anticipated Gammanpila long before somebody had drawn his attention to the manifesto paragraph. It needed no promptings from Gammanpila to do their diplomatic tasks when it struck the mission that something was awry.

Then mid-week I received a media statement issued by a ministry called the Ministry of Foreign Relations which made me wonder when it gave birth because it appears to have had an extremely brief gestation period. Up to Dec 3 it was still the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to go by the media statement issued on the meeting between Pakistan Foreign Minister Qureshi and Dinesh Gunawardena, Minister of Foreign Affairs as it stated.

According to the ministry of whatever-it-is, the statement on the Conservative manifesto was activated following the remarks of Mr G who seems to have wakened many an angry soul as I hear from those back in Colombo.

While assuring Hela Urumaya supporters and other disturbed nationalists-both of the genuine 24-carat and pseudo kind — that Sri Lanka’s unitary status has been well defended, the statement has also rubbished, by implication, Mr G’s castigation of the career service escutcheon.

But what does concern me is whether all this ho-ha (or is it ha-ho?) that one website called Mr G’s jiggery pokery was really necessary, whether the contested paragraph is as vague and ambiguous as it is made out to be.

If the particular sentence is a distortion, then it would have been better served if one is told where precisely the distortion lay.

Admittedly, I may not be as knowledgeable in the English language as Mr G apparently is. I must plead mea culpa for keeping away from all those lectures on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and others. Otherwise I might have learned more about the seven types of ambiguity and the nuances of the English language and discovered Mr G’s grouse with the Tories.

As far as I can fathom he is trying to say that the Conservatives are trying to slip one past sleepy diplomats with their Etonian-cunning and lying and verbal dexterity.

Mr G and others find errors in the Englishmen’s English. Of course not all of them speak like the Queen and write Queen’s English as it should be wrote, so to say.

Some who have been tutored at Oxford seem to be concerned that the relevant para lacks an Oxford comma.

Now without going into a coma over a lost comma (actually I dropped a whole full stop at a tube station the other day!) there surely must be some other means of finding out what was meant.

There is little point in asking Boris Johnson. Some say he is capable of saying two untruths in the same sentence.

In the days of yore — if you’ll pardon the archaic — when crime fiction was widely read, one of my favourite detectives used to look for clues outside the immediate crime scene. So examining the para I came across the word “maintain” which had been totally ignored by those quarrelling over a comma here and a two-state solution there.

The relevant part of the sentence states that “….and in the former conflict zones such as Cyprus, Sri Lanka and the Middle East, where we maintain our support for a two-state solution.”

As even a cursory glance at a dictionary will tell you “maintain” means to make something continue, to keep going, to carry on with etc.

Now if the words “maintain our support” were to apply to Sri Lanka as it does to the Israel-Palestine situation intended here, then all one had to do was see whether and when the Conservatives had previously proposed a two-state solution for Sri Lanka.

If the Conservatives had not, then, I would submit, that the word “maintain” could not apply to Sri Lanka but only to the Middle East as the Tory leaders maintain (there is that word again.

Obviously if such a solution had not been proposed for Sri Lanka on an earlier occasion or occasions what is there to maintain support for a non-existent proposal?

The truth is that our great minds had fallen for a propaganda ploy that a Tamil group linked to the Conservatives had planted saying the Tories who are expected to return to power are supporting a divided state in Sri Lanka. This was quickly picked and propagated by some other Tamil groups.

If the Conservatives had pushed this policy earlier why is it that no Tamil diaspora group had ever said so before? This seemed to have escaped Mr G. He never seems to have asked these basic questions before.

Without doing so he is trying to create the problems that President Rajapaksa would want to avoid at this crucial time of national rebuilding.