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It beggars belief how Ranil Wickremesinghe could assemble such a ragbag crew of adventurers, turncoats, and people-rejects – each high on patriotism and short on principles – and present, without a blush, the motley collection as his cabinet of ministers to lead Lanka’s renaissance out of the Rajapaksa dark ages.

Looking more like a band hired to play aboard the sinking Titanic, to ease the alarm of the passengers finishing off their one-meal-a-day cruise before heading to queue for the lifeboats, the 13 member ensemble consisted 2 from SJB, 1 from SLFP, 3 SLPP from Wimal’s 10 independent groups and 7 from the SLPP, including one, a former Sathosa chairman, who was arrested by Ranil’s FCID in 2018 for allegedly embezzling Rs. 39 million of Sathosa funds, with the case still pending trial in court.  If it is to give the semblance of governance and the air of political stability, it is bound to fail in its purpose. It will not reduce the roar on the Green, resounded throughout the land nor will it dim the clamour of the Opposition in the House. Neither will it satisfy foreign Governments nor lending agencies, including the all-important IMF, that the conditions of political stability they demand before translating their sympathy into dollars, have been realistically created to make economic recovery possible.

The world does not owe Lanka a living. And even the tears they shed now will soon dissolve if Lanka fails to clean up her political act.

This will undoubtedly increase the pressure on Ranil to deliver but, interestingly enough, provide for the architects of the chaos, the Rajapaksas, welcome respite on the road to rehabilitation.

On Wednesday morning, shortly after 10 o’clock, Mahinda Rajapaksa entered Parliament, not as the Prime Minister of Lanka he had been nine days earlier but as an ordinary MP from Wayamba District.

PRIME MINISTER: Has Ranil bitten off more than he could chew? ( Reuters)

He took his front row seat, which had been especially reserved for him by the Speaker the day before, when Parliament had begun its new session after it had been abruptly adjourned on May 6. He settled next to his elder brother Chamal, also an ordinary MP, as was brother, Basil, and son Namal. No high ranking cabinet portfolios distinguished them from the rest of the MPs. Only their signature satakayas, still flaunted, served to brand them as a somewhat different species possibly on the endangered list.

What a difference nine days make in Lankan politics. Nine days before Wednesday’s Parliamentary arrival, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa  invited the last  dregs of his SLPP  political barrel to his official residence, let his firebrand lackeys spur them with rousing speeches before taking the podium himself to deliver the final power-packed, defiant rant to the highly charged gallery.

Moments later, these rabid SLPP dogs of war, some chanting, ‘time to go to Galle Face, time to go to Galle Face,’ were unleashed to the waiting streets to do their worst against the ‘Mynahgogama’ protesters camped outside the Temple Trees’ door and then to brutally attack the protesters at the ‘Gotagogama’ on the Galle Face Green, peacefully demanding him and the President to go.

As the dust cleared on the destruction the SLPP’s dogs of war had left behind, it became all too clear that Mahinda Rajapaksa had made a colossal blunder and was beyond the pale. His political life lay in ruins, irretrievably buried beneath the debris his cult’s die-hards had succeeded leaving behind after their violent sprint on the Green had finally ended. He resigned ignominiously in the evening.

That night, sparked by the attack on the Green, the burning spread countrywide, its flames engulfing SLPP members’ homes, including the Rajapaksa’s ancestral home and damaging their parents’ mausoleum.

In the early hours of Tuesday morn, Mahinda Rajapaksa had to be evacuated with his family from the besieged Temple Trees. For two days, his whereabouts remained unknown. Amidst conjecture that he had fled the country, the Defence Secretary revealed at a press conference that he had been airlifted to Trinco’s naval base and kept there ‘for his own safety’.

Neither did the public know the whereabouts of Basil, Chamal and Namal Rajapaksa. They only knew that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was in his ivory tower, isolated at the President’s House, desperate to form a government to give the air of governance, since the exit of Mahinda had dissolved his ‘system change’ cabinet of three weeks; and failing miserably to form one.

During those uncertain days, the courts slapped a travel ban on Mahinda Rajapaksa. A private complaint was also lodged in the courts seeking his arrest. Opprobrium against the Rajapaksas had mounted to such a degree it was doubtful whether they could show their faces in public for a long time.

Enter Ranil Wickremesinghe, the five-shot Rambo outsourced by Gotabaya Rajapaksa to clean up the Rajapaksa mess. Suddenly the Rajapaksa cloud clears. In a land bereft of hope, Ranil is welcomed as the rainbow at whose mythical end is found the pot of gold. He is the chosen knight from all rivals, the Galahad who will save for Gotabaya his Camelot; and will bring home the Holy Grail filled with dollars to his people, even though he and his Yahapalana band had been decisively exiled by the electorate.

In his first ‘Address to the Nation,’ at 6.30 pm on Monday as the new Prime Minister of the SLPP Cabinet and Government, he turned the last streaks of dusk into a western sunrise to convince eternal optimists that a new dawn was in the offing; and he was its rooster, the herald of the change.  Even those who switched their TVs in faint disbelief, remained to cheer, enamoured by the new Messiah’s Revelations on the ills the people must reap for the sins the Rajapaksa had sown.

But for the sceptics, his  revelations that in the months ahead it will be the most difficult time that Lankans have experienced in their lives  or that the economy was in a precarious state, with statistics to prove it, was nothing new. Ali Sabry had painted the same bleak picture in Parliament only two weeks ago.

In the penultimate paragraph of his speech, he promised he would make Lanka queue free, a nation of plenty where agriculture flourished and the future of youth was secure.

If that is the ambit of his prowess to lift Lanka from the mire to the sunny uplands of prosperity as the 73-year-old Prime Minister of a bankrupt nation, at the head of a crumbling government, and bereft of a political base, he certainly must be a late bloomer to promise to do in the fall and winter of his life what he had dismally failed to achieve in his spring and summer during his five stints as Prime Minister when the wherewithal and political power lay at his command.

His literary reference, saved for the last, to Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ and his identification with Grusha — the faithful trusted maid of the Governor’s wife who has fled after her husband is beheaded during an uprising, leaving her child behind, crossing the broken rope bridge, carrying the child that is not her own — truly reveals his heroic role in carrying the Rajapaksa baby across the burning bridge to safety.

The revelations as to the past need no re-telling as gospel truths newly revealed. The people are well versed in not only hearing it but also experiencing it firsthand. What his book of revelations has so far concealed is how he plans to generate the dollars needed for the Phoenix to rise from its ashes. So far his blueprint for revival rests on his faith and belief that the bleeding-heart West will drop the spare dime in the beggars tin.

But on the Parliamentary battlefield in defending his new master and patron saint, he showed his true genius. He joined with his new SLPP mates to vote against a motion to suspend the standing orders and thereby prevented the ‘motion of displeasure’ to censure the President from being presented to the House for debate and vote.

Rebuked by TNA MP Sumanthiran for breaking his promise as stated in the UNP’s Twitter message of April 27 that ‘the UNP will support the No-Confidence motion against the President which is being prepared by TNA MP Sumanthiran’, Ranil’s lame duck excuse for not honouring his word as any gentleman would do, was to simply say, the timing was wrong.

Far better if he, the UNP’s sole National List MP, had said he was no longer beholden to UNP statements after decamping to the opposite bank on May 12 to lead Gotabaya’s SLPP, even as Diana Gamage would say of SJB statements after she turned coat as an SJB National List MP on 22 October 2020.

On May 18, Ranil answered questions put to him in writing by then SJB MPs, Harin Fernando and Manusha Nanayakkara, grovelling for a post in the new administration.

On the question of Gotabaya’s resignation, Ranil’s answer was that ‘he will agree to a decision by majority of parliament.’ But hadn’t the majority in Parliament shown on the same day they want Gota to stay by voting to prevent even the motion of displeasure against the President from being presented? Didn’t he increase the voting tally to 119 by casting his own vote to prevent its presentation?

On the question of the 21st Amendment, Ranil’s reply is that he will take action to get the amendment passed soon. But has he the clout to do it? That the ruling party’s  MPs gives no tuppence to Ranil’s decrees was proven when his exhortation to appoint a woman as Deputy Speaker without a vote was contemptuously snubbed by the SLPP by successfully fielding its own Ajith Rajapaksa to the post.

In a recent TV chat show SJB’s Dr. Harsha de Silva, who, despite having the greatest potential to help the nation, stuck most admirably to his principle not to betray the people’s ‘Gota go home’ demand by serving as Gotabaya’s Finance Minister, said he doubts whether the 21st Amendment will ever be brought, due to its ban on dual citizens entering Parliament. He asked: ‘If Basil is controlling RW and everyone, will he allow it be passed in Parliament for him to be kicked out of the House?

On bringing those responsible for the Easter Sunday carnage to justice, his reply is that steps will be taken to obtain the assistance of foreign experts into the investigations if necessary. But rather than further delay justice to the victims, why not order the CID to complete its investigations and immediately implement the Presidential Commission’s recommendations in full as demanded by Cardinal Malcom Ranjith, whose brave descent to the political pulpit to render justice to his flock, was vindicated, praised and blessed by Pope Francis himself last month at a special mass held at the Papal Basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican.

On obtaining a pardon for Ranjan Ramanayake, Ranil’s reply is that he hopes to send a team of experts to present facts in this regard to the Supreme Court. On what basis?

There is no constitutional provision for the court to grant pardons; and, even if there were some other means, it is more than likely that the Supreme Court, which convicted Ranjan for contempt of court last year, would give short shrift to the suggestion that their grievous error caused a serious miscarriage of justice and, instead, hold those making such an impudent charge, for contempt of court.

But while Ranil’s answers to the questions posed by political opportunists like SJB national list MP Harin and MP Manusha may have well sufficed to make their halos shine brighter as they played the patriotic card, it cut no ice with the masses on the street. To them, the whole exercise, conducted as a patriotic effort to save the nation, stank as a sell-out of the people’s demand.

However, it has certainly taken the heat off the Rajapaksas. With the passage smoothed and cleared, they were all together on Wednesday, having a cosy reunion in Parliament, wearing the family flag, draped around their necks. It seemed the violence unleashed last Monday never happened.

Only Chamal, the eldest of the Rajapaksa brethren, seemed to suffer a tinge of guilt. Addressing the House on Wednesday, he said: ‘The people who came to Temple Trees that day were innocent supporters from the villages. They came to express their sadness at Mahinda Rajapaksa resigning from the Premiership. But at that moment, at that place they were roused, they were incited to commit this incident. All of us must take the responsibility.’

Taking the responsibility is one thing but doesn’t one have to face the penalty for its consequences too?

Sandcastles last longer on the beach at high tide than the word or principle of Lanka’s politicians. Elections must be held soonest no matter its relative cost for without a fresh mandate, governance will be impossible and the anarchy will worsen.

Until then Ranil’s new outfit can harbour no pretentions of nation building but can exist only as a caretaker government to beg and pass on humanitarian aid received, for public dissent is far too rife to entertain ambitious visions.  A brave new order must dawn rooted in principles, led by men and women of principles.