Is it nothing more than a happy coincidence that JKH rose to pre-eminence during a period in which the country’s body politic was rapidly moving away from the rule of law? Is the prosperity which JKH has so far enjoyed independent of the country’s depravity.

We certainly do not have enough evidence to judge if the JKH’s rise is a symptom of the country’s decline. But it is difficult to imagine how JKH’s rise could have been an event entirely independent of the politico-economic background which sustains it.

There are those who would argue that the background which sustains JKH is not of its own choosing, that the choice it has is to either adapt successfully to the background in which it finds itself or perish. And JKH has chosen to succeed. But this seemingly sound argument obscures the fact there are backgrounds in which the best perish and the scum succeed.

We live in a society which is in terminal decline. There are those who prosper in it because of its decline and others in spite of it. And in the measure our prosperity is independent of the country’s depravity is in the measure we have legitimate grounds to complain about the injustices we suffer. We cannot choose which branches of the government we wish to see corrupt and which ones we wish to see clean and run by men of sound minds and good morals.

Franklin de Soyza
Colombo