Columns

I’ll bet you every dollar in our foreign reserves to one lunch at the MPs’ restaurant in parliament that you cannot say how many registered political parties we have in this splendid isle flowing with milk and missing money.

If you trust the records of the Election Commission — and there is no reason to doubt them — the number is 79 recognised political parties. Yet what some of them do between elections is unseen and unheard.

But then suddenly we hear the heavens rumbling, the climate changing and the political gossip mill grinding with dark stories that would make Booker-Prize-winning Shehan Karunaratne a poor storyteller.

I refer not to the arrival the other day of Basil Rajapaksa, also known as KK, from his sojourn in California. He could hardly set foot in his motherland when questions were already being asked in parliament how he had access to the Bandaranaike International Airport’s VIP lounge when he is no a VIP having shed his ministerial skin and his place in that talking shop by Diyawanna Oya.

While the likes of Johnston Fernando and other acolytes were all smiles at the sight of Basil KK, another story was doing the rounds raising much more than eyebrows. It related to what the Chairman of the National Police Commission, a supposedly independent institution, and former IGP Chandra Fernando was doing at the airport greeting the “political maestro” which one newspaper generously called Basil perhaps to prove that you don’t need even an honorary doctorate or one obtained at a price, to be a maestro.

Having heard his name bandied about, the outraged former police chief said he was at the airport at the time Basil alias KK arrived on some ‘other matter’ which of course he did not disclose. He only happened to “hello” for old times’ sake.

Coincidences do happen, of course. A former senior colleague of mine on the Sunday Observer and later the Daily News would have called it synchronicity. Still, doubts are swirling in some minds. If Chairman Chandra Fernando, was visiting the airport on some other issue as he states, what on earth was he doing in the VIP lounge trying to converse with Basil KK as some video clips show? It tends to show more than an attempt at a passing “hello”.

But let that pass for the moment and turn to the Rajapaksa homecoming. Political gossip has it that he has returned to stir the political pot like the witches in Macbeth with their disgusting broth, and to save his reputation as the Machiavelli of political manipulation at a time when his ultimate worth is dropping faster than the temperature here in London.

Whether he is here on a mission of resurrection, like Lazarus, with a second shot at cranking up the fortunes of a splittist Pohottuwa and lay claims to a front seat in the political firmament or for some other dark doings, one can only speculate in trepidation.

But other tongues are flapping about the rise of a new star in the sky that threatens to intoxicate the local citizenry and those beyond our shores with sunshine tales. It is that ardent advocate of a plant called marijuana or cannabis but more widely known to our peasantry and dealers in such greenery, simply as ganja.

Some weeks ago I watched a TV interview in which the aforementioned person vociferously defended the rich medicinal qualities of this leafy product which the police in years gone by would pounce on and confiscate if found in one’s possession. I suppose they still do so when not manhandling passing protestors or hounding student activists who raided Gotabaya’s presidential larder and picked a banana, while shootings, bribery and dubious deals continue apace.

What the police did with the stuff one knows not — possibly took the bundles home and chewed them for their highly recommended medicinal qualities.

The interviewee, State Minister of Tourism and MP Diana Gamage’s strident support for the local cultivation of ganja, seemed like a fast-reacting political injection. It took just a few days thereafter for President Ranil Wickremesinghe to raise the subject in thoroughly unexpected circumstances.

Much attention, both local and foreign, was naturally focused on his first budget speech as president. While the Sri Lankans were inevitably bracing for more punches to their stomachs and their purses, representatives of foreign countries and international institutions where Sri Lanka’s begging bowl is circulating, were anxious to ascertain the economic path he was charting.

They hardly expected to hear the president speak of growing ganja, though he used a more respectable term. It all seemed out of joint, as it were, though I don’t mean a ganja or other joint that users of toxic substances turn to make them ‘high’, if the appropriate lingo is permitted.

So ecstatic was Diana Gamage at the presidential mention that she was quoted by the media as saying she was “extremely happy about the proposal made by President Ranil Wickremesinghe to grow Cannabis in Sri Lanka. I am very happy that the President has realised the value of this medicinal herb……… This is why I promoted it. I am hoping to bring in investments worth over two billion dollars through cannabis plantation next year.”

With Diana Gamage promising to attract billions of dollars here and billions of dollars there, from a casino atop the Lotus Tower, a Disney Park in Hambantota and a flourishing night economy with all sorts of ‘entertainment’, why do we want a BOI or a Colombo Port City which the then Central Bank governor Nivard Cabraal said would rake in the dollars but alas we have not heard of any, weighing down the artificial island.

Not to be outdone, former health minister Rajitha Senaratne, now said to be considering a long jump, endorsed the move to cultivate ganja for export and took credit for presenting a cabinet paper during a previous avatar proposing that the army undertake the cultivation job.

Imagine that. I remember when in the aftermath of the anti-LTTE war when international human rights activists accused the armed forces of human rights abuses, the then president Mahinda Rajapaksa dismissed the allegations saying our forces were well aware of human rights. He said the soldiers marched with a weapon in one hand and a human rights manual in the other.

If Rajitha Senaratne’s proposal had been accepted, post-war soldiers would be marching with a weapon in one hand and a bundle of ganja leaves in the other.

But hold on a second. Surely the two commanders of the Ganja Brigade are jumping the gun, so to say, in their over-enthusiastic anticipation with the impulsive Diana Gamage already counting the ganja leaves even before the plants are grown.

President Wickremesinghe’s words on the subject were very carefully chosen not to upset sections of the Maha Sangha, including influential monks such as Ven Omalpe Sobhitha Thera who has already castigated the suggestion.

“The possibilities of producing Triloka Wijayapathra purely for the purpose of exports will be examined for which an expert committee will also be established,” said the president in a one-liner that was careful not to mention the word ganja.

Note also that the president said an expert committee will ALSO be set up which suggests that others factors will also be in play in the decision-making. All this hemming and hawing and cultivating the crop will take time.

So State Minister Diana Gamage’s ambitious claims of bringing in 2 billion dollars next year seem like another Disney Park in the air.

In the meantime, perhaps the frontliners in ganja growing — Gamage and Senaratne — might put together a Ganja Party — I mean another political party — and gather together scores of faithfuls already high on Kerala ganja.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran
Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner
in London).