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I haven’t had occasion to read or listen to Foreign Minister MUM Ali Sabry’s full speech to parliament during the committee stage debate on the 2023 budget.

But what little I did was sufficient evidence to treat politicians’ buck passing in the guise of profound revelations be it in that House by the Diyawanna Oya or elsewhere, not with a pinch of salt but a ton of it.

Some might say, as others before them have said a thousand times or more, that it is even better to wash away such rubbish with that laxative called Epsom salt.

One thing tends to stick in one’s mind after listening to this minister for all seasons and all jobs Ali Sabry’s perorations at home and abroad. The less he dabbles in diplomacy and sticks to creating fiction the best it would be for a country already in the throes of a calamitous journey towards a cancerous democracy. That democracy which we had known and experienced in better days, however incomplete, is being scuttled for political expediency and survival.

Alternatively, Minister Sabry might think of living up to his initials MUM and remain mum instead of trying to spin tales which only embarrass the recently deceased Gotabaya Rajapaksa government he served, even though it already has a short and ignominious history.

If the foreign minister thought that his dubious explanation to parliament last week on why the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government clamped a total ban on the burial of Muslim Covid victims– the burial of the dead being a traditional Muslim practice– would absolve the government and himself as a Muslim, he must surely think that the general public is as gullible as some of his political companions with whom he shares the political pews, as it were, in parliament and in the cabinet.

I listened to an excerpt of his speech played on a programme by a Paris-based blogger Bharatha Thennekoon. Ali Sabry’s speech was in Sinhala. But that excerpt seemed the pith of a hitherto undisclosed argument — at least not publicly — but was sufficient to make one wonder whether he was preparing the way for another Booker Prize entry. It sounded even more fanciful than Aesop’s tales minus their moral content.

Whether he was speaking on the votes of the foreign ministry or the health ministry I could not be certain. It does not matter. What does matter is the way he tried to clear the government of swallowing a crazy notion sold to it by a couple of even crazier ‘experts’ as he implied.

According to Minister Sabry, the government had been told that if the bodies of Covid deceased were buried the virus in them would reappear like Lazarus but not in four days but a millennium or several millennia later and engulf the whole country and wipe out our Resplendent Isle or some such tosh. This cart load of bull was picked up by some media and promptly propagated, spreading unscientific garbage as he would make us believe and contradicting WHO advice and practices in other countries

Ali Sabry went on to claim that the entire cabinet — every single one of that caboodle — was opposed to the ban on burying the Covid dead but still the government went ahead and imposed it insisting on the dead being cremated.

Since lying in parliament is an offence and Sabry like Brutus is an honourable man, one must accept his word that every single one in that cabinet of so many honourable men and women including the executive president who headed it, all were firmly against the ban on burials that was announced on April 11, 2020.

If I remember correctly the first Covid afflicted patient was detected somewhere in March. Then following WHO guidelines, the government or the ministry/ committee dealing with the Covid outbreak permitted cremations or burials. The choice was left to the families of the deceased.

Then suddenly on April 11 came this reversal of policy. Why? According to Ali Sabry, the cabinet took the unanimous stance that if the WHO guidelines permitted burials, if other countries permitted burials, and if scientific evidence did not support adverse effects from burials, then Sri Lanka should follow suit.

Yet for one year or so the government continued to impose the ban on burials though the cabinet, according to minister Sabry, unanimously opposed it.

Why? Any sane person (not to mention not-so-sane persons) would surely ask. The whole cabinet agrees but then it takes a decision that is starkly opposite. Were Sri Lanka’s rulers going nuts or something?

While other politicians and their cronies were amassing the bucks in each and every way they can, minister Sabry decided to pass the buck, charging sections of the media which, for some reason, he failed to name though he had the opportunity, of propagating the myth of a virus reborn.

So what on earth is this story he is trying to sell one and a half years later. He was a member of a powerful cabinet, led by the most powerful executive president of recent times, and all agreed that Sri Lanka should follow the rest of the world and scientific advice in allowing the burial of the Covid dead, but all collectively cowering in some corner fearful of the “myth-makers” and their patrons in some unnamed media.

Is minister Sabry really telling the world that an all-powerful president backed by a parliament in which he had a two-thirds majority was too scared to challenge in public debate those advocating a ban on burials with scientific evidence which was by then freely available?

After all, here was a political leadership that had been propped up by a gathering of so-called ‘intellectuals’ under Viyathmaga. Still, it feared taking on a couple of other spinners and their media supporters.

For nearly a year, those who some revered as peoples’ heroes shivered and shuddered fearing to do what the whole world was doing and as advised by the WHO with the best scientific evidence behind it. Is this the leadership that was going to lead this country to vistas of prosperity and splendour?

Rather, is Foreign Minister Ali Sabry’s pantomime just an attempt to divert attention from the truth? The real reason, political observers seem to suggest, for banning burials which were announced on April 11 was the upcoming parliamentary election and the need to rally the Sinhala-Buddhist vote to clinch a huge majority in parliament so that the SLPP would control the presidency and parliament.

The Easter Sunday terrorist attack by some Muslim jihadists was the ideal opportunity to play on public fears of a return to terrorism. One might remember that one member of the cabinet which Ali Sabry says unanimously rejected the ban on Covid burials, was Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekera who submitted a cabinet proposal to ban the burqa, the face covering worn by Muslim women, and to close some 1000 Muslim schools for violating Sri Lanka’s education policies.

Minster Sabry conceded that the burial issue lost Sri Lanka the votes of several Islamic countries at the UNHRC in March 2021. Sarath Weerasekera’s announcement a few days before the UNHRC sessions added to the growing opposition to Sri Lanka with 10 of the 14 Organisation of Islamic Countries abstaining.

Let me get this straight. Is the minister now telling us that the cabinet and government were held to ransom by a couple of scientific dudes backed by some unnamed media and it took a quick visit by the then prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan to Colombo and plead for a lifting of the ban that had already earned Sri Lanka international opprobrium especially of the Islamic world and cost us the vote in Geneva?

That is a hell of a yarn, mister minister. But who will buy it?

(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).