Columns

Do the actions of the Wickremesinghe Presidency and his Cabinet reflect strategic decision-making on the cusp of majorly significant national elections in Sri Lanka?

The Government’s markedly asinine behaviour

The latest controversy to erupt is over the Cabinet outsourcing the handling of on-arrival visas to foreigners at the national airport to a ‘private company.’ This is in the wake of a Sri Lankan’s fury at the company’s representatives refusing a visa for his wife at Katunayake going viral on social media. We are told by the Presidential Secretariat that the company was only ‘processing’ the visa process while Sri Lankan immigration officers had the ‘final say’ on the matter.

The Secretariat has also claimed that the company in question is used by other countries to process visa applications for non-nationals entering their borders. But do those countries permit its representatives to strut around at the border point of entry? That is strictly a matter for immigration officials and is a question of high national sensitivity if not security.

The Minister of Tourism has frantically denied that he had anything to do with the unseemly row attributing the change in procedure to a Cabinet paper by Public Security Minister Tiran Alles. Adding richness to this unsavoury cake, he has also confessed to a ‘problem’ as his observations as Tourism Minister had not been called for.

A Public Security Minister who heightens security concerns?

Meanwhile stakeholders, including the Sri Lanka Association of Inbound Tour Operators, have denounced the replacing of a hitherto virtually free state service with a private company poised to claim potentially massive profits. Now the nation awaits the clarification by the Public Security Minister on Monday which the Government has promised will ‘clear up’ the dispute.

Not much confidence can be placed in that promise however. The Public Security Minister has a penchant for conduct that sits oddly with his ministerial duties, the latest being his declaring ‘Open Sesame’ to the police to use their weapons to ‘eliminate criminals.’ Objecting vehemently, the Bar Association has called for the President to remove the Minister from his portfolio, pointing to a pattern of ‘irresponsible, arbitrary and misleading’ remarks.

True to form, the call by the Bar has been shrugged aside. All this signifies a Government at ‘the end of days. That ugly dissonance is evidenced from the very head downwards. As observed last week, only a remarkably insensitive mind-set will gleefully boast that a luxury hotel is being opened at the site of the erstwhile ‘Aragalaya’ (peoples’ protest of 2022) which threw out  former President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and his family from power.

Seeing the good, bad and the ugly of the ‘Aragalaya’

The fact that President Ranil Wickremesinghe made these inappropriate comments at the opening of the ITC Ratnadipa while former President Rajapaksa was sitting in the audience aggravates the matter. To repeat ad nauseam as these remarks continue to shock the conscience, the President’s juxtaposition of a luxury hotel with the ‘Aragalaya’ is crass. In fact, the President and his United National Party (UNP) cannot wash its hands of giving the ‘karapincha’ treatment to the ‘Aragalaya,’ using it to grab power and then discarding it.

Whatever we may think about the political ‘capture’ of the 2022 protests, this was the first genuine people’s movement in post-independent Sri Lanka despite internal fractures and dissensions. Disparate ‘Aragalaya’ segments cannot be lumped into one monolithic whole. We see this too in regard to mass student protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza currently sweeping across the United States.

Both faculty and students have been kicked, beaten and arrested by the police. In some instances, as US President Joe Biden said, the students may have been violent.  But in others which the President failed to acknowledge, the overly violent response of US law enforcement contradicted the right to dissent. In any event, the US has firmly divested itself of the right to moralize on the international rights order.

Strategic and sensitive reactions needed

But to return to happenings in Sri Lanka, the Government’s schizophrenic convulsions in an election year are getting ‘curiouser and curiouser’ as Alice may wonderingly note to herself. Public resentment of the political order has become menacing with the Deep South paying a high price for ‘Rajapaksa-loyalty’ as existential poverty swallows up its communities. Across the land, the gap yawns wider between ‘the privileged’ (the elite) versus the ‘non-privileged’ (everyone else).

Lest I be misunderstood, this is not to say that Sri Lanka must not have more hotels, luxury or otherwise. That would be patently absurd. Rather, the President and his Cabinet must be far more strategic if not sensitive. But to expect that would be foolish. Now let us proceed to a somewhat unexpected ‘Right of Reply’ to last week’s column exercised by Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo.

While appreciating his generous plaudits in regard to the ‘Focus’ column that he says he reads with enthusiasm every Sunday and acknowledging the ‘sentiments of profound respect and friendship’ that he has personally proffered, I must correct (subject to constraints of space) a serious misunderstanding that has arisen thereto.

Setting misunderstandings
about the ‘Focus’ to right

Objecting to what is opined under the paragraph headed ‘sinister findings and obvious conclusions’, he has inferred that I had made a ‘non-objective insinuation’ that he had ‘somehow knew beforehand of the Easter Sunday attacks’ and had done nothing about it. This cannot be further from the truth, I must say with force.  At no point did I say or intend to say that the Roman Catholic Church let alone the Archbishop knew in advance of the bloody Easter Sunday attacks in 2019.

The column’s offending paragraph reads to the effect that ‘So for the head of the Catholic Church to claim blissful ignorance of all those warnings and to profess to child-like innocence in saying that he ‘supported’ Rajapaksa and had been ‘misled,’ is to insult our intelligence no less.’ But to clarify, referencing ‘blissful ignorance’ was made entirely in the context of his supporting the candidature of former President Rajapaksa.

This was in a fraught background where a parliamentary report et al, had already raised grave warnings regarding the political context of the attacks and ‘intelligence lapses.’ Further, the Archbishop has gone on to say that, ‘placing my hand on the Holy Bible, I did not know anything about the Easter Sunday tragedy beforehand’ and that ‘Had I known about it, I would have been the first to close the Churches and protect my flock.’ That is evidently the case.

What Christ preached

He has also declared to being a ‘supporter’ of the former President, yet that he cannot be faulted for that as he was only one of 6.9 million voters who also believed in the President’s promises. But that is where I beg to differ. Religious leaders are expected to rise to a higher standard of shunning party politics in the public sphere as opposed to what they may do as a matter of private choice.

As such there is a clear difference between men and women of the cloth and ordinary voters. The Archbishop has quoted Pope Francis who has called upon ‘men of the cloth’ to stand up for justice and truth. That too, I wholeheartedly agree with. But publicly advocating for those admirable objectives does not mean that ‘men of cloth’ must ‘support’ politicians.

The most powerful object lesson of Jesus Christ’s teaching was precisely to that effect, namely not to put trust or ‘believe’ in the powerful but on the contrary, to reduce the powerful to the level of a ‘servant.’ That said, the Archbishop has affirmed that ‘misunderstandings must be cleared in the service of truth.’

Certainly there can be no quarrel with that assertion.

The full text of the ‘Right of Reply’ of the Archbishop of Colombo, Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith