Columns

It used to be said in days gone by that the United Nation’s chamber in New York used to come alive when it anticipated a verbal clash between Sri Lanka’s sharp-witted Permanent Representative to the UN, Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe with his coruscating tongue, and Israel’s superbly eloquent Foreign Minister Abba Eban reputedly fluent in 10 languages.

Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, chaired the UN sub-committee on “Israeli Practices in the Occupied Territories” of which Shirley Amerasinghe was chairman, and I had the good fortune of being invited to cover the sessions of the three-man committee when it visited Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan in 1970 but which Israel would not allow into its territory and still does not.

With continued efforts at reaching peace after the second Arab-Israeli war in 1973 and resolutions being discussed, Abba Eban presented Israel’s case with a 9-point plan as a step toward a peace deal.

Responding to it, Ambassador Amerasinghe took his chance to bury his knife into his bete noire, Eban. But that surgical incision required him to step back into history to recall how Moses, a Jewish prophet, received the 10 Commandments from God—a law that the Jewish people were to observe—on Mount Sinai.

Having set the historical background, Ambassador Amerasinghe in a backhander sarcastically commended the Israeli Foreign Minister. Moses, he said, was presented with 10 commandments. Foreign Aban was humble enough to present the world with only nine—a coup de grace that won Ambassador Amerasinghe many accolades privately from a rather dispirited Arab lobby.

I was reminded of this, particularly after witnessing and the many conversations I had with Shirley Amerasinghe during those heady days I spent with the committee when I read of a recent proposal by the UNP general secretary named Palitha Range Bandara.

Bandara’s proposal to postpone the presidential and parliamentary elections by two years if not five, smacks very much of the tactics—and craftiness—of the one-time UNP leader J.R. Jayewardene.

Of course, Junius Richard was no Moses nor Range Bandara an Abba Eban. However, the idea could not have originated from Range Bandara who is hardly known as a thinker.

Those who recall the political landscape of the 1970s and the UNP’s landslide parliamentary election victory of 1977, might remember one of the first comments of ‘Junius Richard the First’ who considered himself the continuity of the country’s ancient monarchy, disrupted only by the Western imperial occupations.

Having secured a massive five sixth majority in parliament, JRJ said Sri Lanka could now roll up the election map for the next 40 years.

If Israel’s Abba Eban did not strive to emulate Moses though Ambassador Amerasinghe sarcastically asserted, given the opportunity to hit back at the eloquent Israeli, Junius Richard’s nephew Ranil Wickremesinghe who had just entered parliament and was soon to be one of his uncle’s cabinet ministers, is seemingly intent on extending his temporary stay on the presidential seat—though not for 40 years as Sri Lanka’s Moses hoped, but close enough.

If JR’s grand plan to deprive the people of their fundamental democratic right for four decades, was hyperbolic and mere bluster, putting off elections for six years was not. Sensitive to a change in the country’s political mood, JR did what he knew best—engage in political manoeuvres that would keep him in power, a practice not unknown to his descendants.

While JR used the referendum—the first since independence—to put off the scheduled 1983 election by six years, the trial balloon floated by Range Bandara most likely inflated at the start by his party leader, was more like that of a moderate Abba Eban, ready to settle for a two-year postponement—actually for any postponement that would skip 2024.

That would give the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa government time to push through the most obnoxious and outrageous laws and regulations, even using Extraordinary Gazette notifications which rightly live up to being extraordinary.

Take for instance, the recent Supreme Court verdict in the Diana Gamage case which stripped her of her parliamentary position, ruled that she was a British citizen, was not proven that she had obtained Sri Lanka citizenship and so had overstayed her visa to be in Sri Lanka.

In normal circumstances, a foreigner overstaying the visit visa not by weeks and months but by years, especially a person who has been found guilty very serious charges, would be deported.

It was not too long ago that another British citizen Kayleigh Fraser had her house raided by Immigration officials last August and her passport seized and later questioned about violating visa conditions and ordered deportation before August 15.

Her cardinal sin was posting video material of the mass anti-government “Aragalaya” at Galle Face, on her social media account.

That was really funny for I read high-ups in the government inviting foreign tourists to Sri Lanka to join in the carnival-like atmosphere.

Now Diana Gamage who has been found guilty of far worse sins by Sri Lanka’s highest court appears to be free with no threats of deportation.

On the contrary, it would appear that she could stay on in the country untouched and perhaps honoured.

A few days after the Supreme Court ruling on May 9 there appeared rather miraculously a gazette notice from the Ministry of Public Security signed by its Minister Tiran Alles dated March 22 and said to be approved by parliament under the title Immigrants and Emigrants Act (Chapter 351).

One wonders how many had actually seen or read this gazette when first issued in March.

It says that “these regulations may be cited as the Permanent Residence Visa Regulations of 2024.”

And what does that say, to put it briefly—persons of Sri Lankan descent, including those who have renounced their citizenship and their foreign spouses would be able to get permanent residence status.

A person of Sri Lankan descent is someone whose parents, grandparents or great grandparents were born in or are still residents of Sri Lanka.

For sheer anticipation, this is a piece of bureaucratic mastery. Who would have thought, more than one month ahead, that the country’s apex court would have come with another landmark judgment that would wipe Diana Gamage off her parliamentary seat and drive her off from the Tourism Ministry, though not from the seat of a fancy V8, as some claim.

Now don’t you say this government did not promise you the rule of law, whatever that might be.

While dear Diana was being felicitated for being able to live her whole life here as a permanent residence, though as the Buddha said nothing is permanent, even before the courts could speak, there was more trouble in the thottam, as they used to say.

This is proof enough that when it is election time and the hunger for power in some is inexplicable, though perhaps understandable, policies, laws, rules and regulations could be twisted and turned to suit one’s immediate needs and to hell with morality, fair play and other gobbledegook mouthed by politicians before they fade into the sunset.

At a May Day rally in the hills to bestir plantation workers from their dire lives, President Wickremesinghe promised them an unexpected 70 percent salary hike, no doubt intending them to vote in support of a dull and dust UNP.

The Plantation companies that now run the state-owned estates on lease, reacted immediately saying they are in no position to meet the Rs 1700 wage hike given their own financial straits and the losses they have to bear in these economically hard times.

The government’s response was tough. Pay up or we take back the estates. One would have thought the capitalist and conservative-oriented UNP would play ball with the plantation class.

Not in an election year, my friend, not when tens of thousands of plantation workers have more votes than the plantation “periya dorais”.

Some see this as a state “land grab” to pass on the estates to their political cronies or foreign companies in keeping with what is increasingly becoming the Wickremesinghe government’s economic policy, partly to satisfy the IMF and other major lenders.

Then what happens? The three-state plantation companies cry broke and cannot meet the wage hike. So the government orders the Treasury and others to bail them out with state funds while the privately-run companies are threatened with a takeover.

Now can you think of better fair play? There is more to be said about fair play but lack of space precludes 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.)