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Out there somewhere, the country’s national cricket team has been battered by bouncy and uneven pitches, weather and off-the-field discriminatory conditions that have not applied to some other participating teams, resulting in Sri Lanka being wiped out of the World T20 tournament.

That has angered millions of the country’s cricket aficionados, who have again called for Sri Lanka’s cricket administration to be deposited in some garbage dump, as it were, where they can repose, having long exhausted any usefulness to man or beast.

But this anger is surely outnumbered by the millions of countrymen and women already struggling with their rising ire and being aroused by the obvious puerile antics of local political figures who have probably not held a bat, save a pol piththa in their lives, trying to play pandu with the nation.

UNP general secretary Range Bandara

While our national cricketers might well have been laid to rest—only to be saved by the weather—by a nation in the Himalayas whose people are more accustomed to wielding the deadly kukri than a bat, in Sri Lanka’s capital, the UNP, known from the early days of our independence as the Uncle Nephew Party, is now proving the truth of that sobriquet.

Last month, UNP general secretary Range Bandara was sent into bat, one thought as a night watchman since in his previous avatar as a policeman he would have had experience as a night watchman.

But the next day he decided to swing his willow and even reverse swing despite a host of signals from the dressing room that he is no Chamari Athapaththu, not even an under-14 player batting at No 10.

How was one to know that it was a calculated risk by his boss himself to test the bowling skills of the opposition and the reactions of the public waiting anxiously for the test match four months hence?

Unknown to the rest of the UNP team except for one or two closest to the boss, Range Bandara’s instruction was to keep the ball off the wicket and try to steal a run or two.

His role was to prove to the world why the term of his boss, which was only stop-gap anyway, though he seemed to think it was as permanent as the Gal Vihara, should not be extended by a couple of years.

If that was all, Range Bandara may be forgiven for his loyalty to the head honcho. But he wanted 225 other staff jam-packed like Sri Lanka Cricket to also be given a two-year lease so they could collect their duty-free vehicles, pocket their pensions, and enjoy other perks instead of being booted out as the people wanted.

I really do not know from where he learned this wild stroke, but he seems to think that the constitution allows them to keep on batting for another two years. That might be true if the team captain was elected by the cricket-loving public and not if he was sent in as night watchman, so to say, to mind the store and not as a permanent fixture in the side, irrespective of what he and some of his cronies think of his prowess as a master craftsman.

As though Bandara’s constitutional gobbledygook is not enough to shock a public preparing for the big match come October, the UNP’s head honcho and Sri Lanka’s frequent flyer threw a spanner into the works that could have more convulsions for the country that is purportedly democratic and an ardent follower of the rule of law, as claimed at various times by those who rule Sri Lanka under different rules and different laws for different people.

Range Bandara’s intrusion was no diversion, as most think, but an early attempt by the boss himself, who has still not announced whether he would go into bat, though he won the toss by rather fortuitous means as his predecessor ran away from the playing field, leaving his boots behind.

The question was whether he could continue to bat without playing in the crucial October Test match that will decide the next captain.

But then he tarnished his own escutcheon, which some of his party people claim is respected worldwide after all the travel, from funerals to swearing-in and other international events, accumulating enough air miles.

While the poor chap is trying to sort out a myriad of problems and the IMF is actually playing the real boss, he will be careful about what he says and does. But if Uncle Junius Richard could pull a few tricks from up his sleeves and cause chaos in society as a precursor to rounding up the opposition and locking them up, why cannot his nephew play national head boy?

After all, tutored under Junius Richard the First after the UNP swept to power in 1977, he must have added more pages to his uncle’s book of tricks and fine-tuned them.

So, while JRJ appointed his friend and lawyer Neville Samarakoon as chief justice in the hope that the new CJ would do his bidding, it was not long before they fell out, and the president tried to push through an impeachment motion in parliament against Neville Samarakoon.

President Wickremesinghe’s move is more straightforward, though unprecedented since independence. With Attorney General Sanjay Rajaratnam due to retire on reaching 60 soon, the president is trying to bowl a Chinaman—to use cricketing parlance to pursue with the imagery—as left-arm spinners are wont to do.

There has been only one reason for breaking tradition and extending the term of an AG due to retire, as mentioned above.

But that reason—or excuse, as some prefer to call it—has been shot down in flames in a strong rebuke to the president by Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church.

The response by Cardinal Ranjit and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, stating in no uncertain terms that the position of the AG has been pivotal in dealing with the Church over the Easter Sunday terrorist attack, is “completely false”.

The CBCSL statement expresses “grave concern” that Rajaratnam who became AG in May 2021, “has failed over the past 36 months to implement the recommendations in the Easter Sunday Presidential Inquiry Final Report.

It says any connection between the Church and Rajaratnam “is false, misleading, and malicious.”

(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.)