Columns

At a campaign meeting in Matara last week, a rather irate President Anura Kumara Dissanayake turned his multi-barrelled big guns on some media and politicians for churning out carefully crafted misinformation to discredit his NPP government.

His anger was palpable for his rapid fire shot down Goebelsian mischief makers who misread the Nazi propagandists’ techniques and appeared to believe they had world enough and time to convert next month’s voters against the six-weak-old government for not fulfilling its promises and deceiving the country.

Some of the recent fabrications that hit the airwaves and escaped from the mouths of politicians and their acolytes seemed to have got Dissanayake’s goat. That was not surprising at all. For those tales of fiction could have come from Aesop’s collection of fables called Aesopica which tells of talking animals.

Even if they got AKD’s goat, they were more of lowly animals such as donkeys and asses who had misled the masses and crept into that Diyawanna Oya premises, the type of political nonentities their leaders wanted returned to that august assembly.

Why? So they could teach every incoming political novice how things are done by these master craftsmen who have run away with the country’s assets while their kith and kin looked posh with a Porsche under the porch and several other luxury vehicles hidden in the wife’s backyard.

But all AKD regaled the public with were not tales turned out in TV studios or customary fiction emanating from the mouths of politicians.

President Dissanayake repeated the story of a recent president who thought he needed 16 chefs to keep his culinary taste buds active. Why not. After all the worldly travel he did to keep this wretched country deposited in the dustbin (not without some prior help from friends and colleagues too who had cultivated their taste buds) and virtually forced to devour this cuisine and the others, his palate does appear to have developed a liking for international menus.

One must not grudge a man for having expanded his culinary appreciation. But what surely seems peculiar is that he had asked AKD for some additional perks such as 30 umbrellas.

So when President AKD used his oratorical skills to line up his critics in a firing squad and turn his verbal automatic at the ex-president, the NPP leader was not the only one who found a soft target.

His prime minister Harini Amarasuriya who had been told by the former president that if she wished to learn more about intricate lessons in governance, she should come to him for tuition, turned on him with a scattergun.

The first-time prime minister is learning fast about political rejoinder. She quickly targeted her opponent, who offered her free tuition, saying that she was hardly likely to select a teacher who failed to win an election 17 times, implying at the same time that the 30 free umbrellas her intended teacher sought were perhaps to cover his politically rejected and dejected face from the public.

But it is not these acerbic rejoinders and caustic dismissals of failed and failing politicians that the more conscious and thoughtful observers would have noticed from some comments made by one of the NPP’s chosen experts, who has not been quite in the public eye as far as I know.

While one can understand the rising ire of leaders—and now the president of recent days—at the myth-makers and “B” grade story tellers and their search for public attention, the more serious issues that deal with national security and other vital legal questions that have been raised for decades and more locally and internationally with deep concern are being responded to and commented on rather superficially and even lackadaisically by so-called experts, some conveniently ensconced in the presidential secretariat that was once the principal target of public resentment.

The fundamental issue is this. Here is a few weeks’ old government with the smallest cabinet feeling its way into running a country with multiple problems on its plate including fundamental economic and security issues and long-troubling social divisiveness.

It is still waiting to form a proper government after this month’s elections. It is a time when the government led by the NPP is labelled as Marxist because of its past, or more congenially now as a left-inclined alliance of a host of political, trade union, and civil society organisations.

But it is still being bombarded by its dispirited but still pervasive and aggressive critics determined to strangle it at its birth. Hence the recent attempt to undermine the new government and pierce it with political, legal, and religious barbs before the NPP could sever its umbilical cord.

That task has been undertaken by a national-religious ‘jihadist’ of a different kind.

If so this is surely the time when serious issues raised by serious media and not what we used to call half-past six journalism should be dealt with by senior members of the government and not those experts that fill in the blanks that are created by any new government.

One might remember that the politically naive and with little or no knowledge of governance, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa let the so-called experts of the Viyathmaga provide him with policy solutions and unheard-of alternatives, ultimately leaving the misled president ‘atharamaga’.

It was the Gotabaya fiasco that came to mind when I read the other day words expressed by some chap called J.M. Wijebandara, designated Presidential Secretariat Director (Legal).

A lot of horse manure has come out of that institution since the days it was converted from what was the original Parliament. Reading Mr. Wijebandara’s remarks on the highly obnoxious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and its even more atrocious child, one would have thought that the NPP, now under a paler pink than the carmine red that its JVP nucleus once sported, would present a people’s democratic demeanour as it did at election time.

Indeed, the NPP manifesto wore a human face and its alliance called in parliament for the abolition of this atrocious piece of garbage that the Ranil Wickremesinghe turned into law.

Limited space does not permit an exegesis of the PTA and the latest law, but Mr. Wijebandara’s words reek of nonsense. He says with great judicial high-mindedness there is nothing wrong with this law. Of course, it has been condemned around the world as one that tramples on the fundamental rights of the people, their right to free expression, association, dissent, and the rule of law which is fundamental for a democratic society.

But Mr. Wijebandara dismisses this cavalierly. He says that “the issue was about the misuse of the PTA against civil activists and journalists, which we will not allow.” Thank you, Mr. Wijebandara; that is so kind of you.”

But one question. Besides the categories you name, it seems you don’t care a damn if it is misused against others—for instance, briefless lawyers parading the streets or women fighting for their gender rights—a question you might pose to Dr. Harini Amarasuriya.

Since I’ve run out of space a couple of quickies. Could you please tell me who decides what is “misuse” and what is not—I mean, long before it leads to a judicial reckoning? With your logic, or whatever you might call it, you will not allow the law to be misused. Pray what happens when you are kicked out and another crazy lot takes over and locks you up, saying it certainly is not misuse from their standpoint.

After all, you are surely making it easier for them to misuse it—you are leaving behind the law in the statute books with repealing it, making it more difficult for them to make it law again.

Secondly, could you kindly define for me “terrorism” as it so means in these laws?

(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.)