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• NPP attorney-at-law’s shocking attempt to justify her false pre-poll ‘Uganda’ claim by Marxist dictum’s ‘the end justifies the means’

After an elating sojourn in some exotic undiscovered island, from whose utopian bourn an NPP parliamentarian returned last week, bringing with her what seemed to be an old NPP edition of Paine’s Rights of Man, and proceeded to hold, it’s an absolute, fundamental right of the free and sovereign people of Lanka to tell a lie, knowing well it’s untrue, as if it was the gospel truth.

Kalutara district NPP MP Nilanthi Kottahachchi declared at an event in Kalutara: “We tell the people of Lanka, you have a complete right to tell any truth as a falsehood and to tell any lie as if it were the truth. It is a democratic right which this government will never curtail but will always protect.”

THE MASK: A person masked as a grandma sarcastically asks Kottahachchi when she will bring the stolen money from Uganda

Where in the world did NPP MP Kottahachchi get this ludicrous notion from? Did she learn it at Law College while studying as a law student, taught at lectures, or while attending a mock debate in the hall on the subject? Or heard while eavesdropping on law students’ banter in the Law College canteen downstairs? Or in the chambers of a senior attorney under whom she did her pupillage?

Did she learn it while she was a member of Namal’s ‘Nil Brigade’? Or imbibe this grotesque distortion of the law and people’s rights in the mandatory classes held before she could be initiated as a full-fledged member of the JVP? Or had it rubbed into her when she became a promising candidate to be fielded at the Kalutara elections this year? Did she see it in the present Constitution, which she swore to uphold before a full bench of the Supreme Court when taking oaths? Or find it proposed as a new fundamental right in the future JVP Constitution while it was being drafted?

NPP MP KOTTAHACHCHI: Purveyor of the absolute right to tell a lie as a truth and the truth as a lie

Or did she merely dream this gobbledygook and assume it was so in reality upon waking? From whatever unknown bourn she may have picked up this absolute trash, it’s clear she has made it her creed, and to parrot it to a naive people as gospel truth, her duty.

Does she realise the consequences of telling the people they have a complete right to tell a lie as an absolute truth and to tell that a truth is an absolute lie when neither right exists in Lanka or anywhere else in the world? Except, perhaps, as a figment of her imagination.

Does she realise that as an attorney–at–law of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, she has a sacred duty to show extra diligence and a greater responsibility to maintain the respect afforded to the Rule of Law; and do naught that may tend to lower or bring into contempt the esteem in which it is held by the people?

What made her convey as an attorney-at-law the impression that the people have an absolute right to knowingly violate a long unchallenged truth and to paint it as a lie? Or that the people have a complete right to add a dollop of varnish for good measure to hide the coarseness of the naked lie and pass it off as an absolute truth? Especially when lawyer Nilanthi Kottahachchi knows full well that neither exists in Lanka’s statute books. Nor in the world, for that matter.

In her pre-election speeches at JVP rallies, she said that the stolen billions from public coffers were stashed, concealed in Uganda by the Rajapaksas, will be brought back to Lanka and returned to the public for their benefit. It struck a powerful chord in the people’s breasts. But recently she said that she had known all along that the stolen billions she had referred to earlier were, in fact, Ugandan legal currency printed by a foreign security printing company to fulfil a Uganda government order. A prime example of how attorney Nilanthi can turn a truth into a celebrated lie that everyone believes is genuinely true.

But has Nilanthi realised the terrible damage that would be caused to the reputations of countless innocent men and women? The bizarre right to make a frog a prince and a prince a frog can be used to turn the guilty into paragons of virtue.

If the people believe that it’s their complete right to tell a lie as if it was the truth, then the people can tell the lie that Nilanthi Kottahachchi is a bogus lawyer with forged qualifications or that she had sat for her law exams in the principal’s room alone with the principal himself, who had answered the Law College question paper, and spread it as a confirmed truth as directly witnessed by another student who had to flee the country in fear of his life and seek political asylum in Australia.

Or the people can tell the considered truth about a respectable woman who is beyond reproach and parrot the lie of her having the morals of a hussy and make it stick.

What if this complete right, as advocated by attorney Kottahachchi, should utterly destroy the painstakingly built reputation of a good, honest politician whose moral rectitude is above question by the complete right of the people to tell any malicious lie that he’s a notorious drug dealer who also owns a string of brothels that pose as spas?

Would such a complete right serve the interest of justice? Or does justice play its vital role only in the long-forgotten Ecclesiastical Courts of yore, where the seeker had to come with clean hands to receive justice on a platter?

If this 35-year-old attorney Kottahachchi’s assertion that it is the untrammelled right of the people to tell a lie disguised as truth or to tell a truth disguised as a lie, it amounts to a travesty of justice.

By claiming that such an absolute right exists when no such right exists, Kottahachchi has opened the sluice gates of the sewers, led the people astray and traduced lawyers as liars, who will lie through their teeth to achieve their ignoble ends.

It will be a shame if the devious ‘Kottahachchi maxim’ become an institutionalised truth, to justify Goebel’s ‘lie, lie, lie, some will stick’ policy undeterredly.

Dr. Archchuna banned entry to Jaffna Teaching Hospital Boorish Jaffna district Dr Archchuna, who danced the devil at the Jaffna Teaching Hospital earlier this month, has now suffered the worst insult no self-respecting doctor can ever receive without coming to grief. His self-inflicted shame that has left him indelibly stained comes after the director of the Jaffna Teaching Hospital banned him entry to the hospital premises, except as a patient in need of medical treatment. The hospital authorities have also taken no chances. They have placed the hospital’s security guards on red alert. They have been instructed to prevent Dr. Archchuna from entering the hospital premises. In the event of him slipping through the security dragnet, to nab Dr. Archchuna and hand him over to the Jaffna Police. The hospital’s orders follow the Jaffna Magistrate’s decision two weeks ago to ban Dr. Archchuna from entering the Jaffna Teaching Hospital. In the case filed against Dr. Archchuna, the Jaffna Magistrate adjourned the case till February next year and released him on a Rs. 100,000 bail with the condition that Dr. Archchuna strictly ‘Keeps Out’ from the Jaffna Hospital premises. Accordingly, the hospital authorities have informed Dr. Archchuna he can only enter the hospital on humanitarian grounds, as a patient in need of medical treatment. What shame it brings to a doctor, sworn to uphold the Hippocratic oath, to run amok like a bull in a China shop when he’s on hallowed ground where the quietude of the sick and the terminally ill are paramount concerns. As the Sunday Punch commented on December 15, “At a media briefing held in Jaffna this Tuesday, Director of Jaffna Teaching Hospital, Dr T Sathyamoorthy, told reporters that over 2,000 patients visit Jaffna Teaching Hospital daily for treatment, which makes proper supervision extremely essential. OUT OF BOUNDS BY COURT ORDER: The Jaffna Teaching Hospital, the only teaching hospital in the Northern Province On the day in question, Dr.Archchuna had arrived at the Teaching Hospital without notice. Dr. Archchuna had attempted to meet him without permission, and in the process had disrupted hospital staff from carrying out their duties. ‘When Archchuna finally gained entry and met Dr. Sathyamoorthy, he had insisted upon being addressed as ‘sir’. “I refused,” said Dr. Sathyamoorthy, Director of the hospital. “I told him I will address him as an ‘honourable member of Parliament’ instead, He shouted at me and said, ‘You should address me as sir whether you like it or not. He threatened to summon me to Parliament for questioning and to take steps to have me removed from my position as hospital director’. The Director of Jaffna Teaching Hospital, Dr. Sathyamoorthy said: ‘If Dr. Archchuna visits the hospital again and disrupts its operations, he will be captured and handed over to the Jaffna Police.’” Now Dr Sathyamoorthy can do it without fear of legal repercussions, armed as he is with a court order banning the troublemaker from entering the premises. So much for Dr Archchuna’s arrogant claim that he is the true voice of the northern people, whom he addressed in his maiden parliamentary speech as ‘My beloved people of Eelam’. DR ARCHCHUNA BANNED: Can only come as a patient By his vile, erratic behaviour, staged no less than at the Teaching Hospital in Jaffna, showing callous indifference to the well-being of patients — his ‘beloved people of’Eelam’ — which moved a court to ban him, Dr Archchuna has disgraced his noble profession, betrayed the Hippocratic Oath, ruined public perception of doctors as Gods on earth, and stands charged with conduct unbecoming of a doctor and—lately—a member of Parliament, as a lawmaker in Sri Lanka’s supreme legislature. The sooner we see the last of this inane attention seeker, the better it will be for all Lankans, including his beloved people of Eelam’. They gave short shrift to their representative to Diyawanna by giving the legal boot to stay clear of their hospital. No worse a shameful fate could fall upon a man who, by his cocky arrogance, has earned public opprobrium to the last measure.