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Adani’s winds of power blow cold
View(s):Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s billion dollar project to set up a network of power windmills in northern Lanka was first inked by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, with the power purchase price set at 8 dollar cents per unit for twenty years.
The Adani Group had first made a backdoor entry during the Gotabaya years in 2022, but its existence had been kept under wraps until a Sunday Times investigative report brought it to public light.
JVP Anura Kumara had, on the eve of last year’s presidential election, sworn that, if elected, he “will definitely cancel it, as it threatens our energy sovereignty.”
BILLIONAIRE ADANI: Pulls out, fed up
After winning the presidency of Lanka last year, as the elected heir to Ranil’s ‘Adani’s wind power’ bequeathment, President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka was in no rush to disown his inheritance. On his return from India, he seemed, as the British used to say, ‘gone native’ and acquired a taste for all things Indian, including Indian billionaire tycoons. He had finally shed the rabid anti-Indian phobia the JVP had held as its Bible of faith for donkey’s years.
All that was in the bad old past, before Anura Kumara had emerged from a JVP cocoon and, metamorphosised from worm to butterfly, had soared to take his reformed place at the head of the negotiating table, with an open mind and new outlook, to practise the ‘art of the deal’ with hard-nosed foreign direct investors. They would fight tooth and nail to get a penny more and stubbornly refuse to yield a penny less.
Evidence that the new president, Anura Kumara, had transcended the JVP culture of hate was clearly shown on his return from India in December last year, after rubbing shoulders with some of the country’s leading figures.
A week before Christmas last year, Reuters had reported on how Adani was embroiled in a Bangladeshi scandal. A Bangladeshi court had called for an official investigation into a deal signed 8 years ago by ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, of supplying power for 25 years from a 2 billion dollar power plant in the rural state of Jharkhand.
And if that weren’t enough of a scandal to go around, more scandalous winds blew from the United States, where Adani was already facing allegations by US federal authorities that he was part of a 265 million dollar bribery scheme in India—charges he has denied.
It was certainly not the best of times for Adani. At a time when other world leaders would avoid him like the plague or wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole; it was refreshing, indeed, to see President Anura Kumara embrace Adani to his breast.
On December 18, shortly after his Indian summer, President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka, instead of launching an attack on Adani’s questionable deals overseas–as one would have expected him to do to shame Ranil’s wind power deal with Adani–turns his focus on clearing Adani’s scandal-hit track record abroad.
In an interview with The Economic Times, President Anura Kumara says, “We do not have any concerns over how Adani works with other countries. What is important for us is how they work with us. If they have worked in a manner that suits us and fits our initiatives, we do not mind working with the Adani Group.”
With these few words, Anura Kumara declares open the financial gateway to foreign direct investors, no matter their backgrounds, as long as it benefits Sri Lanka’s economy. In the late seventies, it was in the same manner that President JR invited foreign investors when he said, “Let the Robber Barons come.”
In her own words, as she said recently of the government’s adherence to the IMF programme, IMF Chief Ms. Kristalina Georgieva will probably say, “Bravo, that’s the way to go, man.”
Adani answered Anura’s call without a blink of his eye. With most of the spade work done during Ranil’s time, only a few formalities remained. With price per unit of power and validity period settled, and the required permissions obtained, except the pending approval from the environmental agency, Adani’s billion dollar wind power project, awaited only the countdown to begin. Even the Government appointed Commission had given it the nod. But for some inexplicable reason, the government appointed another commission to review the findings of the first. It provoked disaster to strike at the heart of the deal.
On February 12, a furious Adani called the whole deal off. But was the government unduly worried? No. The standard para found at the end of the international company letter when rejecting a government project, “We remain committed to Sri Lanka and are open to future collaboration if the Lankan government so desires,” kept JVP hearts still brimming with hope.
What made resurrection more difficult was the high-horse attitude of the government that there were far better offers from Australia and America with the price per unit below 8 dollar cents, including one from a local outfit. The Hindu reported a top Energy Ministry official as saying, “Colombo is not seeking to renegotiate the contentious renewable energy project with Adani.”
However, when nothing transpired, not even a windmill puff of a deal, the government grovelled back to Adani to shamelessly beg on its knees, “Please, come back.”
On Thursday, Adani, rejecting reports of offering 7 cents instead of 8, gave the final brush-off to the wind power project in Lanka. Pity. The winds that blew hot when Ranil signed the half-a-billion-dollar deal abruptly began to blow cold and took to its wings and sped when Anura started insisting on a couple of cents less, far beyond Lanka’s hemisphere.
Will they ever return?
The answer may be ‘blowing in the wind’.
| ‘I spy with my little eye’ game for nation in rilaw count thrall I SPY—the game played by children to fill hours of boredom—was played last Saturday as a national endeavour by the entire nation in attempting to spot rilaws in their gardens, with the whole exercise hailed a complete success by the government media. The state-owned ITN began its 6pm news bulletin by calling the national rilaw counting day a ‘tremendous success’, never undertaken before by past Sri Lankan governments. And the great enterprise which had been hyped all week as the first rilaw survey ever done in Lanka’s 2500-year recorded history—one that even Lanka’s kings had never commanded to be done—even made international headlines.  RILAW COUNTDOWN: See no evil, talk no evil, do no evil but only to be seen and counted by humans In fact, the BBC treated the groundbreaking rilaw survey news as worthy of filling the last slot, specially reserved for strange and weird events from around the world, designed to end each news broadcast with a spoonful of humour to make the preceding dosage of tragic, acrid, serious and important news easily go down for its viewers. The elated pioneer of this rilaw counting national exercise, to whom all the credit must belong, Deputy Agriculture Minister Namal Karunaratne, hailed last Saturday’s rilaw survey as a complete success. “My wife and son had counted three rilaws on my 60-perch land, but I didn’t stay there,” he said. Obviously the minister, as the man in charge of the whole rilaw operation, had a bigger appetite for rilaws, and a measly three rilaws would hardly do to fill his scorecard with impressive rilaw numbers. He said, “I went to Weragala Rajamaha Vihare’s temple grounds. The monks also assisted me in counting the rilaws present.” And sure there were. Plenty. The sprawling temple grounds were certainly more up his rilaw street. It is here that he comes alive as the man of the hour. A news video shows him directing operations as if born to command rilaw counting missions. But the haul of rilaws the temple ground offers proves too much for even Namal Karunaratne’s counting skills. He bravely begins by counting one rilawa, then 2, then 3, then 4, and makes it up to the 13th, and then gives up his valiant effort to count all the rilaws spotted. He barks the command to his minions, ‘poto, poto take poto, and we can count them later.” That wraps up his own personal rilaw counting exercise for the day. And in a similar manner may have ended the rilaw counting exercise for millions who may have answered the government’s call last Saturday more: by putting up their hands in deep despair and giving up on the national endeavour when counting rilaws proved too much of a challenge. Without a smartphone coming in handy at the anointed hour, they would have simply filled the government-printed official rilaw survey sheet with numbers taken from air. But as Namal declared and the government media confirmed, the government’s national rilaw counting exercise was a ‘complete success’. What does the final tally reveal? What does the dossier that gives the lowdown on the number of rilaws and other pests that stormed tens of thousands of Lanka’s garden plots and agricultural fields and boldly stood up and even exposed their rears to be counted, rilaw for rilaw, and monkey for monkey, for 5 minutes early last Saturday at the auspicious hour of 8am, indicate about their morning routine of living off the land as farmers do to sate their hungry appetites? What useful purpose will the final result—if and when it is ever released—of The Grand Sri Lanka Rilaw Survey ever serve, other than making the Guinness Book of Records? In the crackdown on the rilaw population, will the numbers obtained from 5-minute ad hoc sightings, double counting or through guesswork be used to determine the exact numbers of condoms to be distributed to randy rilaws in the bid to prevent excessive rilaw births? Or will the agriculture minister Lalkantha, who has so far maintained a low profile, be marshalled into the war effort? As the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu expounded in his book on The Art of War, ‘Know thy enemy as thyself’, will the statistic gleaned from the rilaw survey results help Lal Kantha gauge the strength of the enemy before applying the Final Solution to the rilaw menace, as did the Nazis to the Jewish question? Whatever plan the government has up its sleeve, it hasn’t divulged it yet. Or is that, too, part of the plan, taken from a leaf out of Sun Tzu’s book, to keep it top secret? Or is the government, on the pretext of a Rilaw Survey, testing the ground for a massive crackdown on drug dealers? To gauge their strength—as per Sun Tzu’s advice—before the war begins, will the public be asked at some future specified date and auspicious time when planets align to gather opposite designated schools, construction sites, discos and nightclubs, and other infamous haunts where drug dealers usually appear, prowling for suckers to peddle their wares, and count each one spotted? It will become the Domesday Book, the official record of the Great National Survey of Sri Lanka’s Number One Public Enemy, and act as the precursor for the battle to begin to end this public plague for good. PS: A way to keep rilaw at bay from invading agricultural fields is to liberally spray the boundaries with leopard urine. This will effectively make foraging rilaws beware of leopards on the prowl. This novel idea stems from some ‘bright spark’ official at the Agricultural Ministry, as a means of reducing crop damage. Perhaps a mass shramadhana campaign is on the cards to rally the people to participate in another bout of patriotic endeavour to seek, find and collect urine from leopards.
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| OOPS! Foreign Minister Herath completely at sea over ASEAN Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath seemed to be all at sea where exactly Sri Lanka was sited on the world map. South Asia, or Southeast Asia, was the billion-dollar diplomatic question that led to the diplomatic gaffe of applying for membership of ASEAN, the closely knit exclusive club of nations in the Southeast Asian region. Addressing Parliament last Saturday, during the committee stage of the budget debate on his foreign affairs ministry, Minister Vijitha Herath gushed the good news: ‘Sri Lanka has applied for membership of ASEAN.’ Furthermore, he was confident of gaining membership of ASEAN. Obviously, there was some mistake, no doubt, some misconception as to what ASEAN actually represented on the world stage. However, when he said, “Sri Lanka is not likely to gain membership of BRICS, as the organisation is not expected to expand its membership immediately,” there was tremendous relief that, at least, the minister was not a fish out of water completely but had learnt from the President’s blunder that BRICS was open to all pro-Putin nations.  FOREIGN MINISTER HERATH: Diplomatic gaffe But the damage was done. The Daily Mirror’s online edition carried the headline: ‘Sri Lanka will gain ASEAN membership soon: Minister.’ Experienced readers wondered whether it was the mandarins at the Foreign Office to blame for making the minister blush, rouged in dark red, or whether it was the JVP-appointed committee of 5 that should take the rap for failing to advise the minister that the fit and proper club for Sri Lanka to be in was SAARC, not ASEAN. But soon the gaffe was rectified when he told the Daily Mirror later, “It was a mistake. We have not sought membership of ASEAN. We are seeking an ASEAN Sectoral Dialogue Partnership. We applied for the same in 2019 and will be submitting a new work plan shortly for the same. It was my mistake.” That’s more like it. But the moving finger writes, as Omar Khayyam says, and having writ in the Parliamentary Hansard, moves on. And not all thy corrections nor thy amendments in newspapers will wash one word of it in the Hansard. His advisers—whosoever they are who enjoy the minister’s trust—should have known better than to put the minister in a spot by sending him to Parliament to answer questions during the committee stage of the budget debate regarding their own ministry without briefing him first. For such gross dereliction of duty, they must receive the most severe punishment, with their heads chopped and spiked on wooden posts, as a warning to other wannabe treacherous deceivers of the minister’s trust and confidence.
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