Serves the UNP damn right then, for retaining notorious bad hats in its fold. This election was not about the UNP. But from this week it will be. For the first time in the history of parliament, one parliamentarian stands suspected of killing another by personally pulling the trigger on his colleague. This is definitely the nadir in these matters.
The obvious needs to be underlined in these times when there is nothing that is really held sacred. Even if the law has to be changed, the killers of Nalanda Ellawala should be sentenced to death in the courts of this land. Parliamentarians or not, the common pond scum which reasoned that pumping some bullets into a rival is their political comeuppance, should be eliminated.
Next comes the hardly appropriate attitude of both the government and the opposition after the event. There has not been any real sense of regret voiced on the part of the leader of the opposition on the fact that Susantha Punchinilame was retained in the UNP list despite his being an accused in a crime that was only equal to the one that was allegedly committed by him last week.
A murder is a murder. Then why is that message lost on the two major political parties which always think nothing of playing politics with death? There is no need to make political theatre out of murder because that can only impart the message that murder in politics is somehow different. But, in murder, there is no line between politics and 'real life'.
Then, why were politicians and their various sidekicks in the form of Journalists, academics and other Jack-in-the-boxes continuing to filter the facts of this murder to suit their own petty political sensitivities? Some tried to make out that Nalanda was slain at the spur of the moment in some kind of schoolboyish fracas. For others, it was only an occasion to make political speeches.
It was the supreme insult that could be paid to the defenceless young man whose only crime appears to be that he was a member of Parliament.
Nalanda Ellawala was definitely privileged, but that's not a crime either. The public took to him the way they took to Sarath Muttetuwegma that other gentleman politician from Ratnapura who also met with a tragic death close to those same parts of town.
Nalanda was youthful, a sweet prince more than mature seasoned campaigner. Incognito, he was seen in various parts of town - the CCC club, the political seminar, social evening here and there. No bodyguards and henchmen were hovering round him, at least not inside these places.
It was almost as if he refused to be the hard scrabble politician, because being youthful, he probably resisted growing up before his time. It is double the tragedy that he had to die in the gangster hurly burly of politics, the part of politics he eschewed.
Nalanda Ellawala was a product of S. Thomas', Mount Lavinia. He had an almost Kennedyesque ride in politics, and there is no doubt about the fact that he had a glorious future. His father proved adept at handling the rising thugs corporation in Ratnapura, though he was by far not a thug himself.
I met him in Ratnapura before a notoriously tense by-election, and he (Ellawala snr) told me that the UNP thugs didn't bargain for his sort.
He was right. Once, Nanda Ellawala bared his torso in parliament and asked the opposition MPs whether they noticed the scars he had on his upper body. The UNP of course couldn't keep Nanda Ellawala out of parliament.
Ellawala junior had not exactly acquired that temperament yet. But if not the rest of the country, at least Ratnapura knew the extent of acrimony between the Punchinilames and the Ellawalas. Suffice to say that the greens in Ratnapura definitely hit below the belt.
After the Thrima Witharana case, in which Susantha Punchinilame was accused of killing two campus students by the gruesome method of driving nails into their heads, the family became persona non grata in politics. Punchinilame Senior did not get his nomination, and he eventually died of natural causes.
But, the general apprehension about this tribe was quickly allowed to die as time went on. At the very best the UNP was thoughtless about the consequences, at the worst the UNP wanted to retain old loyalists despite the blot on their names. So, it was politics as usual.
Sarath Muttetuwegama, Athula Attygalle, Nalanda Ellawala were all men of promise who died violently in Ratnapura though violence by motor car in Muttetuwegama's case was the only, mitigated tragedy. Though Athula Attygalle's killing was probably over a private land dispute, the killing of a public figure should not be followed by business as usual. But obviously the contemporary political culture of violence has inbred that attitude.
Murders are seen and dissected in our age in political terms. This goes for high profile killings such as Athulathmudali's and Vijaya Kumaratunga's and the murders of political hoipolloi and henchmen who also have the same right to life as their bosses. (Ellawala was certainly no hoipolloi or henchman, but many politically related murders don't get this kind if coverage.)
It is in the context that 'our party man was killed by their party man' that these murders have become important. Who among the babel of voices that have been raised today are concerned about Nalanda Ellawala's killing because the victim was a young man who was only 29 and because he had a right to succeed in whatever he does, live, marry and have children like anybody else? (That interpretation may sound banal to the minds which see every killing as a political opportunity, which is of course precisely the attitude and mindset which has bred today's culture of "kill and let be".
A physical disarmament of politicians and henchmen is a necessity. Except in the cases of ministers who are obvious targets of the LTTE, other politicians should not be allowed to possess various assortments of lethal weapons. But what is lost in this furry of voices calling for disarmament is that the political culture cannot be cleansed only by taking away its physical manifestations!
That old sane and healthy concept of sanctity of life can only be brought back by refusing to see the killings themselves as weapons.
But for contemporary politicians this seems to be too large a step to take. It seems glaringly obvious that UNP political hoodlums got rid of Nalanda, and as said earlier, they deserve nothing short of the death sentence.
To return politics to sanity then, murders have to be seen as murders and not as party appurtenances in which one killing becomes more important than another depending on who is in power and what kind of political advantage can be eked out of each death. Save us the sermons, and find the killers.
At least one good thing can come out of Ellawala's senseless assassination. The assurance that punishing killers is not a political thing but a social imperative in any society that calls itself civilised.
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