Rajpal's Column

22nd March 1998

Batty showing some true colours

By Rajpal Abeynayake

Batty Weerakoon would have been born to have his name punned on. The old Trinitian was nicknamed way back in his Trinity college days, and the name stuck on. Weerakoon by some quirk was seen as some kind of anachronism, and the sobriquet Batty at times didn't seem to be a misnomer. Here was Batty going on about social equality and such, when the Soviet Union had collapsed and communism was for all intents and purposes dead. Batty, to be unkind, not only felt like an anachronism, he even seemed to look like an anachronism.

But then Batty and the brigade came to power, and it seemed as if the old left had revisited. Batty Weerakoon and the dear departed Bernard Soysa, bless him, belonged to a different avian when politicians looked as genteel as they actually were.

But when the old left hitched their wagon to the Chandrika led PA, things were looking the same for a while. Particularly Bernard was not about to give up on his old lifestyle of being politically genteel and non - partisan.

Bernard trundled along with the government, almost quaintly holding on to a portfolio that didn't fit him. because Science and Technology would not have exactly been Bernard's idea of a cabinet post.

But then Bernard died, and Batty Weerakoon graduated to the position of Minister. To put it as gently as possibly, there seem to be interesting developments that followed this turn of events. Batty Weerakoon has turned performer, and it is as if his gentility has been replaced with a pugnacious style that we ringside spectators never thought Batty was ever capable of .

Batty Weerakoon is now holding a brief for laissez-faire in the behaviour of the police to political opponents. He also seems to have been appointed the government's favourite hatchet man, even though there is nothing intrinsically quite wrong with that. So what's new about all this ? Batty is after all is a government politician who has a role to play as a front-bencher in parliament.

There is nothing wrong in Batty Weerakoon trying to prove to parliament and the people that the UNP was made up of a bunch of crooks. That is almost the role of the gentleman politician, , because Batty has to hold his colleagues accountable to the polity and the people.

But Batty Werrakoon, remember, is not a core member of the core party of the People's Alliance, which is the SLFP. As an old leftist of the Sama Samaja persuasion, Batty's association with the PA is as a conscientious ally, and that means that he is not a dyed in the blue party member. As a good ally, for example, the LSSP and the Communist Party maintained its own identity, and old campaigners like Colvin R de Silva were notoriously keen about maintaining that separate identity. Colvin even thought that he was smarter than Ms. Bandaranaike of the SLFP who had got to be Prime Minister because of the accident of circumstance. Both Colvin and NM behaved as if they would were merely marking time, before they would graduate as the leaders of the coalition and country. But, though that spirit was an overestimation, in retrospect it appears this helped them retain a sense of identity. The party was not subsumed by the larger United Front. It was a limb, that was finally detached when Ms. Bandaranaike accused the coalition partners of "vituperative politics'', and had them despatched from the party before the polls.

Though this is not to say that the old left did not become wimpish and weak after selling out to the Bandaranaike led SLFP, it is to merely make the point that the Colvin's and the NM's appeared to hold their own to some extent. This may have been because they were an arrogant lot who were convinced that they were intellectually ahead of the SLFP leadership. But the reasons notwithstanding, the old left, to say the least, didn't like to play second fiddle.

When Batty Weera-koon, and the much emasculated left joined the PA government, it appeared that they were joining the ruling coalition on this same basis. On many occasions, the left has played renegade and maintained their party profile within the coalition. But what's significant about Batty's post ministerial performance is that he has either politically become more expedient, or come of age, depending on the way you look at it. He is now Al Capone's team player.

Fundamentally, the long and the short of it is that Batty has taken up the position that the party should be defended, to hell with integrity and all that. He says Eppawela happened because the police culture ( and the political culture ) has changed because of the way the UNP behaved in government. The UNP asked for it, he presumes, therefore, the governments role is to look on as a helpless observer even when the UNP is being victimised by various goonda tribes. There are many problems with that argument, but it will be redundant to enumerate them here. Suffice to say that the PA came into power on a platform of fairplay, which includes fairplay by political opponents. If the PA came to power on a platform of not repeating what the PA did, isn't it an irony that coalition partners such as Batty support aggressive behaviour by saying the UNP has no right to talk? Batty the name was earned or what?

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