Your Sunday Times highlights for this week

Read this week's Sunday Times for your interesting articles including the "5th Column".

Among tomorrow's articles are:

-  Crop damaging animal census yields scattered, sporadic results 

- In capital contests, some well-worn upper case names

- Tamil Nadu Govt's duplicity in illegal fishing exposed 

- Report proposes tougher laws against drivers to stem second largest cause of deaths

- Handicapped legal aid does not deliver what it promises 

The 5th Column's full text is as follows; 

My dear Uncle Ranil,

I thought I must write to you because everyone is talking about you once again, although you say you are not in active politics. This is after that controversial interview you had with a journalist from a foreign network. Many thought you had come off second best- though I am sure you would disagree!

It is true that you were asked some difficult questions. It did seem as if the interviewer was briefed, well prepared and armed with a variety of statements from different sources, but you weren’t. Even so, with your experience of almost fifty years in politics, we thought you should have done better.

When you were asked about Batalanda for example, could you not have said that Satellite, who was your principal political rival at the time, appointed a commission to look into it but did nothing about its findings. Wouldn’t that be smarter than saying that there is no document tabled in Parliament?    

Now, Batalanda has suddenly become a can of worms that the rathu sahodarayas would love to open, even though the findings of the commission are twenty-five years old. After all, most of the alleged victims were reportedly from their party, so it is ironic that this has to happen when they are in office.

You were asked about the Easter Day attacks and whether you could have done more to prevent it. You could have easily pointed out that, as you have done earlier, that Aiyo Sirisena didn’t invite you to meetings of the Security Council and that you were kept in the dark by him, despite being his PM.

Instead you began talking about the ‘politics’ of the Catholic Church. Regardless of whether your views had some merit or not, that did come across as quite petty rather than statesmanlike. It also allowed the interviewer to claim that you were being dismissive about an event that cost many lives.

You were quizzed about not prosecuting the ‘R’ clan. You could have argued that your hands were tied because you were working with a Parliament that depended on the support of the ‘R’ clan to take the country out of a crisis. Instead you thought you can get away by passing the buck to the AG’s office.

You spoke as if the ‘AG’s office’ was an absolutely independent institution, which was led by officers of impeccable integrity who did nothing but what they thought was right in law, disregarding what the government of the day wanted them to do. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, Uncle Ranil!

Listening to all this, it looked as if there were times when you made matters worse for yourself. Trying a few times to end the interview and walk away and telling the interviewer that you had been in politics before he was born made you look arrogant and didn’t endear yourself to anyone.  

Having said all this, I must also say that the interviewer was no Larry King or Amanpour, but more like an English version of some of our local boys. He kept talking over you, not allowing you to complete your answers. He need not be deferential, but he should not have been rude either.

Some of the interviewer’s assumptions were also ridiculous. He found fault with you first for cutting a birthday cake with Mahinda maama despite him being a political rival and then for attending the Queen’s funeral when the country was bankrupt. I don’t think he was naïve, he was just diabolical.

The questions fired at you from two of the panellists and the audience were also hopelessly one-sided focusing on the war against terrorism which most of the audience didn’t see as such. Someone has ensured that you faced a hostile audience and you seem to have readily walked into that trap!

That brings us to ask you, Uncle Ranil, why you chose to do this interview at all? You have said several times in recent months that you are no longer interested in politics. Wouldn’t you have been better off getting some rest and respite, reading your books and watching movies on Netflix?

We saw you at Sirikotha the other day talking to party organisers, so it looks as if you are still very involved with running the Green party. Unfortunately, if you had any hopes of returning to the political arena, this interview would have done more to hurt those chances than to promote it.

Some people seem to derive joy from of seeing your discomfort at this interview which is why they said the ‘Ferrari has crashed’. We see it as a former leader of the country in front of a belligerent interviewer and a hostile audience in an encounter that was unnecessary. It was not a sight to behold.

Yours truly,

Punchi Putha

PS- In a strange kind of way, Uncle Ranil, what happened to you is similar to what happened to the cricket team of your old school, Royal, last week at their big match. You went into the encounter thinking that you would make a ‘fearless declaration’ but you ended up losing the game!