Opinion

A singular modern Lankan mentor – Part III

Published

12 months ago

2025/02/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Prof. Obeyesekere (L) at a ritualistic event

by Laleen Jayamanne and Namika Raby

Gananath Obeysekere: In search of Buddhist conscience
(Baudha Hurdasakshiya Soya)

(Part II of this article appeared in The Island on Monday – 03)

Tissa Ranasinghe’s and Gananath’s Kannagi

Gananath’s Pattini book has a mysterious blue-black cover with an icon of Kannagi in Bronze sculpted by Lanka’s foremost Modernist sculptor Tissa Ranasinghe, commissioned by Gananath. What Appadurai termed Lanka’s links with ‘Indic culture’ is encapsulated in this image of the heroic figure Kannagi from the Tamil epic, striking a gesture of mourning for her husband Kovalan, unjustly killed by the king of Madurai. She kneels with her arms held raised around her head in the familiar triangular formation suggestive of the aniconic representation of the Yoni (an emblematic civilisational gesture of great iconic strength and power, in the Bronze lineage of India, which stretches back to the little bronze figurine of The Dancing Girl of Monhenjodaro itself), even as she laments the injustice. And those of us who know the legend also see that her left breast is missing. Kannagi, it is told, tore her breast and hurled it at the city of Madurai, setting it on fire with her righteous anger! Together, Gananath and Tissa have presented Kannagi in a most generative posture and gesture for the cover of the book on the Sinhala Pattini cult, the only Mother goddess of the Sinhala folk, borrowed from the Tamil Epic, to assuage and heal Sinhala male sexual anxieties and group trauma. This marvelous collaboration between Lanka’s celebrated Modernist Sculptor and Anthropologist was a multivalent, therapeutic intervention into Lanka’s cyclical interethnic violence. The book was published in 1984, one year after the state sponsored pogram against Tamils in July ‘83. Tissa’s modernist Kannagi demonstrates how an archaic ‘Maternal Archetype’ can be creatively mobilised by an artist, to express contemporary predicaments without diluting her orginal power and affective vitality magnified by the use of bronze, a resonant civilisational material.

Pattini is the Sinhala Buddhist incarnation of the Tamil heroic Kannagi and as far as I can tell she appears not to have the iconographic attributes of heroic rage and righteous anger which Kannagi embodies in the Tamil Epic. Kannagi is the step mother of Manimekalai who became a Buddhist nun, according to legend. Is it the case that Pattini is without progeny and so, as a Mother Goddess, rather like the West Asian mother Goddesses who were also virgins? As a girl, my mother and I were devoted to rituals of Mother Mary (mother of Jesus), also known as the Virgin-Mary from, let’s not forget, West Asia (in historic Palestine).

Professor Sunil Ariyaratne’s 2016 film Pattini, warrants a passing comment or two in this context as an example of the institutional consolidation of Neo-Liberal capitalist extraction and commodification of the residual vitality and power of the perennial syncretic Folk traditions of Lanka. It is a neo-traditionalist extravaganza in the genre of nostalgic revival of ‘the Sinhala-Buddhist Folk Heritage of Lanka’ which flourished recently with much fanfare and state patronage as a ‘Rajapaksha genre’. The film deals with the Kannagi legend just so as to reduce it to reinforcing the Sinhala-Buddhist ideology of purity and virginity for women through the exemplary tale of ‘the pure wife’ Kannagi and her step-daughter Manimekala, who becomes a Tamil Buddhist. Her dearest wish is to be reborn as a male so that she can indeed aspire to become a Buddha. The emphasis is on the preservation of virginity (Pathiwatha), and the enthroning of male sexuality as the route to attaining Buddhahood. The mythic epic figure of Kannagi who in her rage enacts heroic justice in the Tamil epic is converted into a parabolic emblem of virginal purity.

A Humanist Education

Gananath’s education is a strand very comprehensively covered in the film, a source of his immense openness to the world of ideas and refusal to accept them on authority without critical evaluation. The film opens at Gananath’s home in Kandy which he shares with Professor Ranjini Obeysekere who appears with her vibrant intellect and grace and ends there too. The couple are shown warmly welcoming the film crew to their house as they have done over their long engagement with numerous students, as they did with me both in Kandy and the US when I was tangled up and blue. It is worth remembering here that Ranjini is the Editor in Chief of the magnificent multi-volume translation project of the Jataka Tales into English, published just last year. It is only now that I can see how deeply Ranjini and Gananath’s scholarship is in conversation with each other.

The account of Ranjini and Gananath’s meeting at Peradeniya University while studying English Literature with Professor E.F.C. Ludowyk is one of the highlights of the film for me. Ranjini acted in the plays directed by Ludowyck and they studied English Literature at honours level together. Interestingly, though Gananath followed the Dram Soc activities on campus, he didn’t participate in any of them, his interest being elsewhere. He says, whenever he could he got onto a bus or train and travelled to distant villages to talk to villagers and monks and tape their songs (kavi). Gananath says that Ludowyck was the best teacher he has ever met and that he was responsible for directing him at every key juncture of his undergraduate life and soon after when making the unusual choice of going to a US graduate school, refusing a scholarship to Cambridge because of colonial history. Gananath’s brilliant textual analysis and exegesis of texts in Sinhala of myths and legends, especially the complex corpus of the Gajabahu legend, owes a great deal to the textual training he received from Ludowyck in ‘Practical Criticism’. We are all beneficiaries of this tradition of Literary Criticism which was part of the training we received in English Lit in old Ceylon and now continued by scholars such as Professor of English, Sumathy Sivamohan and others. Ranjini tells us that it was Ludowyck who collected Rs 10,000 from ten of his friends and handed it to Gananath to go travel the country and do what he wished soon after he graduated with English Honours. All he was asked to do was to write and thank his benefactors. So, it’s this tradition of mentorship and duty of care that Gananath and Ranjini have practiced with their own students during their long working life at American Universities.

A Counter Archive of a People’s Literature, Painting and Ritual

Though I was familiar with some of Gananath’s writing and studied a couple for the film I made, there is a major topic of his research which I didn’t know anything about and as such this film has provided an important learning experience for me. In drawing from the local non-canonical texts preserved in Temples, libraries and archives, which are written, in Sinhala by the folk and as such are anonymous, not by scholar monks in Pali, the language of high learning, Gananath has been able to piece together stories, legends of migrations from India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the ways in which some of these waves of migrants have been incorporated into the folk Buddhist body politic and culture. The gist of which is the seemingly heretical idea (an affront to Sinhala exceptionalism and their sense of manifest destiny as ‘pure Ariya’ Sinhala-Buddhists claiming to be the only real Lankans), that at one time, all people who call themselves Sinhala in Lanka did come from India and were indigenised through various practices and this happened in waves of migration over long periods of time. This section draws from the folk archive of poetry, ritual and Temple murals and legends such as the complex Gajabahu Myth, that bear witness to these processes of migration and acculturation, to make the case for the existence of robust muti-ethnic, diverse communities dotting the island. The legendary folk tales and rituals were, he says, imaginative, fictionalised, poetic expressions of folk memory of these migratory events, not ‘false’ accounts.

Here I want to cite a longish relevant passage from Professor Patrick Olivelle’s highly acclaimed book, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King. Ramchandra Guha, the editor of the series called ‘Indian Lives‘ of which this is the first, says of the Lankan Olivelle that, ‘he is one of the greatest living scholars of Ancient India’. Here’s Olivelle’s argument, on the familiar opposition between History and Legend, which supports Gananath’s theoretical move with practical consequences for how we understand ourselves as Lankans.

“In a seminal remark, the historian Robert Lingat notes: ‘There are two Ashokas—the historical Ashoka whom we know through his inscriptions, and the legendary Ashoka, who is known to us through texts of diverse origin, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. Although essentially correct, there are two problems with Lingat’s assessment.

First it is simplistic to contrast the ‘historical with the legendary’. The portrait of Ashoka I have constructed in this book is based on Ashokan inscriptions and artefacts, yet it contains a heavy dose of interpretation, translation, imagination, narrative, perhaps bias… The ‘legendery’ is not simply false and to be dismissed; it is the reimagination of the past to serve present needs, something inherently human. These narratives were meaningful and important to the persons and communities that constructed them. Their purpose was not to do history in the modern sense of the term, but to do something much more significant to them in their own time.

….There are actually not two but several Ashokas, including modern ones”.

Following this argument, we Lankans who try to practice ‘Loving-Kindness’ must be thankful that Gananath has highlighted for us at least two Dutthagaminies, in his timely essay, Dutthagamini and the Buddhist Conscience, written in the wake of the carnage of the ‘July ‘83’ state sponsored pogrom against the Tamil people of Lanka. There is the familiar Dutthagamini, taught to us in school, as a Sinhala-Buddhist, Tamil-hating ethno-nationalist, constructed from the Mahavamsa narrative taken as incontrovertible historical fact. On the other hand, Gananath presents evidence, from the Dambulla temple paintings, for a humanist Dutthagamini, who like Ashoka himself, was contrite about the mass slaughter he conducted and his killing of Elara the Tamil king.

The film shows us how Gananath makes a radical scholarly move in the late stages of his life by researching the indigenous folk of Lanka, the Veddhas. He argues against the deep-seated idea, promulgated by the ethno-nationalist Sinhala-Buddhist ideologues, that there is an ancient historical enmity between the Sinhala and Tamil folk of Lanka going back to the days of the kings, prior to colonialism. Gananath analyses the myth of origin of the Sinhala folk as represented in temple murals that show Vijaya’s arrival in Lanka from India and his marriage with the indigenous woman Kuveni. The Veddhas are the descendants, he says, of Kuveni and her children by Vijaya and are the ‘other’ or outsider, so to speak, to the Sinhala.

Through his ethnographic work on the powerful Vadi procession (perahera) in Mahiyanganaya, Gananath is able to show the ritual means through which they are incorporated into the Sinhala community. The ethnographic film, demonstrating this robust festive ritual event of staging cultural difference and incorporation, supports Gananath’s argument that the Veddas have been the true ‘outsiders’ of the Buddhist polity (in dress, culinary habits, religion), and despite that, the Buddhist culture had ritual mechanisms of incorporation of the outsider, without resorting to slaughter, while also acknowledging and respecting the awesome power of the Veddas. This section should be shown to school kids, I think, because of its liveliness and pedagogic value. Gananath acknowledges the fine scholarship of Paul E. Peiris on the Veddas and shows the colonial hostility and violence towards these indigenous folk of Lanka. Gananath’s ‘Cook Book’, also relevant to Australia’s colonial history, would have provided a global perspective on colonisation of indigenous peoples and the violent means used in casting them as ‘uncivilised primitives’, which in turn would have prepared him well to write the book on, the Veddas, Creation of the Hunter, in 2022.

What to Do, Napuru Kaleta? (In Wicked Times)

It seems to me that young scholars and artists might be able to generate a new thought or two by reading Gananath’s essays and books in relation to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalaese Art (Campden: Gloucestershire, 1908) and Olivelle’s book on Ashoka. In this way, the monodisciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge, ideas, can be disturbed so as to gain aesthetic nourishment to create, with what’s left, after the ravages of Neoliberal cultural nationalism’s cognitive extraction of our brains. All three distinguished, visionary Lankan scholars were writing about times when material culture and the ‘Intangible Heritage’ (A UNESCO Platform for their preservation) of Lanka and India were/are being destroyed from within, extinguished.

Some ‘transversal’ or lateral ways of understanding and connecting material practices/stuff and immaterial ideas are called for now, I believe, and these three Lankan scholars have shown us many ways in which this can be done. Let me clinch my argument by citing the full title of Coomaraswamy’s indispensable book which took 60 years to be translated into Sinhala. Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa (who also taught ‘mati-weda’) gave me this information for which I am most thankful. I read it in English as an undergraduate, quite by chance. Here’s the extended title:

“Being a Monograph on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, Mainly as Surviving in the 18^th Century with an Account of the Structure of Society and the Status of the Craftsman.”

Gananath might well have known through Ludowyk that the first edition of this book was hand printed in England by Coomaraswamy himself over a period of 15 months on the same printing press (which he purchased), as the one in which the first edition of the complete works of the Mediaeval English poet Chaucer was printed by William Morris, one of leaders of the ‘Arts and Craft Movement’. There is a wonderful story I heard from a native informant of California, of Gananath’s freshman lecture at the University of California in San Diego, on Pilgrimages. On hearing Gananath recite an entire section from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ‘by heart,’ the students gave him a standing ovation!

Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies, (namely Social Ecology, Mental Ecology, Environmental Ecology), is another a book worth reading (now freely downloadable), alongside the others as he was a radical psychotherapist trained in psychoanalysis by Lacan, and a Left Activist in France who also collaborated with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on Anti–Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1968), which was a best seller. He also worked at a humane, innovative mental health institution which was part of the radical anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s and was a wild thinker who reminds me of Gananath and also had the requisite discipline, like him, to write books that crossed generations. He died all too soon, but Gananath will turn 95 on the second of February 2025.

Finally, my gratitude to the producers of this film, the Kathika Collective whose independent spirit, deep research, dedication, and not least, the love of cinema has led to the production of this film over a long period of time, which included the hiatus of the COVID pandemic. While Dimuthu is credited as researcher, script writer and director and Chathura Madhusanka with editing and camera, a great many well wishes (acknowledged in the credits), contributed freely to this film which has not received any external funding. The spirit of education that drove this film is a truly beautiful tribute to Gananath and Ranjini Obeysekere, our indispensable mentors, both.

Yahonis Pattini Kapumahattya’s haunting voice emanating from a deep folk history (which Gananath much admired and we are privileged to hear), accompanies the long credit list.

The film is dedicated:

“To all rural folk who in their diverse ways enriched the peasant Buddhist tradition and found Buddha in that”. (Concluded)

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Opinion

Luck knocks at your door every day

Published

12 hours ago

2026/01/26

Sahan Weerasooriya

Some people seem to have been born lucky. Whatever they lay their hands on ends in success. They pass competitive examinations, find jobs and marry ideal partners. There are others who seem to be unlucky all the time. They fail examinations and remain unemployed. They also find it difficult to find their life partners. Nobody knows how this happens. However, serendipity is not a game of chance. Experts have identified certain habits that can set you all up for good fortune.

Jane (not her real name) after getting through her G.C.E. (Advanced Level) examination tried to find a job for several years. All her attempts ended in vain. Then she tried various other avenues to find her niche in life. One day she happened to attend a friend’s wedding at a five-star hotel. She observed how food had been laid out in a professional manner. Something clicked in her mind. “Can’t I become a chef?”

Thereafter she desperately tried to find a place to follow a course in culinary art. The course fees were very high and her parents could not afford them. One day, quite by chance, she met a chef working in a big hotel. She became friendly with him and expressed her desire to become a chef. The chef listened to her attentively and asked her to join his hotel as a kitchen helper. She accepted the offer and worked as a kitchen helper for a few years. Her enthusiasm and dedication to her duties impressed the management. She was appointed as a Commis Chef.

Kitchen brigade

She was happy to work as a junior, entry-level cook in a professional kitchen. She had to support senior chefs by performing basic food preparations, maintaining station cleanliness, organising stock and learning core culinary techniques. Although she had not followed any professional courses, Jane found herself on her way up the kitchen brigade often rotating through different sections to gain broad experience. After working there for a few years, she managed to join a leading tourist hotel in the Maldives. Her quest for excellence is not yet over. Jane is now planning to join a leading tourist hotel in Australia.

Some people say that kismet led Jane in her quest for becoming a chef. However, her openness to life’s quirky possibilities put her in the right place at the right time. Her success shows that luck is not something mysterious. To a very large extent, you are responsible for much of the good fortune that you encounter. This view has been confirmed by Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology and the author of ‘The luck Factor.’

It is a fascinating exercise to delve into traits that separate fortunate people from the self-proclaimed unlucky souls. If you wish to succeed in life, always expect good things to happen. When you do so, the scales of serendipity tilt in your favour. In Wiseman’s words, “Their expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies.” In a study at New York University it was found that students who firmly believed that they would pass the final examination with flying colours significantly had excellent results.

Try your luck

The fact of self-assurance will motivate you to work hard. Never feel that you are unlucky. Some people complain that they never win lottery prizes and stop buying raffle tickets. Winning a prize from a raffle ticket happens by chance. If you do not buy them, you will never win a prize. Therefore, always try your luck with positive feelings.

If you look around, you will see that lucky people are surrounded by a lot of friends and acquaintances. Lucky people talk to lots of people and attract their attention and goodwill. This will create a network of like-minded people. Colleen Seifert, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan, advises people to get out of the everyday rut. Most people who do routine work find themselves in a rut. They should try to get out of it and do something different and profitable. One way is to follow a course of studies to hone your skills. Another method is to join an English-speaking club or Toastmasters Club. You can also join a library and start reading books on various subjects. When you do so, you will have a chance to encounter influential people. Such a meeting will be a turning point in your life.

Always think that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. In many bad situations there will be at least one good event. Learn how to embrace the unpredictable and engineer the unexpected. If you think you are a lucky person, you will transform a stumbling block into a positive event. Nobody can win any battle without making mistakes. Depend on your sixth sense or instinct before doing something important. Leaving a permanent and pensionable job may pose a big risk. However, if you do not take such a risk, you will not succeed in life. Many ordinary government employees have quit their jobs to become accountants, lawyers, judges and architects.

Sense of responsibility

Most successful people have a deep sense of responsibility for their thoughts and actions. It means you have to keep your word and be faithful to your family and self. Believe in what you do and work hard to achieve your goal. Such an attitude will set your own standards. In the meantime, stop comparing yourself with others who have succeeded in their chosen fields of activity. The wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill exemplified integrity and respect in the face of opposition. During his final years as the prime minister he attended an official function. Some people started whispering that he should step down as he was getting senile. When the ceremony was over, Churchill turned to the men who were whispering and said, “Gentlemen, they also say he is deaf!”

If you wish to win, take time to nurture others’ dreams. A wise man said, “If you want one year’s prosperity, grow grain. But if you want ten years’ prosperity, grow men and women.” On your way to success you cannot simply ignore others. Provide others with nutrients of gratitude and encouragement. When people around you succeed, you should feel happy.

Human life is full of ups and downs, disappointments and missed opportunities. The pages of history are full of heroic stories of undaunted men and women who had triumphed over disabilities and adversities. Draw inspiration from their victorious spirit. We live in a highly competitive and goal-oriented world. Everybody is seeking instant success. Get involved in something bigger than yourself. Work towards your goal in a spirit of excellence.

The Chinese call luck an opportunity and they say it knocks every day at your door. Some people hear it, but others do not. It is not enough to hear the opportunity to knock at your door. You must let it in, greet it and make friends with it to work together. All the fruits of success will be yours then.

karunaratners@gmail.com

By R. S. Karunaratne

Opinion

Conference “Microfinance and Credit Regulatory Authority Bill: Neither Here, Nor There”

Published

1 day ago

2026/01/25

Thilina Walpola

January 21 | Olympus Auditorium, Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS)

The National Collective of Community Savings and Credit Services Providers organised the conference “Microfinance and Credit Regulatory Authority Bill: Neither Here, Nor There” on January 21 at the Olympus Auditorium, Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS), BMICH, to foreground the community savings and credit services as an alternative credit practice to moneylending and microfinance. While underscoring the uniqueness of community credit practices, grounded in collective rights, solidarity, mutual aid, the non-hierarchical nature of organising and long years of practice, community credit providers opposed the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-Treasury-CBSL attempt to subsume the community credit model under moneylending and microfinance in the proposed Microfinance and Credit Regulatory Authority Bill. Over 200 community credit practitioners from more than 50 community organisations from Mannar, Kilinochchi, Jaffna, Mullaitivu, Batticaloa, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Badulla, Rathnapura, and Hambanthota had gathered at the conference.

M. K. Jayathissa, a farmer leader from Hingurakgoda, Polonnaruwa, explained the microfinance crisis as resulting from the microfinancialisation of rural credit and the targeting of low-income women. He recalled his role in the farmers’ struggle against debt during the 1990s. Jayathissa linked the microfinance crisis among women and the farmers’ debt crisis to a wider crisis in food production.

Renuka Bhadrakanthi, chairperson of the Ekabaddha Praja Sanwardhana Kantha Maha Sangamaya, Weligepola, shared her three decades of experience as a community practitioner. She showed how the community credit framework helped women build assets and wealth through small savings. Unlike market-based initiatives such as microfinance and moneylending, community-controlled credit systems empowered women both with agency and material capabilities. Renuka also noted the regional diversity in organisational frameworks and credit purposes. She stressed the need for vigilance and action now, as globalisation and neoliberalism drive economic reforms aimed at capturing community wealth and making people dependent on the market.

Rajeswary Sritharan from Yuhashakthi, Mullaitivu, brought in experiences from war-torn societies. Yuhashakthi and Mahashakthi networks, operating in the Northern and Eastern provinces and comprising more than 10,000 women members, were created during the civil war to support women’s ability to control the household economy. These two networks have proven resilience against war-related dispossession and loss while also strengthening women. Rajeswary contended that self-help community credit groups are informal and unregulated, revealing that societies are governed by a collective ethos, community audits, and democratic decision-making, ensuring transparency and accountability. She pointed out that community groups do not have a history of bringing their members before the police or courts when they fail to service their debts, unlike microfinance companies. She also raised the significance of community groups such as Yuhashakthi and Mahashakthi as first responders in times of crisis, even as recently as with Ditwah, intervening and assisting affected communities much before the government could.

: Suneth Aruna Kumara

: Pubudu Manohara

: M K Jayathissa

Suneth Aruna Kumara, representing Vimukthi Gami Gowi Kantha Samithiya, Hingurakgoda, Polonnaruwa and also speaking on behalf of the microfinance-affected women, highlighted the creative space that collective forms of association have opened up for microfinance victims. “People who were hiding, afraid of debt collectors, are trying to rebuild their lives autonomously,” he said. In this journey, women are rethinking the meaning of credit, whether it is possible to create credit mechanisms that do not rely on interest income, and imaginative ways of decommodifying community relations. Suneth emphasised that women’s initiatives are emerging from their lived experiences as debtors, exploited by predatory interest rates and violent recovery practices. As a victim himself, Suneth criticised the proposed regulatory Bill for failing to adequately safeguard microfinance and credit consumers by providing legally binding safeguards. According to Suneth, the proposed Bill does not guarantee that the microfinance crisis will not recur.

Another highlight of the conference was the sharing of experiences by Malaihaya women, presented by Letchumanan Kamaleswary from the Centre for Equality and Justice. Kamaleswary described debt as ever-present in the Malaiyaha community. It forced migration from South India and kept people captive as plantation labour for over 200 years. Although the plantation management restricts all community associations within the plantations, microfinance companies can enter and operate freely. Debt is so severe that most Malaiyaha women work past their retirement age.

: Renuka Bhadrakanthi

: Rajeswary Sritharan

Pubudu Manohara, from the Rural Development Foundation in Hambanthota, traced the history of community credit projects to various state poverty alleviation programmes since 1977. These projects, affiliated with governments and supported by international groups such as the World Bank and UNDP, have survived many national and local crises. Over time, however, both the government and international organisations like the ADB have become wary of people’s ability to save. “They are afraid of our ability to create community funds,” he said.

The discussion emphasised that mobilising community groups and local political leaders is essential to oppose the Bill in its current form. Concerns arose about the negative impact of heavy regulations on community organisations and women’s resilience. “Domestic violence is rooted in economic violence. The destruction of community organisations will have a direct effect on local development and local economic activities. That will also burden the government,” said a Yuhashakthi representative from Mullathivu.

Community organisers urged the government to consult directly with them when developing regulations, emphasising that new rules should protect and strengthen community-based initiatives rather than respond to external pressures. They argued that the ADB, having promoted commercialisation of microfinance and contributed to the resulting crisis, lacks the legal and ethical standing to advocate for regulatory frameworks. Instead of receiving directives from the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), the government should converse with the grassroots communities, devising homegrown developmental solutions to regenerate local economies, empower the most vulnerable and build community wealth, the community organisers stressed.

Opinion

A puppet show?

Published

3 days ago

2026/01/23

Thilina Walpola

After jog for the camera, wearing shorts in Jaffna, thanks to the freedom gained by the country being liberated from the clutches of the Tigers by the valiant efforts led by Mahinda Rajapaksa, President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka, said: “Some come past Sri Maha Bodhi and other Buddhist temples all the way to Jaffna to observe Sil, not to spread compassion but hatred.” When the need of the hour is reconciliation what an outrageous statement that was, to be made by the head of state! Will he say that the people of the North and the East bypass many Kovils straddling the area and come to Kataragama to spread hate? Probably not! His claim has become a hot topic of conversation.

Having lost a majority of the votes garnered from the North at the presidential and parliamentary elections, to the Tamil nationalist parties at the local government elections, President Dissanayake’s claim may well have been a pitiful attempt to recover lost ground in the North. But at what cost?

It all started with AKD’s refusal to refer to those brave service personnel who saved the unity and the integrity of the country as Rana Viruwo. Interestingly, the most devastating rebuke for this came from a Tamil MP, who is an avowed admirer of Prabhakaran, stating in Parliament that a Sinhala Rana Viruwa saved his life when he was about to be washed off in the flood waters resulting from Cyclone Ditwah. He teased the government by asking in ‘raw’ Sinhala Ei umbalata lejjada unta Rana Viruwo kiyanna? (Are you shy to call them war heroes?)

In addition to slinging mud at MR and harassing service personnel, there is no doubt whatsoever that AKD’s government is trying to harass any Tamil politicians who helped eradicate the Tigers. This fact is borne out by the treatment meted out to Douglas Devananda. Shamindra Ferdinando has explained this in his article, “EPDP’s Devananda and missing weapons supplied by Army” (The Island, 7 January).

NPP ministers publicly insult Buddhist monks, but whenever they are in trouble, they rush to Kandy to meet the Maha Nayakas, the latest being Harini’s visit. Instead of admitting the mistake and trying to make amends, the government went on, until it realised the futility in trying to justify the ‘Buddy’ episode. Excuses given by Harini to the Maha Nayakas, to say the least, were laughable. She had the audacity to say that though the questionable web link was printed in the textbook there were no instructions to click on it! She may continue as Prime Minister but can anyone who does not know what to do with a link or who is trying to encourage ten-year-olds to have e-buddies when the rest of the world is heading towards banning 16-year-olds from social media, continue to be the Minister of Education?

Number of MOUs/pacts signed with India, including defence, have not yet been disclosed even to Parliament. The Cabinet Spokesman once stated that the contents of those MOUs/pacts could not be divulged without the consent of India. Interestingly, we have had very frequent visits from VVIP politicians and top government officials from India, some at very short notice. One of them referred to these as ‘usual’ ones! However, what is unusual is that a party that shed a lot of blood of Sri Lankans for even selling ‘Bombay’ onions, is now in government and seems under Indian command. Perhaps, its transformation occurred when India sponsored a visit by AKD in early 2024, which helped him secure the presidency. Among the NPP’s election pledges, the most touted one was to reveal the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday attacks. It has been alleged in some quarters that India was behind the attacks. The NPP government’s silence about this speaks volumes!

It has transpired recently that it was Indian High Commissioner Gopal Baglay who pressured Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena in July 2022 to take over the presidency after the elected President was toppled by protesters, but many believe that it was a joint effort by the Indian HC and the ‘Viceroy’ who just left, after an overstay! It is an illegal act as pointed out in the editorial “Conspiracy to subvert constitutional order” (The Island, 22 January) and may be investigated by a future government, if elections are not postponed forever!

We seem to be watching a puppet show where many puppeteers outside are pulling the strings! Are we paying the price for electing a bunch of inexperienced politicians?

By Dr Upul Wijayawardhana ✍️