Monday 16th December, 2024

The JVP-led NPP, which embarked on a much-advertised, ambitious campaign to clean up Parliament by ‘filling it with honest, educated, intelligent members’, has had to cleanse itself. Speaker Asoka Ranwala had to resign on Friday, unable to prove his claim that he had a doctorate. The NPP leaders, who contested under the Compass symbol, and secured an unprecedented mandate to put the country right, were left with no alternative but to throw Ranwala to the wolves as they did not want the integrity of their moral compass questioned.

‘Doctorgate’, as it were, could not have come at a better time for the Opposition parties, which are still reeling from crushing electoral defeats and licking their wounds. It has provided them with a rallying point and an opportunity to divert public attention from their internal battles over National List appointments. Their leaders are now trying to make themselves out to be paragons of virtue!

Ranwala’s resignation has prompted some other NPP MPs, including ministers, to have the title of Dr. removed from their credentials. The government has been able to forestall the Opposition’s no-confidence motion against Ranwala as the Speaker. But the SJB says it will move a no-faith motion against Ranwala unless he resigns from Parliament on the grounds that he has deceived the voters in the Gampaha District, where he contested last month’s general election.

This, we believe, is a textbook example of twisting the knife. Opposition politicians are taking it a bit too far. Their argument that Ranwala entered Parliament by way of deception, has no leg to stand on. There is reason to believe that he would have been elected even if he had contested without flaunting the title, ‘Dr’, because he has been in the good books of the JVP/NPP leaders, who made it clear to the public that they wanted him elected.

Above all, the people of Gampaha have proved that they are not selective or choosy about the qualifications, educational or otherwise, of the candidates they vote for. In the 2010 general election, they elected a teledrama actress fielded by the UNP, giving her a staggering number of preferential votes simply because she had played the lead role in a subpar soap opera, which became popular. She admitted in a television interview that she knew nothing about Sri Lanka’s Constitution. Today, the UNP as well as its offshoot, the SJB, are out for Ranwala’s blood! Moreover, the people of Gampaha also elected the likes of Mervyn Silva and Prasanna Ranaweera, who boasts of having carried out a chilli powder attack on the UNP MPs in Parliament in 2018. Thankfully, they have not been able to re-enter Parliament.

It looks as if a branch of the Examination Department had to be set up in the parliamentary complex to check the educational qualifications of the MPs. Let the holier-than-thou Opposition politicians, who have taken the moral high ground, and undertaken the task of checking the authenticity of the academic credentials of the NPP politicians, be made to prove their own educational qualifications. We see among them a politician who was once accused of having sat a law examination in a separate room, and obtained external help to score very high marks.

This allegation, which went uninvestigated, should be probed. Better late than never. Some Opposition politicians who are parading their learning and questioning the academic qualifications of others have only aegrotats or unclassified degrees awarded by some foreign universities to candidates who cannot attend examinations due to illnesses.

Power blinds the wielders thereof to reality and fogs their thinking faculties, making it hard for them to act rationally. How the JVP/NPP politicians are behaving exemplifies a pithy local saying about the exclusivity of power and thinking capacity—‘bale thiyanakota mole ne, mole thiyanakota bale ne’ (‘when one has power, one has no brains and when one has brains, one has no power). They are doing exactly what they persistently condemned their predecessors for. A large number of videos highlighting their policy contradictions have gone viral in the digital space.

Worryingly, a bunch of tainted politicians who were beaten badly in last month’s parliamentary polls have been able to make use of the controversy surrounding MP Ranwala’s educational qualifications, to gain some political mileage. They have a remarkable ability to heal their wounds and regain their strength like ‘The Blob’, or ‘the many-headed slime’. The NPP seems to have underestimated their ability to do so. However, it will be a mistake for the Opposition parties to entertain the hope that they will be able to secure a bridgehead in the NPP-dominated national politics and launch a counterattack soon, without making a serious effort to regain public confidence by mending their ways.