GOTABAYA & ME

Reply to Anura Gunasekara

By DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

Mr. Anura Gunasekara purports to quote a passage of praise from me about Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He says it is “in a writing of around March 2017”. He produces within quotes, some writing which runs into six lines in his article. It is also full of elisions (gaps). In his article he quotes me three times and in two of the three he also produces sources for the quote. But not in this long passage with gaps which he says is “in a writing of around March 2017”. Strange.

I am not saying I have not praised Gotabaya Rajapaksa, but I have also been a stern even harsh critic of his before and after the purported writing “of around March 2017”.

Context counts. I praised Gotabaya Rajapaksa from end 2016 through 2017 after the 19^th Amendment had disqualified Mahinda as a Presidential candidate and I thought Gotabaya would be an MR proxy and MR would be the Prime Minister empowered by the 19^th Amendment, while the UNP’s candidate would be Ranil Wickremesinghe. At the time, Sajith Premadasa’s inner-party rebellion of 2010-2011 had failed and there was no prospect of his candidacy.

As the GR project unveiled its true Trumpian character, my stand changed on the public record. Certainly, after May 2018, starting with my critique of the agenda of Viyath Maga 2 at the Shangri-la, I have been consistent in my criticism, way ahead of others and more hard-hitting.

Where was I politically and what was I saying when Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ascending to the zenith and everyone else was getting on the bandwagon or staying silent?

Let an independent young columnist, Uditha Devapriya, writing in the Sunday sister paper of this newspaper, be the umpire in this matter:

“…there was little that stood in Mr. Gotabaya’s way. He had a world to win and a country to preside over. In November 2019, then, almost every community, including sections of ethnic minorities, gave him support. Even political commentators who had penned diatribes against him raised the possibility of better days ahead. Very few thought otherwise: among them, Dayan Jayatilleka stood out. This was as it should be: no one wanted to back a dead horse, and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP, for all its history and heritage, seemed like a relic of some distant, dark past.”

(Battling the blues – The Island)

When the 6.9 million were voting for Gotabaya Rajapaksa I was openly supporting Sajith Premadasa, which was only natural since I had argued for his leadership of the UNP and his presidential candidacy since 2010 (‘The Sajith Solution’ The Sunday Leader, and ‘The Opposition in Sri Lanka: Restore viability, resolve crisis’|Groundviews, both April 2010), and even said he would be the best postwar developmental President Sri Lanka could have, on my regular television show Sithijaya in August 2014.