by Dr Jayampathy Wickramaratne,
President’s Counsel

Two national elections will be held within the next twelve months or so. In terms of Article 31(3) of the Constitution, the Presidential election has to be held between 19 September and 19 October 2024, being a date not less than one month and not more than two months before the expiry of the current President’s term of office, which is 19 November 2024. Whoever becomes President will surely dissolve Parliament soon, hoping to get a comfortable majority there.

Going by the present, a Presidential election will likely be a contest between the SJB’s Sajith Premadasa and the NPP’s Anura Kumara Dissanayake, but then there are the vagaries of politics. President Ranil Wickremesinghe seems to be banking on SLPP support and has strong support from members of his Cabinet. But there is a group in the SLPP, Namal Rajapakse included, that thinks that Wickremesinghe has little chance of winning and that it would be wise to contest the Presidential election on their own and retain the SLPP’s electoral base.

Given the current fractured nature of the Sri Lankan electorate, the votes of the numerically smaller communities will be crucial in the Presidential election. Although devolution is an issue of concern mainly to the Sri Lankan Tamils and the Muslims of the Eastern Province, there is considerable support for devolution among Muslims in the rest of the country and the Hill Country Tamils who have had representation in Provincial Councils and Provincial Boards of Ministers. A sizeable Sinhala population believes power-sharing to be essential to a constitutional settlement of the national issue.

They also consider devolution of power to strengthen democracy by bringing the government closer to the people and as a necessary tool for balanced development, enabling people in the periphery, not just in the North and East but in the whole country, to decide on issues directly concerning them. This is according to the principle of subsidiarity; that is, whatever could be more efficiently handled by the lowest tier should be vested in such tier.

A demand that has gained attention is for local government to be recognised by the Constitution as the third tier of government. Local authorities should be further enabled and given resources to initiate and implement development through their own development programmes. Empowering the people at the village level is essential, and to this end, elected Grama or Jana Sabhas should be set up to facilitate their active engagement in the affairs of the community and afford them an active role in local self-government.

Local authorities must be legally required to consult Grama/Jana Sabhas in policymaking and planning relevant to the locality. One of the key elements of the rich democratic political discourse that took place during the Aragalaya was democratisation.

Not surprisingly, parties of the South are reluctant to flag devolution as a vital election issue. President Wickremesinghe has been talking about the full implementation of the Thirteenth Amendment (13A), but no action whatsoever has been taken, much to the disappointment of Tamils, especially the Tamil MPs who voted to make him President, some openly and others discreetly.

Sajith Premadasa told a meeting of Buddhist monks in Galle last August that he was for fully implementing 13A within a unitary state. Premadasa received the highest percentage of Tamil votes after Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in a Presidential election. Since then, there has been radicalisation among the Tamils, as shown by Sridharan’s win over the moderate Sumanthiran at the ITAK sessions, a change that SJB leaders seem oblivious to.

Not many speakers on the SJB platform speak about devolution. There is no unanimity within the NPP on the national question, as shown by JVP leaders rushing to counter Harini Amarasuriya’s statement that the NPP would support fully implementing 13A. Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s statement in the North that he would offer neither federalism nor 13 Plus but a multi-racial government and equality between all communities disappointed not only Tamils but pro-devolution supporters of the NPP. He is reported to have said in Canada that while the NPP did not believe in Provincial Councils as a solution to the ethnic issue, it would not move to abolish Provincial Councils if the Tamils considered devolution as a solution. This is not much different from what some other parties of the South stand for.

No party or leader having a chance of winning a national election has publicly said they would abolish Provincial Councils, although some surely wish they could, notwithstanding the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. It is one thing to accept the reality that Provincial Councils have come to stay but quite another to honestly believe that a solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis lies in all communities sharing state power. Meaningful devolution, both as a solution to the ethnic crisis and a necessary tool for developing the periphery, can be realised only if there is an honest commitment towards it. That is what the numerically smaller communities and pro-devolution voters wish parties and leaders to commit to in the coming elections.

The Island reported on its front page on Friday April 19 that eight young persons trafficked and held captive in a remote area in Myanmar to perform forced cybercrimes had been rescued. Lankan Embassy officials in Bangkok had received the eight escapees on the border of Thailand with Myanmar. Cass picked on this phrase in the news item: “… their repatriation was arranged with the assistance of the International Organisation for Migration.”

   Cassandra’s attention focused on this statement since she had been considering how belated the rescue of the victims were, and so she wondered whether this Organisation had to catalyse our government and/or the SL Embassies in Thailand and Myanmar to be more proactive over this trafficking issue. These cheated young men and women were being tortured in the camp in Myanmar and this was reported by the MTV Channel First, weeks if not months ago.

The negotiations to get them out of the clutches of their cruel taskmasters took so very long. Some are still held within their control. Was our government and its embassy in Yangon too slow, too indifferent, not emphatic enough to save these hapless youth?

What are ambassadors and embassy staff overseas for if not for helping as soon and as effectively as possible citizens of their country when in trouble in the country they are posted to? These captives in illegal cyber camps – Sri Lankan young men and women – were in real bad trouble. It took months, Cass believes, to get the first of them to safety after they had escaped. DPL negotiations don’t work? Then why maintain such embassies at considerable expense while the country is bankrupt? Are they functioning only to celebrate national holidays and kowtow to local politicians when they visit the foreign countries?

Celebrate young SL woman

Piyumi Wijesekera is among NASA’s four-member volunteer crew selected to participate in a “simulated mission to Mars within a habitat at the Agency’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston. Her companions for the 45 day trial are Jason Lee, Stephanie Navarro and Shareef Al Romaithi. They will step into the agency’s Human Exploration Research Analog l or HERA, on May 10, to work and live like astronauts.

” They will exit the facility on June 24 – their simulated return to Earth. What major differences from ordinary life they will have to face and overcome; to me the severest being confinement in a small space and being cut off from family and friends. They are supposed to walk on Mars’ surface using virtual reality. This is the second group undergoing this vast experiment; the first having completed their mission on 18 March.

   Piyumi Wijesekera is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Radiation Biophysics Lab at NASA Ames Research Centre in California’s Silicon Valley. She earned her first degree in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, and a doctorate degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Her doctoral research focused on stem cell and organ engineering. Her social activities listed in her bio reveals her to be a normal young woman, close knit with family and having fun with friends. What a massive challenge she willingly faces; so removed from her usual lifestyle.

Shareef Al Romaithi is from the UAE; Stephani from Ecuador and Lee is probably American – Cass internetted but failed to determine his nationality. Much publicity has been given these four volunteers both internationally and locally; Piyumi being featured in recent local newspapers too. Notwithstanding, Cass felt impelled to write about her – such a pride to this country of ours.

Singing duo

   Another feather in Sri Lanka’s national cap! Roshini Abbey and Nuwan Hugh Perera, billed as West End stars, sang their song Anagathaye in Sinhala at the Commonwealth Day Service on March 13 at Westminster Abbey, in the presence of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. Eastern beauty and manly handsomeness were what we celebrated plus their excellent rendering of the song. She was dressed in a green, patterned in black sari with black blouse and her waist length hair loose at her back. He was in a bordered black sarong, white shirt and a shawl thrown across his shoulders. They combined so well. I thanked the friend who sent me the video clip. Such a joyous change from what we hear and read about now with politics supreme.

In his address from the Great Pulpit, the King mentioned the fact that Queen Elizabeth laid special store on this organization of nations. He said: “Commonwealth Day was an occasion of particular pride for my beloved mother, the late Queen; a treasured opportunity to celebrate our Commonwealth family, to whose service she dedicated her long and remarkable life. The Commonwealth has been a constant in my own life, and yet its diversity continues to amaze and inspire me. Its near-boundless potential as a force for good in the world demands our highest ambition; its sheer scale challenges us to unite and be bold.”

That last holds so true for us Sri Lankans and our country. In Cass’ previous Cry she echoed a sensible activist who spoke about being Sri Lankan and making the most of the diversity of the racial and religious mix in our peoples. Will we ever be as we were before the cursed Sinhala Only stricture was thrust on us for personal power? We older ones tasted the joy of us being people of Ceylon, no matter our religion, facial structure, shades of brown and customs. Mutual respect was what the separate groups had for each other and as individuals, particularly us children then, we cared not a hoot if the other was of a different race or religion.

Consequently, we were a prosperous nation – soon after independence – second only to Japan in Asia and the envy of the Singaporean leader. Cass does not need to mention where we are now – thrown there by politicians and their greed for lucre and power, aided by slimy administrators either making their own fortunes and /or bowing and scraping to politicians.

Debates

   The much talked about verbal match between AKD and Sajith is finally scheduled for early May. Both debaters are eloquent and more significantly, well informed and intelligent. Cass pronounces them thus, at least in comparison to most in the August House. Hence it should prove to be an event. Furthermore, neither is given to going off the rails and descending to vituperation.

If perchance one or both do, it will turn out be a deliberate soliloquy on the part of AKD and a carefully elocuted, complex worded, non- yelling denigration of the other. Cass is sure these two will not allow their debate to go the way of all Parliamentary debates descending from pronouncement of a fact or two to verbal slanging, exchange of personal insults and then rushing to the centre of the chamber with ever ready sluggers to fisticuff until parliamentary measures are taken to restore decorum.

   Will the scheduled debate in Parliament on the 2019 Easter Sunday massacre turn out thus: just another shouting brawl? Cassandra, in her ignorance, asks whether yet another debate/report etc are needed on the senseless killing and maiming of hundreds in churches and hotels. So many have already been done. Then reading Wednesday April 24 The Island, she found the editorial asks just that question: “There is no need for the Easter Sunday terror attacks to be debated in Parliament.

What is needed is a thorough, credible investigation therin.” Earlier the editorial notes: “Above all, former President Maithripala Sirisena’s claim that he knows who masterminded the carnage must be probed and action taken against him if he has sought to mislead investigators.” That calls for the loudest three cheers from Cassandra. Perfectly spot on!

By Uditha Devapriya

In a long, thoughtful article on Vasantha Obeyesekere in the Daily Mirror two years ago (“Versatile Filmmaker Vasantha Obeysekera’s Dadayama“, August 6, 2022), D. B. S. Jeyaraj remembers going to watch Dadayama with Ajith Samaranayake for the first time. This was 1983, a few months before the riots; political turmoil had become a fact of life, but people went in large numbers to theatres. Dadayama was no exception.

“When we went to the Regal Theatre, the show had already started running to a full house. Furthermore, tickets to the next show were also sold out. There were long lineups of ticket holders waiting to see the next show of the film. The chances of seeing the film that evening or night were extremely remote.”

The most obvious reason for the full and packed audiences, of course, was the experience Obeyesekere’s film had offered spectators. In the context of the Sri Lankan cinema, there had not been a film like it before. It represented not only the peak of the Sinhala cinema of the 1980s, but as importantly, the high point of the middlebrow-masscult culture of that decade. By now, the divide between box-office success and critical appeal that had prevailed and, in a way, defined the cinema in the 1960s and 1970s had faded away. What was once considered as lowbrow entertainment had become middlebrow art. The old middlebrow, by contrast, had become the new highbrow.

Against this backdrop, what Vasantha Obeyesekere did was to subvert the tropes of popular cinema, using the motifs of the mainstream as a vehicle for serious themes. Obeyesekere figured in among a group of ambitious filmmakers – among them, H. D. Premaratne and Vijaya Dharma Sri – who had emerged in the 1970s thanks to the policies of the National Film Corporation, and had taken it on themselves to question the conventions and frontiers of their medium. In doing so, they carved a space for themselves.

Dadayama was far from the first film that exemplified this trend. Nor was it Obeyesekere’s first work to take a step in that direction. Before Dadayama, he made Palagetiyo. And before Palagetiyo, he made Diyamanthi, a slick neo-Hitchcockian thriller which steered clear of the song-and-dance sequences of mainstream Sinhala films, yet, somehow, managed to keep audiences entertained. Diyamanthi, in turn, followed a long line of films that began with H. D. Premaratne’s Sikuruliya and Apeksha, and Vijaya Dharma Sri’s Duhulu Malak.

For all intents and purposes, these were films that examined “serious” themes, political or otherwise. Yet they did so while featuring some of the most melodramatic, contrived storylines that could ever be concocted. Sikuruliya, for instance, borrows its plot from the Ummagga Jatakaya and every other trope of Sinhala romance films. Yet, crucially, it subverts those tropes. In a typical Sinhala film, the forlorn girl – played here by the highly versatile Swineetha Weerasinghe – would not take it upon herself to elope with another man on the day of her wedding: she would invariably wait for someone to rescue her. Yet here, she does what she pleases with various men who enter her life.

Apeksha takes this a step ahead by confronting social class, a theme that had never been addressed with any modicum of intelligence in a mainstream Sinhala film. In popular Sinhala cinema, class served as a backdrop, or at best a prop. The rich man would invariably be the villain, the poor boy the hero, and the (almost always rich) girl would be saved by the latter from the clutches of the former. Apeksha ends on that note: it culminates in a predictable fistfight between hero and villain. But the rich, depraved villain does not entirely become a villain: at certain points, such as when he visits a singer at a bar he has fallen in love with, we feel the director is trying to humanise him.

Vijaya Dharma Sri’s Duhulu Malak tackles a more controversial and difficult theme: adultery. As the film scholar Laleen Jayamanne notes, Duhulu Malak became “perhaps the first Sri Lankan film to present adultery in a manner that makes it seem visually pleasurable.” This was no mean achievement, and it cannot be undermined. However, Dharma Sri worked at a time when adultery could not be presented in any visually pleasing way without making concessions to the box-office. For that reason, Duhulu Malak has the cake and eats it too: it sympathises with the woman who faces a stark choice between her husband and her lover, yet satisfies the moral brigade by making her return to her husband.

Parithyagaya

Both Premaratne and Dharma Sri spent the rest of their careers making films that addressed one difficult theme after another, within an essentially commercial framework. To their credit, this formula never backfired on them. Premaratne, for one, managed to make a series of hits in the most unlikely and impossible settings.

Two of his films, Devani Gamana and Palama Yata, were released in that interregnum between the ethnic riots and the second JVP insurrection. Both performed well at the box-office. Then, in 1997, when the trauma of the insurrection had begun to fade away, he made Visidela, which confronted the insurgency as in unfolds in an otherwise quaint, nondescript Sinhala village.

It is against this backdrop that one should note Obeyesekere’s achievement. Obeyesekere fundamentally belongs to the middle-cinema space, but his films are not of the same mould as Premaratne’s and Dharma Sri’s. Premaratne and Dharma Sri ostensibly steered clear of political themes, though of course one can argue that there is nothing apolitical about the themes they explored.

Obeyesekere, however, is more of a political radical: he questions norms and conventions by first making us idealise them before shattering all illusions we have of them. In this regard, his treatment of class in Palagetiyo is different to Premaratne’s approach to it in Apeksha: unlike the latter, in which the two lovers reconcile, in Palagetiyo the romance eventually takes second place to the harsh realities of class.

As I mentioned earlier, Dadayama was far from the first film which epitomised the middle-cinema space of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet it was unprecedented in its own way. For the first time in a Sinhala film, we are seeing tropes of the popular cinema being presented before our eyes, only to be shattered like the shards of glass that rain down on the camera and the screen in that final encounter between the protagonist and antagonist.

Obeyesekere made sure to include his actors in this scheme. To give the best example, he conjures Irangani Serasinghe out of the blue, presents her as the sweet, idealised mother-type so strongly associated with her, and then destroys that image of her by making her a chain-smoking brothel owner. During a conversation I had with her 10 years ago, Serasinghe recalled being showered by letters from outraged fans: “They all asked me, ‘Why did you take on that role, why did you set such a bad example for our children?’” She seemed visibly distraught. Obeyesekere’s ruse had worked.

It goes without saying that Vasantha Obeyesekere never again reached the heights he did with Dadayama. Kadapathaka Chaya comes a close second, but it is too long, and at one level derivative of Dadayama, to rise on its own. His last great work, Dorakada Marawa, bears comparisons with Dadayama and Palagetiyo. Yet by the time of its release, the Sinhala cinema had moved on to its next phase, marked by the entry of a new and different – a more politically inclined – generation of directors. Premaratne and Dharma Sri continued to make films. Yet they had to give way to a new order.

For better or worse, the Sinhala middle-cinema of the 1970s and 1980s no longer exists. Most of its best and brightest purveyors, including not just Obeyesekere, Dharma Sri, and Premaratne, but also to a considerable extent Sumitra Peries, have long passed away. Yet in that interregnum, that middle-cinema space provided both directors and audiences a chance to confront, address – and even resolve – some of the more pressing issues from that time.

One wonders whether the present culture in Sri Lanka – with its emphasis on low budgets, on avant-gardism, on lavish funding – has made us less appreciative of the cinema’s potential to raise awareness of important issues within mainstream audiences.

Perhaps what we need to do is to return to that earlier mode of filmmaking. In doing so, we can redefine, even revolutionise, the Sinhala cinema, tapping into its potential as the most popular and the most populist of the arts in this country. Films are, essentially, communal experiences. What the likes of Premaratne and Obeyesekere taught us is that this does not preclude directors from examining serious themes, and that mass audiences can be made to respond to them – as the 1970s and 1980s illustrated well enough.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at .