Al Jazeera last week released, after some delay, an interview with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, conducted in London some weeks ago. It is now on You Tube and is bound to go viral especially here in Sri Lanka. Both friend and foe must admit that the Al Jazeera interviewer, Mehdi Hasan, was most unfair to Wickremesinghe in this Head to Head interrogation duplicating the well known BBC Hard Talk show. Why the former president chose to expose himself to the grilling is anybody’s guess. We in this island are very familiar with the pithy Sinhala saying illagena parippu kanawa (literally asking for and eating parippu) meaning knowingly walking into a trap. This is exactly what Wickremesinghe did.

Given his very long political experience, having first entered parliament in 1977 at age 28 as one of the youngest MPs ever, he had served as prime minister on no less that five occasions and as leader of the opposition as many times before finally ascending the presidency in 2022. Though he was elected by parliament to serve out the balance of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s term and not the people, nobody would have expected him to have willingly submitted himself to this ordeal in the presence of a clearly hostile audience. Hasan, sharply dressed, suave, incisive and an obvious believer in a no-holds-barred interview style reveled in roasting Wickremesinghe as presenters do at such interviews as Hard Talk has shown over the years over BBC. True, Ranil was able to fire some of his own shots (“I was in politics before you were born”) but they proved to be of little use before an obviously partisan audience.

Talk shows such as Al Jazeera’s are structured in a format that all the dice is loaded on the interviewer’s side. The respondents, unless they are specially skilled debaters who can stand up bravely to an unfair adversary, are too often cannon fodder. The questions are fired machine gun-style and the respondents given little opportunity to have their their say, the interviewer interupting before the victim, and we use that word advisedly, have the opportunity to get a few words edgewise. We remember one occasion when Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar acquitted himself excellently in a Hard Talk interview with BBC. But he was an exceptionally gifted debater having served Oxford Union as its president before launching on his legal and political careers. Wickremesinghe is himself not a spring chicken. There were occasional flashes of his parliamentary debating style during the show but these were lost on the hostile audience who frequently applauded Hasan.

Given the treatment respondents receive in these high pressure talk shows, why do politicians, both serving and retired, and others who would obviously anticipate a hard time in an unequal encounter subject themselves to such indignities? The answers to this question may be many, one being over confidence in oneself to withstanding a grilling however daunting. Another may be that most politicians believe that bad publicity is better than no publicity. Politics being art of the possible, there will be those who delude themselves that they can give as good as they get as as Kadirgmar demonstrated so many years ago. Another possibility could be the fees such appearances command. Many global leaders, post-retirement, have entered the international lecture circuit at high fees as President Obama has done while others have written international best-sellers.

Whatever it was in Ranil Wickremesinghe’s case, he certainly did not emerge unscathed from the Al Jazeera program. This was equally true when he appeared in an interview some months ago with the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. However bad a battering respondents in such programs receive, there is no dearth of participants in these talk shows as their frequent telecasting and rankings show. They will, no doubt, continue to be part of the entertainment scene for many years to come. Like audiences at boxing matches show, there is no lack of people to enjoy watching the inflicting of pain upon fellow human beings. Blood lust, after all, is part of human nature.

Post-retirement plums for judges

Justice for All, an organization of senior lawyers, academics and public interest activists including several respected and well known names a few days ago raised a matter that has for many years agitated the public mind. This relates to the appointment of retired superior court judges to various positions, particularly diplomatic, that we have seen in recent years. The trigger that sparked the instant discussion was the naming of the recently-retired Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya, PC, as Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. He succeeds Mohan Peiris, also a former chief justice.

That justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, however threadbare a cliché, nevertheless remains as true as it always was. Thus the question is that will the public be convinced that plum appointments are not rewards for favours from the bench granted to the appointing political authority by serving judges? Also, would such favours be done with an eye on a post-retirement appointment? Apart from the two appointments to the UN in New York of two former chief justices, there was also a retired supreme court judge who was posted to London as Sri Lanka’s high commissioner. He raised many diplomatic and other eyebrows by calling himself Justice so and so in his visiting cards. There was also a retired chief justice who became the governor or the western province and others who became chairmen of banks who functioned with great acceptance.

Nobody can say that all such appointments of retired judges, and there have been many over the years, were bad. Judges of the highest integrity like Justice T.S. Fernando many years ago served this country well as high commissioner in Australia. The Justice for All statement widely publicized in the media covered most aspects of the problem which are many. Hopefully what has been said there will register where it matters and necessary action taken as soon as possible on an undoubtedly urgent matter.

Saturday 8th March, 2025

What is unfolding in Sri Lanka’s law enforcement circles reminds us of Greek mythology, of all things. In Plato’s Symposium, we come across the story about how Zeus split humans in two and condemned them to search for their other halves. The Sri Lanka police find themselves in an even bigger predicament, so to speak; they have had to look for their own head, and their search has so far drawn a blank! Cops and spooks have been working day and night to trace the head of the police, but in vain.

IGP Deshabandu Tennakoon, who is on compulsory leave, has been in hiding since the issuance of a court order for his arrest over a shooting incident, which took place in Weligama in December 2023. The police would have the public believe that they are doing their damnedest to arrest their elusive chief, but without success. There are two possibilities in this regard. The police are so incompetent that they cannot track down their boss, or they are being economical with the truth as they do not want to arrest him.

It is a supreme irony that during Operation Yukthiya, Tennakoon, as the IGP, boasted that he had unsettled the underworld and frightened criminals into taking flight, but today he himself is on the run just like them. There cannot be anything more demeaning for an IGP than to be arrested by his subordinates and hauled up before courts. This may be the reason why Deshabandu is in hiding, but he cannot go on playing hide and seek with the police until the cows come home. He had better turn himself in without further delay.

Tennakoon is in this predicament because he compromised professional integrity and chose to stooge for the political authority of the day. He should have learnt from what had befallen Pujith Jayasundera, who was promoted to the post of IGP at the expense of a more deserving officer during the Yahapalana government. Jayasundera’s promotion turned out to be a curse for him as well as the country. In the aftermath of the Easter Sunday carnage in 2019, he must have regretted that he ever secured the post of IGP. He was arrested and remanded for his failure to prevent the terror attacks. Subsequently, the Supreme Court ordered him to pay Rs. 75 million as compensation to the victims of the bomb attacks.

Jayasundera was an efficient crime buster who did the police proud before being promoted as IGP. He was instrumental in forming the Police Narcotics Bureau and enabling the country to battle the scourge of dangerous drugs effectively. His promotion to the topmost post in the Police Department only ruined his career. Tennakoon, too, would have been free from trouble if he had not become a cat’s paw for the politicians in power to secure the post of IGP.

A sucker is said to be born every minute. The same holds true for stooges, who are also a dime a dozen. This country has never experienced a dearth of them. All vital state institutions, especially the police, are full of them; they have been pulling political chestnuts out of the fire for successive governments. They had better learn from the experience of the top cops who did so in the past and found themselves up a creek without a paddle.

Friday 7th March, 2025

Former Minister Mervyn Silva and two others, arrested by the CID for allegedly selling a block of state-owned land in Kelaniya by preparing a forged deed, were remanded yesterday. We do not intend to discuss a matter that is under judicial scrutiny. However, it needs to be said that legal action against Silva and others of his ilk for blatant violations of the law during the Rajapaksa government, is long overdue. The CID is only scratching the surface of the problem of forcible land acquisition.

The CID has made quite a few arrests under the current administration, but its high-octane performance has been selective. Minister Wasantha Samarsinghe, who is also facing a fraud charge, was not arrested. Is it that the police continue to consider the ruling party politicians ‘more equal than others’ despite last year’s regime change? A court case is now pending against Samarasinghe. The police once arrested two small schoolgirls—one for picking a few coconuts from her neighbour’s land, and the other for stealing a five-rupee coin! But they baulk at arresting politicians allegedly involved in forgery and land grabs.

Many people lost their properties to organised gangs that operated with impunity under the UNP/SLFP led governments. Let the police be urged to ask the victims of land grabs in Colombo as well as elsewhere to come forward and file complaints. Underworld gangs working for previous governments not only grabbed valuable properties belonging to ordinary people but also intimidated their victims into silence. Sadly, some members of the legal fraternity have sold their souls to the criminals in the garb of politicians.

Silva was above the law during the Mahinda Rajapaksa government, and stood accused of masterminding savage attacks on the Opposition and media institutions. It was political patronage that prevented him from going to jail for a cheque fraud. The Attorney General’s Department under political pressure opened an escape route for him. Sadly, the UNP-led Yahapalana government did not care to probe such incidents, and President Maithripala Sirisena unashamedly appointed Silva an SLFP organiser, making a mockery of his commitment to good governance.

Silva is one of those responsible for the collapse of the Rajapaksa government in 2019. President Rajapaksa shielded the likes of him, mistakenly believing that since he had a two-thirds majority in Parliament and the Opposition was weak, he could go on doing as he wished. The arrogance of power cost him the presidency in 2015. However, there are no permanent heroes or permanent villains in politics; heroes become villains and vice versa, and the people tend to re-elect villains when the heroes fail.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa became a hero in 2019, despite the ouster of the Rajapaksas in 2015, and mustered a two-thirds majority in the legislature, but a resentful public took to the streets in their thousands and he headed for the hills. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was firmly in the saddle, and things were looking up for her strong government. She even crushed a wave of anti-government protests last year, but eventually she had to flee the country.

As for the villains in Sri Lankan politics, one may recall that the country erupted in euphoria when the demise of JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera was announced in 1989; people lit firecrackers, ate milk rice and danced in the streets. But in the 2004 general election, they voted overwhelmingly for the JVP, which was part of the UPFA coalition at that time, enabling it to secure 39 seats. Two decades later, they voted the JVP-led NPP into power. Whoever would have thought that Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election and incurred much public opprobrium for inciting a riot to sabotage the elevation of Joe Biden to the presidency would be re-elected?

Thus, anything is possible in politics. This is something the NPP government should bear in mind. Unless it learns from its predecessors’ mistakes, and lives up to people’s expectations by fulfilling its main campaign promises, it will face the same fate as the past governments with supermajorities. Political dog-and-pony shows and rhetoric won’t do.