Editorial
Comrades see red

Tuesday 21st January, 2025
A string of defeats in cooperative society elections during the past few weeks, indicating a sharp decline in the JVP-led NPP’s approval rating, and growing public disillusionment with the incumbent dispensation, has jolted the NPP leaders into making a determined bid to turn things around with the next Local Government (LG) elections slated for April. They are however labouring under the misconception that their pre-election tactics will help boost their popularity as a government. So, instead of carrying out their duties and functions diligently and living up to the people’s expectations, they have chosen to bash their political rivals. They endeared themselves to the public by being magnanimous in victory, but the problem with magnanimity of Sri Lankan politicians is that it falls by the wayside when the worm shows signs of turning.
The JVP/NPP has launched a series of public rallies to shore up its support base ahead of the upcoming LG polls. Interestingly, at these events the government leaders mostly repeat what they said during their presidential and general election campaigns. If they say anything new, it invariably runs counter to their promises. What President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has said about the Trinco oil tank farm is a case in point. Over the weekend, he said Sri Lanka needed about 24 out of the 99 tanks; about 61 tanks would be developed as a joint venture between Sri Lanka and India, and the Indian Oil Company would utilise the others. When the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government proposed to do so, the JVP/NPP condemned it as a total sell-out. During its reign of terror in the late 1980s, the JVP murdered many of those who defied its ban on Indian goods and services; its sparrow units even killed traders who sold ‘Bombay onions’, which the then UNP government had to dub ‘Lanka big onions’ to save lives! Today, the JVP in the NPP’s clothing is sharing the Trinco oil tanks with India! It is heartening that sobering economic reality has had a mellowing effect on the JVP’s hidebound ideological shibboleths which plunged the country into a bloodbath about three and a half decades ago, but shouldn’t the JVP leaders tender an apology to the public for the heinous crimes their party committed in the name of a campaign to defeat what it called Indian expansionism?
President Dissanayake went ballistic at a rally in Katukurunda, Kalutara, on Sunday. Tearing into former Presidents of Sri Lanka, he repeated his campaign rhetoric. Claiming that former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was occupying a state-owned house, whose imputed rent was Rs. 4.6 million a month, President Dissanayake said Rajapaksa would be asked to pay that amount as rent or vacate the house and collect the housing allowance (Rs. 30,000) the latter was entitled to. Was it an instance of a subconscious motivation manifesting itself? The government is under pressure to introduce an imputed rental income tax as part of the ongoing IMF programme.
The former Presidents of this country are not without private residences, and therefore it defies comprehension why they should be given state-owned houses. However, the question is why President Dissanayake, who takes on the former Presidents with might and main, has baulked at dealing with the large-scale rice millers and private bus mudalalis, with a firm hand despite their exploitative practices. His efforts to strip the former Presidents of their ‘undue entitlements’ may strike a responsive chord with the public, but such action will not help assuage the people’s resentment at the government, which has failed to fulfil its main election promises, and cannot even make rice freely available at affordable prices.
It will be a big mistake for the government to reduce security provided to the former Presidents, especially those who were instrumental in defeating terrorism. Equally, one may recall that in 2020, while being detained in the Boossa Prison, three notorious criminals, Podi Lassi, Kosgoda Tharaka and Pitigala Keuma, threatened to harm the then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Defence Secretary General Kamal Gunaratne, and some senior prison officers. Such is the power of the underworld. The government insists that security provided to the former Presidents has been reduced on the basis of proper threat assessments. But something that President Dissanayake said in Katukurunda on Sunday makes one doubt the veracity of that claim. Declaring that the number of security personnel assigned to former President Mahinda Rajapaksa had been reduced to 60, Dissanayake declared that if ‘whingeing’ persisted, those 60 personnel too would be removed. The subtext of his statement is that the controversial decision to reduce security provided to Mahinda Rajapaksa was not devoid of politics, and the government would not hesitate to strip him of security completely if he offends it further.
A government that raises public expectations but fails to live up to them loses its popularity. Popular support cannot be regained by means of rhetoric, threats, warnings, scapegoating or rows with the media. The NPP must understand this if it is to avoid a crippling midterm electoral setback.
Editorial
Groping in the dark

Thursday 13th February, 2025
Sri Lanka continues to be in the throes of multiple crises because their root causes usually go unaddressed. If the past governments, especially the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration, had cared to tackle the issue of the country’s national debt becoming unmanageable by taking steps to shore up foreign currency reserves and increasing state revenue substantially, the current economic crisis could have been averted.
A mega crisis has been developing in the power sector for decades, but nobody seems to care. Successive governments have only paid lip service to the pressing need to address it. Sunday’s countrywide power outage has left the government, the Opposition, the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and other stakeholders behaving like the proverbial visually-impaired men who tried to figure out the shape of an elephant by touching different parts of the animal’s anatomy, and came to absurd conclusions. No sooner had the power failure occurred than Minister in charge of the power sector, Kumara Jayakody, declared that a monkey had done it! His claim had the whole world in stitches, with international media giving it much prominence owing to its high entertainment value. It also made one wonder whether Sri Lanka’s national grid was so primitive that it lacked resilience to withstand the shock from a monkey coming into contact with a transformer in a grid substation. Even ferocious Tigers could not shut down the national grid despite all their terror attacks on the country’s power infrastructure.
Senior CEB engineers lost no time in attributing Sunday’s power outage to an increase in solar power generation, which, they said, had rendered the national grid unstable on account of a drop in demand. That sounded a tall tale and betrayed the engineers’ prejudice against power generation from renewable sources. The CEB Technological Engineers Union has rubbished the engineers’ claim; it has said that according to a report prepared by a committee consisting of 35 experts including some of the serving CEB high-rankers, the national grid is capable of accommodating 2,600 MW of power from renewable sources, and solar power production amounts to only 1,400 MW at present. The CEB stands accused of short-changing the solar power producers in a bid to perpetuate the country’s overdependence on lucrative thermal power production. It will be interesting to see what the CEB engineers have to say about the aforesaid expert committee report.
There have been several previous instances where we experienced countrywide power outages that lasted for hours. During the past decade or so, every regime change has been followed by a nationwide power failure. The UNP-led UNF formed the Yahapalana government in 2015 after ousting the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration, and a countrywide blackout occurred in 2016. Grid defects were blamed for the eight-hour power outage, but no action was taken to find out what had really caused it.
The SLPP toppled the Yahapalana administration, and formed a government by winning the 2019 presidential election and the 2020 parliamentary polls; the country experienced a nationwide power failure in 2021. The issue was relegated to the limbo of forgotten things after the restoration of power supply and some half-hearted attempts to identify the causes thereof. Prolonged power cuts came thereafter for want of fuel to generate electricity.
Another countrywide power failure was experienced in 2023 about one year after the ouster of President Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s fortuitous elevation to the presidency. The latest nationwide power outage has come only a few months after a regime change.
Sunday’s power failure must be thoroughly probed and the causative factors identified as a national priority. It must also be ascertained whether some vested interests deliberately undermined the national grid to advance their own interests. Given the existence of various powerful lobbies, popularly known as Mafias, in Sri Lanka’s power sector, anything is possible.
The government should give serious thought to launching a clean-up of the power sector, which is rotten to the core, under its Clean Sri Lanka initiative.
Editorial
Buses as Chariots of Death

Wednesday 12th February, 2025
The tragic collision between two private buses in Kurunegala on Monday snuffed out four lives and left 25 others injured; five of them are battling death, according to media reports. The police say the bus that caused the mishap was plying at 90 km/h, which is close to the maximum speed limit on local expressways.
Speeding is the order of the day on roads in Sri Lanka, where deaths caused by accidents average seven or eight a day, but nothing much has apparently been done all these years to ensure road safety. It is said that in the days of yore, people would write their last wills before embarking on pilgrimages to faraway places such as Kataragama, given the perils of their arduous journeys. The modern-day Sri Lankans are not entirely free from such trepidation; they cannot so much as cross the road without fear of being run over by speeding vehicles.
It was reported last month that 30 advanced speed guns worth Rs. 91 million had been imported for the traffic police. Didn’t any of the police stations in the areas through which the aforesaid ill-fated buses plied have a speed gun?
Sri Lankan bus drivers are a dangerous lot, as is public knowledge. They are capable of making even atheists pray. Their vehicles are veritable mobile shrines, but the various religious icons displayed therein are redundant, for their spine-tingling driving alone is sufficient to keep their passengers reminded of deities and the Buddha.
Expressways are equipped with speed cameras, which have had a deterrent effect on drivers with lead feet, and help cash-strapped governments rake in a lot of money by way of traffic fines. Given Sri Lankans’ propensity for speeding and committing other traffic offences, installing speed cameras along the roads where accidents frequently occur will not only help save lives but also prove a boon for the incumbent government, which is under pressure to increase its revenue substantially to qualify for the next tranche of the IMF loan.
Police Spokesman, SSP Buddhika Manatunga yesterday urged the public to speak up if the vehicles they travelled in were driven in a reckless manner because it was their precious lives that were in danger. One cannot but agree with him. Passengers usually do not voice their concerns, much less fight for their rights. Curiously, those who ousted an Executive President by taking to the streets suffer in silence in private buses whose drivers ride roughshod over them besides exposing them to danger. Their submissiveness only fosters indiscipline among bus crews. Hence the need for passengers to pluck up the courage to challenge issues such as dangerous driving.
The Police Spokesman also requested the public to inform the police of instances of reckless driving, etc. They should do so for their own sake, but what guarantee is there that the police will respond swiftly to such complaints. Most of all, how can passengers convey such information to the police? Are there special telephone numbers and dedicated personnel to entertain passengers’ complaints?
True, the police alone cannot tackle the menace of reckless driving, and they need public cooperation. But they themselves must take stern action against wild drivers. A few weeks ago, the police used plainclothesmen to travel in private buses and record offenses committed by their drivers, who were made to face legal action subsequently. That method yielded the desired results, but the bus workers and owners started protesting. They have apparently had the last laugh thanks to their political connections. The government stands accused of giving kid-glove treatment to powerful rice millers who exploit the public, and the private bus mudalalis who not only thrive at the expense of commuters but also endanger the latter’s lives with impunity.
Let the government and the police be urged to resume their road discipline campaign.
Editorial
Needed: ‘Ministry of Excuses’

Tuesday 11th February, 2025
Most detractors of the NPP claimed, before last year’s elections, that Sri Lanka would find itself in the same predicament as Oceania in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, if the JVP-led alliance was voted into power, but thankfully their prognostication has not come true although the NPP parliamentary group is said to be under the spell of a kind of Big Brother, as evident from their regimented conduct. However, it looks as if the current dispensation needed a Ministry of Excuses, as it were, a la the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty in Oceania, given the sheer number of excuses the NPP leaders trot out on a daily basis albeit ineffectively.
Sri Lanka has suffered what may be described as the biggest shock at the hands of a monkey since Hanuman’s arson attack mentioned in Ramayana, if a statement made by the Minister in charge of the power sector, Kumara Jayakody, about Sunday’s countrywide power outage is anything to go by.
Power cuts have returned due to the latest breakdown of the Norochcholai coal-fired power plant. Minister Jayakody lost no time in attributing Sunday’s power failure to ‘a monkey coming into contact with a transformer’ at the CEB’s Panadura Grid Substation. Subsequently, he and other government politicians started blaming the previous governments which, they said, had not developed the national grid.
The NPP government considers itself infallible and blames its predecessors and even wild animals whenever something goes wrong. Some of its members have blamed the current coconut shortage on depredation by monkeys, making one wonder whether those animals intensified raids on coconut cultivations after last year’s regime change.
An NPP minister continues to draw heavy flak for having faulted the public for consuming coconut oil and pol sambol excessively thereby worsening the current coconut shortage. The government has also claimed that the rice shortage is attributable, inter alia, to the practice of Sri Lankans feeding their pets with rice! Before last year’s elections, the JVP/NPP accused large-scale millers of hoarding rice, and manipulating the paddy/rice markets to exploit both farmers and consumers alike, and pledged to end millers’ exploitative practices with a single stroke of the presidential pen. But that promise has gone unfulfilled and the millers’ cartel is far from tamed.
Some former military officers who contested the last general election on the NPP ticket thundered from election platforms that they needed only two months to wipe out the underworld. Today, they are in power, but hardly a day passes without underworld killings being reported.
The NPP government should seriously consider setting up the Ministry of Excuses fast so that it will be able to present its excuses, ruses, etc., in an effective manner and prevent its members from making contradictory statements by way of self-exculpation.
Ironically, in the late 1980s the JVP unleashed mindless terror purportedly to save the country from a ‘monkey army’ (derogatory term it used for the Indian Peace Keeping Force). It destroyed countless CEB assets including transformers in a bid to cripple the economy. Fortunately, it failed in its endeavour.
Going by Minister Jayakody’s aforesaid claim, the JVP leaders must be feeling ashamed that in the late 1980s they failed to achieve a task that even a monkey is equal to—causing a countrywide power failure. Today, those who promised to defeat an entire ‘monkey army’ are in power, but they cannot even protect an electricity substation against monkeys!
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