Wednesday 26th February, 2025

The NPP government’s maiden budget was passed with a two-thirds majority at the second reading vote yesterday. It will now go into committee stage for further review. That the ayes would have it was a foregone conclusion. However, the events that unfolded in the run-up to yesterday’s budget vote were oddly interesting.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake presented Budget 2025 in Parliament on 17 Feb. Thereafter, a debate thereon got underway. Two days later, an underworld kingpin, called Ganemulle Sanjeewa was killed inside a courtroom. That incident was followed by the custodial deaths of two suspected murders, and the focus of Parliament shifted from the budget to public/national security for all intents and purposes. The same holds true for the media and the public; they too have remained preoccupied with the narratives about those killings and the security implications thereof. An analysis of media content during the past few days will bear this out.

The economic crisis is far from over, and the country is still under a pall of uncertainty, which shows no signs of going away anytime soon. This is a time when the government, the public and the media must remain maniacally focused on the economic front. But threats to public/national security, real or otherwise, have taken centre stage, eclipsing the country’s fiscal plan for the current year. One may call it a case of misplaced priorities, but it is something the government should take cognisance of.

Given the high level of public outrage that the killing of a crime czar inside a courtroom and two extrajudicial killings have sparked, how serious the situation would be if harm were to befall a prominent figure, say a popular political leader, is not difficult to guess. Hence the need for the government to ensure that VIP security, especially for its rivals, is not compromised while doing everything possible to protect the public and neutralise threats to national security. Mere rhetoric won’t do.

Last week’s daring underworld attack inside a courthouse has made a mockery of threat assessment under the current dispensation. The acting IGP Priyantha Weerasooriya told the media the other day that Ganemulle Sanjeewa had not been taken to a court in Gampaha recently in view of an intelligence warning that he would be targeted there. But the police took him to the Colombo Magistrate’s Court, the following week! We are reminded of the circumstances that led to the Easter Sunday carnage in 2019. Some of those who were blamed for failing to prevent those terror attacks, despite the availability of actionable intelligence, are back in key positions in the public security sector!

The leaders of the JVP, which was responsible for quite a few political killings in the late 1980s, cannot be unaware that terrorists and other killers have to be lucky only once, as the IRA told Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. A solo gunman/ bomber can plunge a country into chaos and unsettle a government, or even cause its collapse, however powerful it may think it is.

One may recall that a 17-year UNP regime’s fate was sealed the day former minister and leading Opposition figure, Lalith Athulathmudali, was assassinated. That tragedy which shook the country sparked political upheavals, in 1993, setting in motion a process that led to the collapse of the UNP’s rule the following year. The political backlash from Lalith’s assassination prompted President Ranasinghe Premadasa to throw caution to the wind, despite terrorist threats, and go among the people during a May Day rally, a few days later, presumably in a bid to boost the sagging morale of the UNP’s rank and file. The rest is history.

Sri Lankan politicians do not learn from history. The Mahinda Rajapaksa government curtailed former Army Commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka’s security as he had entered the presidential fray in 2010. Thankfully, the LTTE had been defeated by that time. But the Easter Sunday terror attacks happened a decade later. Today, the underworld is unusually active, and the possibility of attempts from other quarters to destabilise the country cannot be ruled out. One can only hope that the government will act prudently.

Tuesday 25th February, 2025

The JVP-led NPP government, to give credit where credit is due, has already set two examples worthy of emulation. It had Speaker Asoka Ranwala step down when he failed to prove his claim that he had a doctorate. It has also had the courage to take exception to some degrading remarks Deputy Minister Nalin Hewage made about SJB MP Rohini Wijerathna last week.

Chief Government Whip Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa promptly requested the Chair to expunge the offensive words from the Hansard when the SJB raised objections. NPP MP Kaushalya Ariayaratne condemned, in a Facebook post, what Hewage had said. Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya has also gone on record as stating that such remarks should not have been made. Way to go!

Hewage should have known better than to make such remarks, and there is no way he can justify them. Now that the government has expressed disapproval of his disparaging remarks, the matter should be considered closed. But the Opposition has a propensity to blow issues out of proportion to gain political mileage. Let its holier-than-thou members who lack control over their restless tongues and tend to lash out at female MPs at the drop of a hat be urged to follow the example set by the NPP. They ought to remember that nastier things have been said about female MPs in Parliament, which has also witnessed numerous brawls and even a savage attempt to assault and gherao the Speaker. The culprits got off scot-free. Thankfully, most of those rowdies are not in the current Parliament.

The UNP and the SLFP as well as their offshoots, the SJB and the SLPP, respectively, are without any moral right to condemn others for mistreating women. The UNP’s 17-year rule (1977-1994) began with a presidential pardon for a notorious rapist serving a jail. UNP politicians and their supporters also stripped female SLFP activists naked in public during the post-election violence spree in 1977. The SLFP, which produced the world’s first female Prime Minister, humiliated a group of female UNP activists in a similar manner in the run-up to the North-Western Provincial Council election in 1999.

Most of the Opposition MPs who have taken up the cudgels for Rohini’s rights—and rightly so—were in the previous Parliament, but they never so much as made a whimper of protest when MP Diana Gamage was vilified in the House. After crossing over to the government from the SJB, Diana had to suffer many indignities at the hands of some male SJB MPs who would spew out streams of suggestive remarks whenever she rose to speak in the House. She sought to get even with them, but hers was a futile effort like a badger’s fight against a pack of mastiffs.

We urge the party leaders to take up the issue of harassment of female MPs and rein in unruly elements in their parliamentary groups. This is the best way to clean up Parliament.

Meanwhile, the female members of the Provincial Councils and local government institutions were in a far worse predicament than the women MPs. Reams were written about the harassment of female local councillors, some of whom were even shouted down at council meetings. The situation became so bad that the victims sank their political differences and formed a front to fight for their rights.

Successive governments have striven to increase women’s representation in political institutions and made laws to achieve that end, but without much success. A quota has been introduced for women in the LG institutions. There is a pressing need for decisive action to safeguard their rights. This is something the NPP government should give serious thought to, with the next LG polls only a few weeks away. It ought to extend its Clean Sri Lankan initiative to keep the local councils to be elected in April free from harassment, sexual or otherwise. Other political parties which are making a public display of their commitment to protecting women’s rights, too, should assign high priority to the task of ensuring that LG institutions will have zero tolerance of the harassment and intimidation of female councillors.

Monday 24th February, 2025

Sri Lanka’s focus has been shifted from Budget 2025 and the economy to the netherworld of crime and narcotics for all intents and purposes. Since President Anura Kumara Dissanayake presented the NPP government’s maiden budget on 17 Feb., a spree of underworld attacks has sparked a kind of national discourse on crime and criminals.

Close on the heels of Wednesday’s courtroom killing, which shook the country, two suspects arrested for gunning down a person in Kotahena, Colombo, were fatally shot allegedly in a scuffle with the police during ‘a search for weapons’ at Crow Island. A policeman also suffered injury in the clash, we are told. Those killings have provided grist to the Opposition’s mill, and left the NPP government on a sticky wicket.

Friday’s custodial deaths are viewed in some quarters as a sign of the culture of extrajudicial executions returning. This is something a government needs like a hole in the head, especially ahead of an important election. So, it is only natural that the NPP administration had the Acting IGP and the Secretaries to the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Public Security give a press conference as a damage control measure, on Saturday. Theirs was an attempt to mitigate the political impact of the surge in crime, the courtroom murder and the custodial deaths on the government.

Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security, former SDIG Ravi Seneviratne, addressing the media, went so far as to attribute the increase in criminal activity to a conspiracy. Giving what may be considered a political twist to the issue, he claimed that there was an attempt to derail investigations into the past emblematic crimes including the Easter Sunday carnage and destabilise the country. He said he had received intelligence reports to that effect; those behind that sinister move had been identified and legal action would be taken against them. Going by his claim, there is a threat to national security. But President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is also the Minister of Defence, has categorically stated, in Kandy, that there is no threat to national security. Hasn’t the President taken Seneviratne’s claim seriously, or doesn’t think a move to destabilise the country serious enough to be considered a threat to national security?

Interestingly, in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday tragedy (2019), the then President Maithripala Sirisena claimed that the terror attacks had been intended to scuttle his war on the underworld, especially the drug Mafia. Now, Seneviratne, who was the SDIG in charge of the CID at the time, tells us that the ongoing underworld attacks are aimed at derailing the Easter Sunday carnage probe among other things!

As for conspiracies, we are reminded of what ex-SDIG Seneviratne stated in his testimony before the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI) that probed the Easter Sunday terror attacks. He and 10 other witnesses insisted that there had been an external hand behind the Easter Sunday carnage. Among others were Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and former SSP Shanie Abeysekera.

The police are duty-bound to ensure the safety of all suspects in custody. Friday’s custodial deaths have left another blackmark on the police. A thorough investigation is called for. The police narrative about the killing of the aforesaid crime suspects reminds us of actor/director-turned NPP MP Jagath Manuwarne’s popular teledrama, ‘Kodi Gaha Yata’, wherein a suspect is killed and a policeman suffers injury to a leg under similar circumstances.

The prevailing culture of custodial deaths has rendered everyone vulnerable. First, they come for criminals, and whom they will come for next is anybody’s guess. More importantly, the Sri Lanka police have earned notoriety for wrongful arrests, which are legion. The way they acted following the murder of Seya Sewwandi, a four-year-old girl, in Kotadeniyawa, in 2015, is a case in point. Three suspects including a schoolboy were taken into custody on suspicion and vilified before the real murderer was arrested. Thankfully, the police did not take any of those suspects out as part of ‘an operation to trace illegal firearms’!

Worryingly, the focus of the ongoing public discussion is on the criminals and their rights rather than the victims of crime. Much is being spoken about the serious security lapses that led to the killing of Ganemulle Sanjeewa in the dock, but his victims numbering dozens, and the predicament of their families crying out for justice have not received much attention. The deaths of two suspects in a police shooting are being discussed in Parliament and on political platforms, but the person who perished at their hands in Kotahena has been forgotten.