President Anura Kumara Dissanayake continues to draw heavy flak from the Opposition for repeatedly declaring, at the NPP’s Local Government (LG) election rallies, that he will readily approve financial allocations for the local councils to be won by the NPP and others will face difficulties in obtaining funds as the political rivals of the NPP cannot be considered clean. The Opposition and some election monitors have taken exception to what can be considered a warning issued by President Dissanayake, and brought it to the notice of the Election Commission (EC).

The Government Information Department has denied a media report that the EC issued a letter pertaining President Dissanayake’s aforesaid statement. This is a strange state of affairs in the run-up to a crucial election, where the stakes of the ruling NPP are much higher than those of its rivals.

It is clear to any intelligent person that President Dissanayake is leveraging his position as the Finance Minister in a bid to influence the outcome of the upcoming LG polls. The message he has conveyed to the electorate is loud and clear; the local government institutions will be at his mercy and therefore it is prudent for the public to vote for the NPP and ensure the smooth functioning local councils. The EC ought to take the presidential statement in question seriously and take appropriate action.

It behoves the EC to refrain from acting like the three proverbial monkeys—refusing to hear, speak and see evil—in respect of the presidential statements that have the potential to influence the outcome of the upcoming polls. It has to act in response to the Opposition’s complaints promptly.

If the EC has not reacted to the controversial presidential statement in question, as the Government Information Department has reportedly claimed, it should make its position known to the public without further delay lest its silence should be considered a sign of subservience or partiality to the ruling coalition led by President Dissanayake. It is duty-bound to ensure a level playing field for all political parties and independent groups in the fray. The government must not be allowed to bulldoze its way through at the expense of its political rivals.

The EC should not consider President Dissanayake’s warning at issue as mere campaign rhetoric, for there have been instances where contempt-of-court charges were pressed against some politicians over their political speeches. The imprisonment of S. B. Dissanayake over a derogatory statement he made about the Supreme Court, at a Vap Magul ceremony in Habaraduwa in November 2003 is a case in point.

The Opposition’s reaction to the President’s warning that he will impose restrictions on fund allocations for the local councils to be won by parties other than the NPP has been lukewarm. In fact, the Opposition does not flog any issue hard enough to shape public opinion. It has not even been able to highlight what the Batalanda Commission report says about the JVP’s violent past. The green-channelling of 323 red-flagged freight containers has been forgotten. The Opposition has claimed in Parliament that a member of the incumbent Cabinet was interdicted over a fraud while he was serving in the State Fertilizer Corporation, but it has baulked at naming the person concerned and demanding his resignation from the Cabinet.

The government has been able to distract the Opposition, which has also stopped short of cranking up pressure on the EC to take up the President’s aforesaid warning. The Opposition has not pointed out that the Colombo Municipal Council under UNP control survived several SLFP-led governments including those with two-thirds majorities under President Mahinda Rajapaksa and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Leader of the House and Minister Bimal Ratnayake was spot on when he told Parliament recently that there was no bigger asset to the NPP government than the current Opposition, whose bark was worse than its bite. Nothing can be a graver threat to democracy than the aggressiveness of a powerful government as well as the meekness of the Opposition and the so-called independent commissions.

Saturday 19th April, 2025

Governments with steamroller majorities become impervious to reasoning. Blinded by the arrogance of power, they dig their own political graves. This, we have witnessed on numerous occasions in this country. When ensconced in power, politicians practise the exact opposite of what they preach during their election campaigns.

The JVP-led NPP government finds itself in an unenviable position. It has had some arrests made under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which it used to condemn as a repressive law and pledged to scrap as a national priority. The JVP leaders who were arrested and detained in the late 1980s under the PTA must know what it is like to be held under that draconian law.

There is no way the government can justify the arrest and detention of former State Minister Sivanesanthurai Chandrakanthan alias Pilleyan under the PTA and the statements being made by its leaders that he has been arrested in connection with the Easter Sunday carnage contrary to what is stated in the detention order. Allegations against Pilleyan must be probed and if irrefutable evidence to prove charges against him can be ascertained, he must be prosecuted. But the CID should not have been directed to use the PTA to arrest and detain him.

One of the conditions the EU has laid down for extending GSP+ is the abolition of the PTA. The government will have a hard time convincing the EU that it is serious about doing away with the PTA while using the draconian law selectively to deal with its political opponents.

No one who cherishes human rights and the rule of law will oppose the ongoing investigation into the abduction and disappearance of Vice Chancellor of the Eastern University Prof. Sivasubramaniam Ravindranath in 2006, but on no grounds can the government’s efforts to turn Pilleyan’s detention into a kind of political circus be countenanced.

Meanwhile, the NPP government has used an ad hominem in its argument against attorney-at-law Udaya Gammanpila, who is Pilleyan’s counsel; it has been carrying out irrelevant attacks on Gammanpila and vilifying him instead of addressing his arguments or position on the issue. It has claimed that Gammanpila has no experience whatsoever with handling court cases on his own, and therefore it is puzzling why he has undertaken to handle Pilleyan’s case. In peddling this argument, the government has made a mistake. It is counterproductive for the JVP/NPP to question Gammanpila’s ability to appear for a client in courts on the grounds that he has no experience with handling court cases on his own, for the same logic can be used to bolster the Opposition’s claim that the JVP/NPP, which has not even run a wayside kiosk, is not equal to the task of governing the country.

If the government actually believes that Gammanpila cannot handle Pilleyan’s case properly, it should be happy, for it wants Pilleyan thrown behind bars, doesn’t it? Sun Tzu has said in The Art of War that you must not disturb your enemies when they are making mistakes. If the government thinks Pilleyan has made a mistake by retaining Gammanpila, who, it says, cannot handle his case properly, why should it make an issue of it without keeping quiet?

Friday 18th April, 2025

Many crimes, including high-profile assassinations, have gone unpunished in this country during the past several decades. The CID has selectively reopened an investigation into one of them. It has arrested and detained former State Minister Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan alias Pilleyan over the abduction and disappearance of Vice Chancellor of the Eastern University Professor Sivasubramaniam Ravindranath in 2006. The victim had received death threats from the breakaway LTTE group, led by Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan alias Karuna. Pilleyan was a prominent member of that outfit.

What Pilleyan is alleged to have been involved in is a very serious crime, which must be investigated thoroughly, and those who masterminded and perpetrated it must be brought to justice. However, the police and the government must bear in mind that fairness in criminal investigations is a cornerstone of justice.

The CID has used the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which the JVP/NPP leaders themselves have condemned as draconian, to arrest and detain Pilleyan. The CID would not have done so without the blessings of the JVP-led NPP government, which has made a mockery of its much-advertised commitment to doing away with that law. One is puzzled by the timing of Pillayan’s arrest, his 90-day detention, and questionable claims that senior JVP/NPP leaders, including Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala, have made implicating him in the Easter Sunday carnage although he has been arrested in connection with the abduction and disappearance of Prof. Ravindranath. This queer turn of events makes one wonder whether the government is driven by an ulterior motive, with pressure mounting on it to ensure a breakthrough in the ongoing investigations into the Easter Sunday terror attacks before the upcoming sixth anniversary of the carnage.

Former Minister Udaya Gammanpila, who is Pilleyan’s counsel, has said the CID is capable of ‘beating a rabbit in such a way that it eventually admits that it is a fox’. The CID has amply demonstrated its ability to obtain confessions in that manner, on numerous occasions, especially after the murder of Seya Sewwandi, a four-year-old girl, in Kotadeniyawa, in 2015. Two men and a schoolboy were taken into custody on suspicion over that heinous crime, severely beaten and vilified before the real murderer was arrested. One of the men and the schoolboy complained that they had been tortured during interrogation and asked to make confessions.

It is a supreme irony that the JVP, the main constituent of the ruling NPP coalition, which has undertaken to ensure that justice is served in respect of the abduction and disappearance of a Vice Chancellor, has been blamed for assassinating two Vice Chancellors—Prof. Stanley Wijesundera and Prof. Chandratne Patuwathavithane—for defying its illegal orders. Those intrepid academics were killed in 1989 while serving as the VCs of the University of Colombo and the University of Moratuwa, respectively.

All those who are responsible for the abduction of Prof. Ravindranath in a high security zone in Colombo must be made to face the full force of the law. Similarly, the university dons in the NPP are duty-bound to have the masterminds behind the assassinations of Prof. Wijesundera and Prof. Patuwathavithane also brought to justice.

Prof. Wijesundera and Prof. Patuwathavithane were killed for resisting the JVP’s attempt to disrupt university education. Today, the leaders of the JVP, which had those professors gunned down for refusing to obey its illegal order to close universities in protest against the Indo-Lanka Accord and the devolution of power through the Provincial Council system are all out to ingratiate themselves with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; they also stand accused of helping further India’s strategic interests at the expense of Sri Lanka! They won’t reveal the contents of the recently inked MoUs/agreements with India, especially the one on defence cooperation! They have also pledged to hold the Provincial Council elections after conducting the Local Government polls!

Any man’s death diminishes those who are involved in mankind, as John Donne has said poetically. Needless to say, the deaths of hundreds of men diminish them more. Curiously, the massacre of about 600 policemen, who surrendered to the LTTE, in the Eastern Province, in 1990, on the orders of the then UNP government, has gone uninvestigated. The family members of those police personnel, killed in the line of duty, deserve justice just like those of the Easter Sunday carnage victims. Let the NPP government be urged to order a probe into the massacre of the policemen in the East.