Continued from December 9, 2025

During his rousing speech, Harin Fernando anticipated SLPP national organiser Namal Rajapaksa’s straightforward declaration of his resolve to end the JVP/NPP regime as soon as possible. The latter’s battle cry might have sounded premature even to some of his less attentive fellow members of the SLPP who failed to catch his meaning. It is possible that Harin delivered a preemptive strike at what he felt was Namal’s overweening presidential ambition (by making a facial gesture, before leaving the speaker stand, that suggested contempt at the latter’s goal). What Namal expressed was his desire and determination to bring down a poor-performing government that, he believed, was causing great harm to the country through ignorance, inexperience, and arrogance of the men and women who were running it.

Harin was criticised in Parliament by Wimal Weerawansa MP, in February 2024 during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency, for having casually stated during an interview with an Indian TV channel, as newly appointed Tourism minister then, that Sri Lanka was a part of India! Indian High Commissioner Santosh Jha’s recent remark at the Colombo YMBA’s ‘Light of Asia’ Centenary Celebrations (December 6, 2025)  that “… India and Sri Lanka are connected not only by geography but by deeper bonds of culture ….” could be read as a matter of fact allusion to a sinister assumption that Harin’s ‘casual’ statement probably purposefully expressed. It is also significant that Harin was appointed by the UNP as its Deputy Secretary General of Political Mobilisation with immediate effect on October 21, 2025. His new responsibilities include uniting all political parties in the country and engaging them in a common programme, in addition to which he will be coordinating the many meetings that are to be organised by the UNP. Harin’s new post seems to match Namal’s position as the national organiser of the SLPP.

Actually, the very idea of holding a series of such massive protest rallies across the country is Wickremesinghe’s brainchild. If he and Mahinda Rajapaksa have masterminded the Maha Jana Handa protest rally campaign initiated on November 21, 2025, they have all the reason and the moral  right as well as the inherent obligation to do so. They ought to get involved in actively mentoring the next generation of rulers at this crucial moment of unprecedented national emergency caused by the recent cyclonic disaster of apocalyptic proportions. They both share between them a significant amount of responsibility for the current situation due to their own past strengths and weaknesses of leadership as senior politicians, in their characteristic egoistic ways, though.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, a follower of the watersheds of 1956 and 1972 in the political history of post-Independence Sri Lanka, inadvertently turned the 2009 victory over terrorism, which he was largely instrumental in creating through his own brave political leadership, into a sort of pyrrhic victory. That is, he let his success become the cause of his own downfall and the country’s regress; this was basically as a consequence of his shameless indulgence in ‘family bandyism’  or nepotism. As for Wickremasinghe, an admirer of the 1978 introduction of the open market economic system and the institution of the executive presidency (by his uncle, UNP leader J.R. Jayewardene), acts as if he wants to erase from national memory the two previous epochal events (of 1956 and 1972) that his rival is guided by; this makes him look least sensitive towards Sinhalese Buddhist majority’s legitimate aspirations.

Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapaksa, each tried and tested in the rough and tumble of parliamentary politics for over half a century, have always been political rivals, but both have also been robust defenders of parliamentary democracy. Those who are old enough or adult enough may remember how, not long ago, the Parliament chamber reverberated with their raised voices denouncing each other with shouts of “kauda hora? Mahinda hora …. Ranil hora benku hora”, etc. Despite this mutual hostility in politics, they have together profoundly influenced the most tumultuous course of the island’s political history of the last two decades (2005-25). At the Maha Jana Handa, Harin expressed his views on the complementary roles the two senior leaders played during that period in the service of the Sri Lankan people. While praising Wickremesinghe for  saving Sri Lanka from total economic collapse in 2022, and for having made similar  contributions in the past for the uplift of the country and its people. Harin paid unqualified encomiums to Mahinda Rajapaksa for having eliminated the scourge of separatist terrorism through his unique abilities of political direction and diplomacy.

Harin’s explicit acknowledgement of the  historic achievement of the leader (Mahinda Rajapaksa) of the SLFP (the major partner of the UPFA, now the SLPP) signifies a sea change in the UNP’s traditional attitude towards that victorious nationalist  triumph over the LTTE.

So, Wickremesinghe and Rajapaksa represent respectively the UNP and the SLFP, which, though now almost defunct, are still alive and well in their new manifestations. The UNP is probably on the verge of being made whole with the return of its breakaway group the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) led by Sajith Premadasa, with or without his consent; it should not be forgotten that the SJB, with its 40 MPs, forms the main Opposition. There will most likely be a similar reunion between the SLFP and the SLPP. The cooperation between the two oldest  national parties at this crucial juncture is imperative for the survival of the sovereign unitary state of Sri Lanka. If Sri Lanka’s unitary status must be ended for some untoward reason beyond the country’s capacity to deal with such as global or regional geostrategic pressure (which is, of course, unlikely, because the Eastern bloc countries Russia and China, with comparable military and economic power also have stakes in the region), it should be done through Parliament, not otherwise.

The rescue of parliamentary democracy after the ouster  of the 7th Executive President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022 amidst the so-called Aragalaya (Struggle) protest, which was turning violent, was the joint achievement of Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapaksa (though it was cynically bruited about the social media that Wickremasinghe played an opportunistic ‘run with the hares and hunt with the hounds’ strategy exploiting Aragalaya, begun peacefully, but later hijacked by violent extremist elements including members of the JVP/NPP. Representatives of certain regional communal parties, and coercive religious extremists hiding among them, were there too. These elements seem to be lying low now in sinister silence.

On December 5, 2025 President Anura Kumara Dissanayake made a special statement in Parliament  which took almost one hour and forty minutes. He dwelt on the devastation being caused by Cyclone Ditwah that had by then raged for about a week already and what his government was doing and was planning to do in the future to bring relief to the hapless thousands affected. Two things out of the many matters that he touched on, I feel like mentioning here:

1) He made some commendatory remarks about the triforces members and the police, while paying tribute to Wing Commander Nirmal  Siyambalapitiya of the Air Force, who died in a helicopter accident during a rescue operation in the flood-hit Wennappuwa area, and to the five Navy personnel who went missing while being engaged in widening a waterway in the Chundikulam lagoon in Chalai in order to control the flood situation there. This is something that suggests an implicit acknowledgement made (belatedly, though) by the President of the vital importance of the defense forces whose selfless dedication to the service of the nation should never be underestimated. That is a salutary attitudinal change on his part, comparable to the aforementioned volt-face of the UNP regarding Mahinda Rajapaksa-led victory over separatist terrorism.

President Dissanayake had stopped calling the security forces members ‘ranaviruwo’ or ‘war heroes’, perhaps under pressure from the small section of the Tamil diaspora enjoying the patronage of the meddling powers. This year President Dissanayake marked the May 2009 victory over terrorism a day later than the due date, that too grudgingly. The vociferous Archuna Ramanathan, independent MP from Jaffna, who calls the dead Prabhakaran his ‘god’, and claims that he receives funds from the Tamil diaspora (which may be true), taunts the President and his Sinhalese MPs for failing to call the members of the Sri Lanka Army ‘war heroes’! While President Dissanayake denounces ‘Nationalism’ consciously misconceiving (a la Americans) it as ‘jativadaya’ (Racism) or ‘warga vadaya’ (Communalism), he allows the rump of the banned LTTE to commemorate the dead terrorist leader as a national hero. Illegal Mahaveerar Naal celebrations were held in the north in the last week of November. MP Archuna Ramanadan, it was reported, thanked the Sri Lanka Navy personnel for saving him from the flood waters while returning from one of those celebrations!

 2) While paying a passionate tribute to the security forces members  President Dissanayake made a gratingly incongruent gratuitous reference to the submerged Gampola area as ‘a place largely populated by Muslims’: “No room should be left for them to feel isolated or discriminated against”. What an ill-conceived remark! Clearly, he meant to curry favour with the Muslim community of the place. He is probably already trying to promote himself among the Muslim community in preparation for re-election in 2029!

During the “Derana 360” programme hosted by Kalindu Karunaratne about a month ago, Minister of Justice and National Integration Harshana Nanayakkara, NPP MP, probably inadvertently, revealed that they had to give in to certain Tamil demands in the North (which might seem unreasonable and extremist to the majority community) in order not to spoil their chances of winning support at the next election.

SJB leader Sajith Premadasa, in his capacity as the Leader of the Opposition, was on an official visit to New Delhi in early November, 2025, which focused on strengthening India-Sri Lanka bonds. (But his egotistic utterances degraded his Indian visit into a private one.) He had meetings with senior Indian leaders including External Affairs minister Subramanyam Jaishankar and Corporate Affairs minister Nirmala Sitharaman. He was given the honour to address the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA). Sajith Premadasa talked about Sri Lanka’s commitment to its special strategic relationship with India, stressing “the need for implementing the 13th Amendment for Sri Lanka’s stability”. It is impossible that he is unaware of the fact that the 13th Amendment was externally imposed on Sri Lanka in 1987 by India and has not been fully implemented by any president to date for good reasons.

The National Joint Committee (NJC), a leading civil society organization committed to the defence of Sri Lanka’s unitary state status and sovereignty, has strongly condemned Sajith Premadasa’s ‘recent declaration in New Delhi that he would fully implement the 13th Amendment to the Constitution’ (The Island/November 14, 2025)

The NJC has issued a statement condemning SJB and Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa’s recent declaration in New Delhi that he would fully implement the controversial 13th Amendment to the Constitution when elected to power. Co-Presidents of the NJC, Lt. Gen. Jagath Dias (Rtd) and Dr Anula Wijesundara expressed shock, dismay, disappointment and disgust over it. They have described Premadasa’s uncalled-for undertaking given to India as unbecoming of him as the leader of the main opposition; it is a disdainful betrayal of the nation. The NJC views the 13th Amendment, introduced under duress, as obsolete because India did not fulfil its part of the contract to disarm the LTTE, leading to a disastrous three decade military conflict.

What I have delineated above is a hexagonal simulacrum of the chaotic political situation of the country as I perceive it, for what it is worth, with Mahinda Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe poised at opposite points equidistant from the square formed in the middle by President Dissanayake and Premadasa facing each other and Harin confronting Namal. Concluded

By Rohana R. Wasala ✍️