Monday 16th March, 2026

The JVP-NPP government has finally brought itself to swallow its pride and introduce the QR-based fuel rationing system to face the current global oil crisis. It is notoriously slow on the draw and arrogantly dismissive of sound counsel. About three and a half months ago, its delayed response stood in the way of effective disaster management in the immediate aftermath of the landfall of Cyclone Ditwah.

The government mismanaged the current fuel crisis for two weeks. It rejected out of hand calls for fuel rationing when long lines of vehicles began to appear outside filling stations on the first day of the US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran. We repeatedly pointed out that there was no shame in rationing fuel during a global oil crisis. Instead of introducing the QR-based fuel sales to manage the meagre petroleum reserves by preventing panic buying and hoarding and curtailing consumption, the government, in its wisdom, kept on releasing fuel to the market. Maybe the JVP/NPP leaders considered it infra dig to introduce the QR-based fuel sales lest the credit for managing the crisis should go to their immediate predecessors, who introduced that method. It is also possible that they were all at sea due to inexperience or they resigned themselves to fatalism, hoping that the fuel crisis would resolve itself.

An absurd attempt is being made in some quarters to liken the current fuel crisis to the one we experienced in 2022. The two situations are as different as chalk and cheese. The 2022 fuel crisis was local, but the current one is global. In 2022, the SLPP government bankrupted the economy, leaving the country with no forex for fuel imports. Today, the country has foreign currency for oil imports, but the Iran conflict has disrupted the global oil supply.

The government craftily jacked up fuel prices the other day, claiming that they were intended to curtail fuel consumption. Thereafter, it resorted to fuel rationing, which is bound to cause severe difficulties to the public, but some fuel is certainly much better than no fuel at all. If not for rationing, the vast majority of motorists would have had to wait in never-ending queues outside filling stations for days on end and return home empty-handed the way they did at the height of the economic crisis in 2022.

Trishaw and school van operators are complaining that their weekly fuel quotas are not sufficient. The government should look into their complaints and redress their grievances. There were complaints of some teething problems yesterday. Many people found it difficult to obtain new QR codes, and some filling stations complained of technical issues. These problems must be sorted out expeditiously. There are also some holdouts, but they are bound to fall in line.

Stern action must be taken to prevent the emergence of a black market in fuel. A wag says Sri Lanka is now as oil rich as Iran’s Kharg Island, thanks to numerous hidden caches of fuel. Every trishaw doubled as a mini bowser to stockpile fuel during the past two weeks or so. It is now up to the police to seize hoarded fuel and bring the culprits to justice. There is also the possibility of some filling station operators themselves hoarding fuel and profiteering. They allegedly did so in 2022.

There are other measures that need to be adopted to manage the fuel crisis, which shows no signs of going away any time soon, with US President Donald Trump acting like a bull in a china shop. Countries like Pakistan have adopted methods such as work from home and shorter work weeks without pay reductions. Technology can play a pivotal role in helping reduce fuel consumption. There are many single-occupancy or low-occupancy vehicles on the Sri Lankan roads. A car-pooling app can be created to enable several commuters to share one vehicle, thereby reducing fuel consumption, traffic congestion and carbon emissions. We are not short of IT mavens capable of helping evolve a technological solution to the issue of underutilised vehicle capacity on the road.

A long-term solution to the energy crisis is obviously to reduce the country’s fossil fuel dependency. It defies comprehension why Sri Lanka, blessed with abundant sunshine throughout the year, continues to burn millions of tons of fossil fuel a year for transport, cooking, cooling and lighting. Every house must be equipped to harvest and store solar energy, while the use of electric vehicles is promoted as a national priority.

The country is experiencing a severe cooking gas shortage as well despite government politicians’ rhetoric, denials, claims and assurances. It is public knowledge that many people have several gas cylinders each and stock up on cooking gas. LPG dealers are also notorious for hoarding gas and selling it at black market rates at the expense of many ordinary citizens who languish in queues in vain. The QR-based quota system can be extended to LPG sales as well while raids are conducted to seize hoarded gas stocks.

War and politics are full of uncertainties and surprises. When one heard US President Donald Trump bragging that the US and Israel had won the war against Iran at the end of the third day of bombing itself, one was reminded of US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, and his realistic assessment of war. Eisenhower famously said, “… every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out.” Fielding a question at a press conference about how the US would respond to a potential conflict involving China and Taiwan, he said the war was inherently unpredictable and responsible leaders could not forecast exactly how it would unfold.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have thought they would be able to bomb Iran into submission and engineer a regime change in Tehran in a matter of few days after killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the war is dragging on with no end in sight, and Iran has opened a new front in the economic sphere. It has effectively turned the world’s most important oil chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, into a strategic lever, countering US-Israeli bombs with barrels of oil, so to speak.

Trump recently reassured the world that the war would be over soon, and G7 countries released part of their strategic oil reserves when oil prices began to climb, but Iranian attacks on six ships in the Hormuz Strait have caused oil prices to soar again despite the release of as many as 400 million barrels of oil by the International Energy Agency, with the US alone pledging to contribute 172 million barrels. Iran has warned that it will not allow “one litre of oil” to be exported from the region while US and Israeli attacks continue. Many economies are already groaning under high oil prices, and some of them have adopted energy-saving strategies that hurt their industries and citizens. There is no way the US can absolve itself of responsibility for this situation, with fears being expressed of a possible global recession, which will lead to job losses, drastic welfare cuts and many other untold hardships for countless people across the world. The IMF has warned of an increase in global inflation if the Middle East conflict continues.

President Trump initially gave flippant answers to serious questions about escalating oil prices, claiming that the US would gain from oil price increases, and he prioritised defeating Iran over bringing oil prices down, but the sobering economic reality made him swallow his pride and waive US sanctions on Russian oil as a desperate measure to stabilise the global energy market. The waiver is said to be effective only for one month, but unless oil prices come down, it will have to be extended. This move has gladdened the heart of Russian President Vladimir Putin beyond measure. The reason the US gave for imposing sanctions on Russian oil was that Russia used oil money to fund its war against Ukraine.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described the waiver of sanctions on Russian oil as a ‘narrowly tailored, short-term measure’ that applies only to oil already in transit and will not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government, which derives the majority of its energy revenue from taxes assessed at the point of extraction. But Russia’s economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev wrote on Telegram that the US was “effectively acknowledging the obvious: without Russian oil, the global energy market cannot remain stable”. President Putin has expressed a similar view.

The western allies of the US have not taken kindly to the lifting of sanctions on Russian oil. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in no way justifies lifting sanctions on Russia, French President Emmanuel Macron has said after a discussion with other G7 leaders on the economic fallout from the Iran war. Countries like Ukraine ought to realise that their interests do not figure in the Big Powers’ scheme of things. No sooner had Trump asked Ukraine for help to counter Iranian drones on its allies in the Middle East than he lifted sanctions on Russian oil.

The US and Israel have said it is they who will decide when to end the ongoing war. But Iran has said although they started the conflict it will decide how and when to finish it. The UN, which has outlived its raison d’etre for all intents and purposes, has called for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East. It is doubtful whether the parties to the war will heed the UN call, but it will be in their interest to do so, and pave the way for the de-escalation of the bomb-barrel conflict, as it were, which has adversely impacted the entire world. More than 4.2 million people have already been displaced in the Middle East region, mostly in Iran, according to the UN. Trump ought to heed Eisenhower’s view of war.

Saturday 14th March, 2026

Some prominent astrologers are up in arms, claiming that the JVP-NPP government has not officially recognised the list of traditional New Year auspicious times or the nekath seettuwa they have submitted. They have been holding press conferences and raking the government leaders over the coals (pun intended) for what they describe as a sinister move to devalue the cultural significance of the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. All previous governments officially endorsed the nekath seettu, according to which New Year activities are usually conducted.

The Department of Cultural Affairs has responded, saying that two groups of astrologers have submitted two different nekath seettu, and it will make a final decision after allowing public and expert views to be expressed thereon. It has also said that it, together with the Ministry of Buddhist and Religious Affairs, will continue to take necessary steps to safeguard and promote the country’s cultural values, including longstanding New Year traditions.

Sri Lankan governments want the public to do as they say, and they do as astrologers say. In the final analysis, the whole country does as astrologers say. There was a time when even military operations in the North and the East were conducted according to auspicious times. Many of them ended in disaster, and ones that were not launched according to auspicious times yielded the desired results in 2009. Interestingly, the President who provided political leadership for the country’s successful war on terror, suffered an ignominious defeat by advancing a presidential election on astrological advice. No astrologer could predict that another President would have to flee the country and resign.

Some critics of the incumbent government have claimed that it is not keen to recognise the New Year auspicious times officially as it is led by a bunch of Marxists who place no value on cultural practices. They have pointed out that Marxists generally treat astrology as superstition or a cultural phenomenon rather than a legitimate system within Marxist theory. However, Karl Marx has not made any specific reference to astrology though some Marxist scholars have taken a critical view thereof. In the 1950s, German philosopher, Theodor W. Adorno, a major Marxist influenced social theorist, wrote about astrology and horoscope columns in newspapers and magazines as part of his critique of mass culture under capitalism. He viewed astrology as a symptom of irrationalism and conformity in capitalist societies, where people are distracted from systemic social problems and instead turn to vague supernatural explanations. This view has gained currency among not only Marxists but many non-Marxist scholars and thinkers. One may recall that Voltaire also famously said, “Superstition is to religion what astrology to astronomy—the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.” This is particularly true of Sri Lanka and some other countries in this region.

If auspicious times are based on mathematically determined planetary positions, how come there are two lists of nekath. How is the government going to decide which list is correct? One can only hope that the government will not favour the group of astrologers backed by NPP politicians. There is hardly anything that Sri Lankan politicians do not politicise. Unless the government handles the nekath issue carefully and resolves it to the satisfaction of both sides, there may be what can be described as an astrologers’ war, and the people who rely on the official nekath seettuwa to conduct the New Year rituals will be confused and the political opponents of the JVP/NPP will surely weaponise the issue.