By : A.A.M.NIZAM – MATARA.

President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s Anniversary speech and the brilliant 2021 futuristic Budget presented by the Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa have raised the trust of the people who suffered immensely under the destructive yamapalana government for the last 4 ½ years. The Anniversary speech clearly outlined the performances achieved during President’s first year under various obstacles made by the Sirisena/Ranil government and restrictions that had been placed upon him by the obnoxious 19^th Amendment.  The President also outlined details of the work to be carried out and steps to be taken in the next four years of his term.  Hat these measures will definitely be carried out regardless of opposition from any quarters.  

In this atmosphere the foreign servile discarded and despicable Dayan Jayatilleke(the 3 D Jayatilleke) in his utter frustration of success being made by thus government has made silly and stupid attempts to admonish the President on what and what he should do and what and what he should not do and what coarse correction he should undertake. This stupid writer says that the President must seek the Middle Path, occupy the moderate political centre, not the extreme, and return to the mainstream democratic political culture and tradition of his family, the Rajapaksas

Thinking that he is the Messiah reborn he states that the President has made strategic blunders and his term of office will end up in a one-term wonder, like the Trump Presidency (2016-2020), Yahapalana (2015-2019), and the Samagi Peramuna (1970-1977). 

Showing his dislike with one of Sri Lanka’s much-admired political columnists Chandraprema, he says that back in  June, GR insider, author of the Gota’s War (2012) and Sri Lanka’s new ambassador/PR to the UN-Geneva, commented that Trump will win and argued assuredly that polarisation around the ‘law and order’ vs. ‘anarchy’ issue guaranteed a white majoritarian tsunami for Trump and this 3D stupid adds that in a fascinating coincidence, this was the core of the successful GR game-plan of 2019.

Referring to Sirisena presidency he states that when that Sirisena Government was heading rapidly in the wrong direction, which will prove unsustainable, result in unfavourable polarisation, and crash and burn unless there’s a drastic course-correction back to the moderate centre, Sirisena heeding to the advice given by him and some other prominent people instituted a coarse correction.  Ignoramus Sirisena may have needed such advice but it does not apply in the case of much talented and highly erudite President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa.

This 3D fool says that the Gotabaya Presidency, as per his diagnosis won’t end well, but it will end sooner rather than later. 

He blames the President for adopting a zero merit policy and asserts that the Gotabaya administration hasn’t yet had a bond scam type scandal on its watch, but the factor underlying that scandal is something that the GR Presidency has been greatly susceptible to not appointing officials on the basis of the highest merit of excellences similar to Ranil Wickremesinghe’s choices. In President Gotabaya’s first year, the abandonment of meritocracy has become a rule rather than an exception. Despite internationally admired steps that have been taken to arrest Covid-19, this fool asks whether anyone believes, or can anyone believe, that the finest available Sri Lankan talent, the best available brains, the human resources of the highest quality and achievement in the fields relevant to the COVID-19 virus, have been mobilised and are actually driving the national/State effort to rescue us from the pandemic? 

The President’s appointments to/within the military have been fine, but the appointment of the serving and retired military to posts in which they have registered no expertise or experience, still less excellence, will prove at least as systemically damaging, he says.  He may have said the same thing when Mr. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa as the Secretary to the Ministry of Defence took steps to place suitable security personnel to fight the terrorist aggression.

He points out that the retreat from the principle of merit in post-Independence Sri Lanka began with the Sirimavo Bandaranaike Government’s twin measures (in the early 1970s) of the abolition of the independent public service and the introduction of district-wise and media-wise standardisation at university entrance. 

The government of Madam Bandaranaike was forced to introduce the standardization system for University Entrance to rectify and overcome a long felt anomaly for Sinhala and Muslim students under which majority of students selected for the Medical and Engineering faculties had been Tamil students.  Investigation carried out in this respect revealed that prior to the University Entrance examinations Tamil Professors held clandestine classes for Tamil students and passed out the question papers and also they were told to write the word OM” in their answer scripts to facilitate their identification.  Only after the standardization system and the Z score system the anomaly was rectified and students from remote areas like Monreagala and Anuradhapra districts got a fair treatment for entering Universities and the artificial merit system of Tamil students getting concocted higher marks were stopped.

Today, he says that it is presupposed that ex-military appointments across the state system, and the annexation of civilian functions under the Defence Ministry headed by a retired General, accord with the criterion of merit, because the military/ex-military has the collective institutional ‘karmic merit’ for having performed the ultimate meritorious deed of saving the country from terrorism. 

This 3D fool further states that on many occasions since January, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has gone on public record, including two international audiences – the SAARC leaders virtual summit and the UN 75th anniversary world leaders summit – respectively downplaying the danger and claiming success in containing Corona (in self-congratulatory detail). If the anti-coronavirus campaign had been fought by an elite Task Force of the finest trained and credentialed professionals in the field, the President would not have made such statements because he would have been far better briefed and advised. Instead he has set up an echo chamber. Sadly, he is imitating the practices not of the victorious last war – the nation’s and his elder brother Mahinda’s finest hour, and his own finest contribution.

He predicts that the next major crisis we shall face is the economic crisis. This time too, it won’t matter to the suffering citizenry that there was a global pandemic, any more than it mattered to the voters who threw the Sirimavo Bandaranaike Government overboard in 1977 despite the OPEC oil shock of 1973 affected a great many countries.

As in the case of combatting Covid-19, this is not what the Gotabaya administration has done. Pushing Dr. Dushni Weerakoon, Executive Director of the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), out of the Monetary Board is hardly a sign which inspires confidence. Having obtained her PhD at age 27, she has risen to be perhaps our top professional economist, with a reputation for non-partisan, independent policy diagnosis and lucid prescription. 

He asserts that the Sirisena/Ranil government was doomed to a one-term existence by its adherence to an ideological model rather than to Realism. That Government felt it more important to drive through a set of reforms which stemmed from its obsolescent ideological model of the neoliberal glory days of the 1980s and 1990s. 

Referring to the previous government which he admired in all its aspects, the 3D bluffer now says that the UNP Leader, Ministers and civil society ideologues were blissfully unaware that in the 21st century a social backlash had overthrown the model in favour of statist-nationalism in Russia and populist religio-nationalism in Eastern Europe. Even when the rebellion reached the West with Brexit, followed by the Trump victory of 2016, the UNP didn’t change course. These global trends apart, the reality of Sri Lankan society – made transparently clear at the Feb 2018 Local Authorities Election – made the Ranilist UNP model utterly untenable.

The UNP, he adds, sought to turn us into a neoliberal neo-colony of the West. The GR model was designed to turn us into a military-occupied territory ‘liberated’ from liberal-democracy and inhabited by a regimented, controlled, drone-monitored citizenry. The Yahapalana and Gotabaya administrations share the assumption that their electoral victories were some kind of ‘revolution’ and a mandate for a total transformation in accordance with their respective ideologies. 

The first anniversary of the Gotabaya Presidency coincides with the victory of Joe Biden. He admonishes that President GR must learn the correct lessons of the defeat of President Trump, whose proudest boast of not being a ‘politician’ but a success in other fields, was the source of his biggest blunders, since as a political amateur he had no respect for the values, norms and ethos of democratic politics and governance.

GR and his fellow (Sinhala) long-time supporters of the California Republican Right must absorb the lessons of the two-thirds vote that the Democratic ticket obtained in California (possibly due to Kamala Harris). With or without Democrat control of the Senate, President Rajapaksa can surely figure out the implications of a Democratic administration. Space could open for generalised, permanent ‘lawfare’ under ‘universal jurisdiction’, which could go global. 

For the moment the biggest political advantage that President Gotabaya enjoys is the fog of intellectual and psychological confusion in the democratic resistance space. In a threatening note to President GR this American worshipping 3D fool says that in the USA, the democratic intelligentsia (most indelibly Noam Chomsky), the media and the politicians (most notably Barack Obama) sounded the clarion call that the main existential danger was a second term for President Trump – Chomsky called it a threat to humanity – and that the indubitably overriding objective must be to prevent it. In the midst of the primaries, the Democratic field suddenly cleared for the candidate who had the best chance of winning back the blue-collar white voters and breaking through to the American heartland. The left, progressives, women, and the Black community rallied around him, submerged differences to attain the objective of stopping a second Trump term, perceived as the portal to Fascism of some variety and form. 

He laments that by contrast, the Lankan democratic intelligentsia remains ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Think Straight’. Recently, an emeritus political science academic urged the democratic Opposition to model itself on that led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike – who it must be noted, never proceeded to lead her country after she lost the General Election in 1977 and was beaten to the presidency by populist Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1988. 

This pro-Indian betrayer states that he associated Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa for more than 20 years and hence he knows more than Viyath Maga-Eliya hawks may assume and adds that being only a student of politics, he remained a passive participant at the meetings his father had with Lakshman and George Rajapaksa, gathering valuable points”

When an extremist ideological network-cum-pressure group (self-professedly pro-China) – the Janavegaya – arose within the ruling family and Coalition Government and spread through the State apparatus, George and Mahinda Rajapaksa stood against it. The Rajapaksa political culture was light years away from a ‘Military First’ or ‘Make the Army Great Again’ (the local MAGA) perspective in peacetime. It was civilian, parliamentary, democratic, centre-left progressive, moderate nationalist, undogmatic, pragmatic, flexible, open, reasonable and consensual.

In a ridiculous attempt to create a rift between the President and the Prime Minister similar to the failed attempt he made to creep into Viyath Maga and create dissensions in that organisation this 3D foreign stooge says that Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decade was not reshaping the country according to some ideology or model and he was determined to achieve a decisive end, operating within the democratic Constitution, to the existential danger that confronted the nation: Prabhakaran and his LTTE. By doing so MR achieved the most historic transformation of all. Like his elders, he was very comfortable with the country’s democratic character and civic way of being, in which he swam like a big fish in the sea.