Post-dissolution politics - a new kid on the block?
The elite leadership has failed the nation. Though that's the pre-poll refrain, I for one would not put it in those terms. I would simply say the elite got together and gang raped the country.

The elite is continuing to do so, by resorting to the all too well known self-serving political stratagems. Unless they prove otherwise sometime in the near future, the JVP falls within that sphere of culpability. The JVP is part of the elite that molested the nation. It's not just me saying so -- its Somawansa Amarasinghe the JVP's suddenly avuncular, permanently-smiling leader who is himself saying so. He made an apology to the business leaders at the BMICH and this apology is the best testimony of the JVP being (despite its painfully rebellious past) part of the leadership elite that failed the nation by omission as well as commission. How so?

By commission in launching precipitate action to overthrow a government causing the country to slide into a period of extended anarchy. As for omission, I will leave the reader to fill in the blanks.…..

But is it really strange that the post independence elite leadership of this country is corrupt and self-seeking? The coloniser -- the British -- used corruption as the tool for extending its suzerainty over this country. This was not done only in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) but in all colonies of the extended empire.

The local elite families famously betrayed the country in exchange for the fact that the British allowed them, the chosen few, to be corrupt while exploiting the serfs to their hearts content. It was the British who first created the current NGO operative. Though this assertion may raise a few eyebrows, it is a fact that the British created the prototype for the modern (peace?) merchant who aggressively sells his nation in return for a mess of pottage. The British created a class which was allowed to plunder, because that was the way to buy the loyalty of this class. This is the same way in which donor countries advance their own insidious causes in the modern day and age via the NGOs. They allow the local NGO operatives to line their own wallets by dipping into the NGO kitty, and they turn a blind eye in order to buy their loyalty. Same tactics but in a different era….

It's another story when it concerns political corruption. The legacy of corruption and self-aggrandisement in Sri Lankan politics is colonial. But the national elite has not been able to break out of this colonial hangover. The voter has not been able to get the elite to give up the habit of looking after its own interests exclusively.

Today, there is a new political alignment, which says that it is ready to make a permanent break from this hoary past of self-seeking politics. But it's an alignment full of contradictions. To take just one example, the JVP is aligning with a President who gave the same JVP a written promise to get rid of the Executive Presidency. She never did that. The JVP however decides, many years later, to hold hands with the same President who is making use of the same powers of the Executive Presidency that the JVP so badly wanted dislodged.

This JVP also wanted the Chief Justice impeached, and was signatory to a Resolution that sought his impeachment on grounds of misconduct. The JVP aggressively wanted the Chief Justice sent home, and was more vocal than the UNP opposition of that time in pursuing that cause.

But, the JVP is holding hands with the President who appointed this Chief Justice, and to this day protects him as if he was the crown jewel of the Kumartunga administration. There is nothing said in any document that the JVP wanted the Chief Justice removed; the JVP has grown to live with the Chief Justice, as it has now grown to live and work with the President who appointed him.

So, with this kind of new political combination it is difficult to surmise as some have done that we are seeing something new and unspoilt on the horizon. People are not waiting for the JVP to perform as the new boy on the block, as erroneously stated by many political sages. By the above omissions and commissions and many more in the bargain, the JVP has already performed.

It can only be forgiven if it performs a lot better in government, if it ever gets to being in government. The JVP gets no reprieve until then, or no handicap, because it is part of the same culpable self-seeking political elite that has so far failed the nation by perpetuating the colonial practice of being part of an elite club of self-seeking leaders. As they say in some systems of law, the JVP is presumed guilty with the onus being on it to prove its innocence.

End piece: The LTTE has done it again, but why it has to seek the moral low ground when it was hugging the moral high ground is a valid question. Prabhakaran played elder statesman well, in the midst of a hollering Southern political leadership that was sparring each other to the point of extinction. But now he has decided to enter the fray, if reports are correct that it is the LTTE that killed a UNP politician who was due to contest from Batticoaloa. Uncle Sam himself woke up to the reality that there are several bad boys in Sri Lankan politics, and Uncle Sam also seems to have understood the subtlety of it too. In the South, people die in campaign skirmishes. In the North and the East they are just bumped off.

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