5th Column

Johnny! Let us do it our way
My Dear Johnny Howard,
I thought I must write to you after hearing that you had chaired a meeting which resolved that Sri Lanka should have its presidential elections this year -and not next year as Satellite keeps telling us.

Of course we know that your resolution was at the insistence of the Green man and his party which has every right to believe they are being cheated of an election, but we don’t think that gives you the right to tell us Sri Lankans when we should vote.

Johnny, I am not sure whether you have heard of a chap called David Gladstone but he was the last foreigner to comment on our elections and he was promptly shown the door by our Head of State at that time. Fortunately you are not in this country so we cannot do that to you but that doesn’t mean that what you said was less disparaging.

I do concede, Johnny, that we have a peculiar brand of politics: the kind of politics where a deputy minister is stripped of his portfolio because he allegedly smashed up a night club only to be reinstated so that his son can continues the “good” work, beating up cops who raid the night clubs in search of illicit drugs!

We also have fathers, mothers and daughters leading one political party and fathers and sons, uncles and nephew leading the other political party. We also have a government offering protection to a terrorist group which is killing the government’s own intelligence operatives and then we have a group of insurgents turned politicians saying the government should not negotiate with another group of terrorists who have shown some inclination towards political activity.

And then, to cap it all, we have a government and its president who are refusing to allow its elections commissioner to retire and an elections commissioner who is refusing to tell us when the President should retire!
But the point is, Johnny, this is democracy, Sri Lankan style and if there is something wrong with it, it is up to us to do something about it and not for alien busybodies to tell us what to do and what not to do.

If memory serves me right, Johnny, this is not the first time that you seem to have a problem with things that are Sri Lankan. We heard you say some time ago that Murali was a chucker and what an expert you turned out to be-Murali was tested many times over by your country’s experts and found to be genuine. Australia only lost the chance to see the world’s greatest bowler in action-and you had to eat your own words.

After all, Johnny, we don’t tell you when you should call your elections and we don’t complain about how you treat aborigines or asylum seekers in your country, do we? And our Prime Minister, (bless him, he is now the ‘chosen one’!) never called Shane Warne a drug addict, did he?

So, Johnny, let us hope that this is the last we hear from you with regard to matters in this country. If I were to voice the general sentiments of most people in this land, ‘we may approve of what you say, but we will defend to the death that you have no right to say it’!
Yours truly,
Punchi Putha

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