Columns

• FRIDAY’S HARTAL PROTEST AGAINST RULERSBRINGS NATION TO A STANDSTILL
• After tear gas attacks, will bullets now wring the tears?

This is the sad stark shocking state of the nation this Sunday morn, beggared beyond belief with only the fig leaf of her lion flag left to hide her nakedness.

• The President confined to his office digging his heels and the Prime Minister to his, stubbornly refusing to budge, with a state of emergency declared at Friday midnight;
• with the besieged seat of democracy at Diyawanna Oya, marooned on its desert island,  fortified and barricaded, to protect an adjourned Parliament that’s deadlocked, an Opposition that is divided, a Government party that’s split and a good for nothing  Cabinet that’s merely marking time;
• with the masses on the streets howling in anguish, unable to keep the wolf from the door, starved of food, gas, fuel, medicines, infant milk powder, and every essential but still fed on a government diet of lies, deceit, humbug, IMF fairy tales and prosperous vistas of miracles ahead;
• with an islandwide hartal on Friday that effectively brought the country to a halt but showed — though yet  to no avail — the impotency of this Government to rule against the people’s will, whatever the Constitution may otherwise dictate;
• with the nation rendered bankrupt by political corruption and criminal mismanagement; and forlorn hope that comes to all never coming to a single Lankan,  living in the very sewers  of hell.
  

  LOCAL VICTORIA’S SECRET UNDIES COLLECTION ON PARADE AT DIYAWANNA CATWALK: Protestors flaunt knickers and pants near Parliament to show defiance and reveal what they have been left with under Rajapaksas’ ruinous reign

And the question on 22 million parched lips this Sunday is when the dreaded Rajapaksas will finally leave; and release this nation from the terrible curse the wrathful Gods have pronounced upon it for the primitive worship of false idols.

The prospect of them peacefully leaving without drama seems bleak. President Gotabaya seeks refuge in the Constitutional omission to grant Parliament the right to demand his resignation. Clinging to this flimsy excuse, he insists he will never leave.

So does the Prime Minister. But he has no constitutional leg to stand on against Parliament’s will to remove him and can only exist by the grace and favour of his brother Gotabaya.

Earlier in the week, notwithstanding their refusals to resign, the SJB went through the motions to purge both the President’s and the Prime Minister’s rigidities. On Tuesday they handed over two no-confidence motions against the President and the Prime Minister to the Speaker at his official residence.  On Wednesday, the Speaker told Parliament his decision on the matter would be announced on Thursday or Friday.

But the tear gas attack by the banks of the Diyawanna Oya on Friday put paid to Opposition hopes. Hearing of protestors being tear gassed by the police caused tensions to rise within the House. In the absence of the Speaker, acting Speaker Hesha Vithanage of the SJB, like a flustered librarian aghast to find the quietude of the reading room shattered by the cacophony of raised voices, adjourned the House for ten minutes. The Speaker adjourned it for ten days.

An enraged group of opposition MPs met the Speaker in his chambers to protest. His concession, while May 17 will still stand as the next date for Parliament to meet, was to hold a party leaders’ meeting to decide the issue.

The police crackdown on peaceful protests began on Wednesday. Earlier on April 25, a police request for a court order to remove a group of protesters from demonstrating at Temple Trees as inconveniencing the free movement of the public, had been rejected by the Colombo Additional Magistrate Harshana Kekunawela.

On May 4, however, Colombo Additional Magistrate Manjula Ratnayake issued the requested order. Armed with it, the Kollupitiya police ordered the protesters to dismantle the ‘Mynagogama’ structures they had erected outside Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Temple Tree door. In obedience to the court order, the protesters duly removed the tent but did not cease, by any means, their roadside protest. Neither has the cry ‘myna go home’ abated.

On Thursday, the arrest of 12 engaged in a peaceful protest outside the Diyawanna, sparked the protests to intensify. Hundreds swooped to the area to storm the barricades. The police tear gas attacks did naught to quell the fury for the protesters returned with renewed fire. Baptising the site ‘Horugogama,’ they settled down for an all-night siege. Support from the area flooded with people bringing in food and water. By morning marquis had been erected and a sound system was in place.

Called an underwear protest, the beggary of Lanka was bared raw on Friday morning with some of the crowd removing their undies, and using the metal barricades as clothes lines to hang them on, to demonstrate how the Rajapaksas have reduced them to nothing but their ‘amudes’.

The police retaliation with water cannon and tear gas in the afternoon not only made the protesters to temporarily retreat but, far worse, it also brought the proceedings in Parliament to an abrupt close. Not for ten minutes but for ten days. But the protesters hailed it as a victory. They had shut down Parliament. If they couldn’t make the MPs act according to the people’s wishes, they had made it impossible for MPs to act at all.

While the protests pursued without relent despite the repeated tear gas attacks, the President summoned a late hour cabinet meeting that night. On May 1 afternoon, the Daily Mirror reported that Mahinda Rajapaksa had told the President that he, Gotabaya, had the power under the 20th Amendment to restore political stability. It seems the President has decided to take his brother’s advice and use the powers vested in him by the draconian 20A. As the first step, he declared emergency rule from Friday midnight.

Will it be a repetition of the emergency declared on March 31st night, a futile attempt to prevent a nationwide candlelit protest from taking place on Sunday April 2 which nevertheless went ahead? Much water has boiled under the bridge since April 2. The people’s patience has run out, their angers flared, their tempers frayed, their hate solidified, their disgust turned to wrath. Will emergency laws douse their hatred or quell their fire or, instead, inflame their burning angers?

The police request for a court order to remove the ‘obstructions caused to the access road of the Presidential Secretariat’ by the Gotagogama protest on the Galle Face Green made to the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court on Friday was postponed for Monday. If the police are successful in their request tomorrow, will the protesters, who have carried on their marathon protest for 30 days, tamely dismantle their makeshift stages, fold up their tents and go docilely home like sheep to their pens at the bark of the shepherd’s collie?

Or what would happen if they dismiss, God forbid, the court order as one made not taking cognisance of the greater national interest, one not acknowledging the voice of the sovereign people, as one mistakenly taken without due regard to social policy to heed the nationwide protest ‘Gota go home’ and defy the injunction out of hand?

One shudders to think what will happen when the irresistible majesty of the law is brought into direct conflict with the immovable will of the people whose sovereignty is enshrined in the Constitution as an inalienable right and the fundamental freedom to engage in peaceful protests guaranteed under Article 14?

It is the same with the hartal. Bolstered by the success of Friday’s hartal, the protesters intend to make it even bigger on May 11. Can the police with their court orders, or the President with his essential services gazettes, stop the people from demonstrating their protest through a peaceful hartal?

Mohandas Gandhi called his hartals as a day spent in fasting and prayer. It served to bring down the mighty British Empire and made their sun finally set on its far flung colonial conquests.

And will the emergency doom the prospect of an interim government made up of the SLFP and others with the President still at the helm? Will the so-called independent group of 41 sit with the Government and risk blood on their hands? How will the international lending agencies and India, by whose grace Lanka exists, react if violence is used to restore a phoney stability?

Will they not exert pressure on the Government, will the UN’s Human Rights Council not marshal world opinion against propping the Rajapaksa regime, urge foreign Governments to withdraw lifelines already extended? Should tear gas and water cannon attacks fail to quell the protest, will it then be the turn of the bullet to wring the tears?

Rather than lead this nation to bloodshed, the Rajapaksas must go.

Sabry makes his defence well in advance of failureAli Sabry who handles Finance Ministry matters and ostensibly acts as Lanka’s Finance Minister despite having resigned from office on April 5 and never sworn in again, told Parliament on Wednesday that he accepts that his Government was wrong to have cut taxes, wrong not to have sought IMF help earlier and was mainly responsible for the present crisis, having only a foreign exchange reserve of USD 50 million. ALI SABRY: Nightwatchman Long time personal lawyer to the President, he also made his own defence well in advance in the event he is accused at a future date of further bungling at the Finance Ministry. He told the House: ‘I am not an economist. I only took up the job since there was no one willing to bear the burden. I am only the nightwatchman’. In cricketing parlance, the nightwatchman is an inferior batsman who is sent to bat higher up in the order near the end of the day’s play in order to prevent the team’s top batsman from getting out before lights are called. Howzat for excuses? But can the nation afford to have one playing the role of the Finance Minister at a time of its gravest crisis who confesses in advance as to his own incompetence to do the job? And who says he is only doing it as a favour since no else wants it? As an incompetent stop gap, temporary fill in till someone suitable to the post is found? A nightwatchman solely existing to protect the top order wickets from falling? And can the President afford to have such a Finance Minister at this critical juncture who has already made his excuses for any future shambles and told Parliament he is a total ignoramus when it comes to high finance? One who told a major American TV news channel in an interview while in Washington for IMF talks, that ‘we let the dollar to float’, without realising the gaffe that Lanka has no control over the American dollar to either float or peg it? Can the international lending agencies or donor countries like Japan afford to have any confidence in the Government when the man it has placed in charge of the nation’s finances and steer the country out of its bankruptcy, tells Parliament, he is not qualified for the job, that he is only doing the job since no else is there, that he is merely a nightwatchman sent to protect the top order, staying at the crease only until recalled to the dressing room? And if these do not shock the lending agencies, there’s more. Even his legal right to act as Finance Minister is itself in question. As the Sunday Punch commented on April 10 and again last Sunday, a minister ceases to hold office when, under Article 47(2)(b) of the Constitution, he ‘resigns his office by a writing under his hand addressed to the President.’ To assume that same office again, he has to be sworn in by the President as the Finance Minister, even as he was sworn in as the Justice Minister on 25 April, having resigned as Justice Minister on 4 April. Ali Sabry talked in Parliament on Wednesday as if the nation owed him an eternal debt of gratitude for being the only man available on the burning ship to have come to Lanka’s aid at her frantic hour of need to bear the flaming torch. Before his arrogance gets the better of him, he should realise that, by his own estimation, he is nothing more than an expendable nightwatchman, the desperate pick of a desperate government that has lost the people’s mandate to rule. Of course, the President can clear this anomaly with one stroke of his pen by simply swearing Sabry as the Finance Minister. Perhaps Justice Minister Sabry, being a lawyer to boot, should be the first to advice the President and get his anomalous position constitutionally rectified. Constitutional requirements must be studiously satisfied, there is no Presidential right to dispense with the formalities out of convenience or carelessness. But it will entail having to awkwardly explain how Lanka had an imposter as a Finance Minister, one who didn’t have the constitutional right to hold the post, from April 8 until then; and had even sent him to Washington to plead for an IMF bailout as the nation’s duly accredited Finance Minister when he was not.