Sunday Times 2
Have the three Big Bangs blasted out the Rajapaksa star forever?
View(s):The Rajapaksa political star has been shining in Sri Lanka’s political skies for some years but whether it has survived the three Big Bangs on the 9th day of three consecutive months—May, June and July — is not yet certain.
At the time of writing these comments, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s letter of resignation as president of Sri Lanka has been transmitted to Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena from the Sri Lanka Embassy in Singapore and is being subject to analysis.
Whether the Rajapaksa star has survived the three Big Bangs, is being reduced to space junk, or turned into shooting meteorites — like the one that hit Earth and destroyed the predominant species, the Dinosaurs, or turned into a Black Hole that has the potential of creating new stars — is a matter for astronomers or astrologers like Gnana Akka and their ilk.
We will endeavour to fathom the thinking of the Rajapaksas, some of whom are still reported to be in this land of Splendour and Development which some of our great thinkers along with their president envisaged.
An old saying which rings absolutely true today is: Victory has many fathers but defeat only orphans.
It’s hard to find today those cheer leaders who proliferated for the Rajapaksa brothers — Mahinda the President and Gota his Permanent Secretary who proclaimed themselves as the leaders who won the war against separatist Tamil terrorism. In the state media and even in most private media institutions, it was hard to find exceptions to such cheerleaders. Today, they say they were quite sceptical about their leader’s heroic acts but could not say so then.
Some of the Rajapksas who had the joy of identifying themselves as those of the First Family for many years could be saying that all is not lost. They had suffered a stunning defeat before in 2015 but bounced back to power in five years.
In 2015 there was the man who was the leader who defeated them, Ranil Wickremesinghe giving them a helicopter ride back to their home in Medamulane, sparing them a right royal hoot along the 250-miles-long old road. In five years, beating the Sinhala Buddhist drums that they were being threatened with minority conspiracies, they swept the presidential and parliamentary polls and enacted the 20th Amendment to give the executive president powers that no other president had enjoyed.
By strange coincidence, there was the same Ranil Wickremesinghe appointed Interim President by Gotabaya Rajapaksa doing the honours for him.
Rajapaksas are bound to think about the short memories of the majority Sinhala Buddhists of this country. In 1953, J.R. Jayewardene as the Finance Minister of the Dudley Senanayake government cut off the subsidies given in rice to all people. The Samasamjists staged a violent Hartal, in which some people were killed and Dudley Senanayake resigned from the premiership.
But seven years later, Dudley won the 1960 parliamentary elections but not having a working majority held another elction which he lost to Sirima Bandaranaike at the height of her popularity. But Dudley won the 1965 elections and ruled for five more years. Twenty four years after Hartal, JRJ won the parliamentary elections with the biggest ever majority and his party ruled for 18 years.
This political amnesia of the majority voting block of the electorate may be the only hope of some Rajapaksas of a return to power.
But the 2022 political rout is of a scale which is unlikely to be erased by any kind of political amnesia. A sitting president was made to flee the country and his entire cabinet, including many ministers of the Rajapksa family, were forced to resign. The president was compelled to admit that the country was bankrupt and the main reasons were mistakes he made in regard to financial management and his decision on banning import of chemical fertilisers and insecticides.
The people dying in queues awaiting for fuel supplies for days, the record rise in the cost of living, shortage of medicines in hospitals and the strategic interests surrendered by Lanka to keep the lives of the ordinary people going will be indelible in the minds of the people.
The IMF conditionalities that are likely to come are going to make life harder for the people and the incumbennt government will be by no means popular.
It will indeed be a miracle if the Rajapaksa star has not been blown into nothingness by the three Big Bangs. Ends