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• JVP leader Anura demands 20b from SLPP for damage to his halo

Its leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake found the boot on the other foot when the clichéd reply he had received ‘prove it, prove it’ from the SLPP whenever he charged them of fraud, was also now his first resort to fend off the corruption charges hurled at him.

Last Sunday in response to a corruption charge made, Anura Kumara told a Gampaha rally that he dared the SLPP to ‘prove it’. He said: ‘Jail me if I had defrauded a single cent of the people.’

Anura Kumara need not unduly fret. The people have long ceased to be amazed at the host of allegations flung by politicians against their foes, like harmless confetti tossed at a wedding on the bride and groom by invited guests. They do not stick for long and are easily swept away. The people have for long considered how so futile it is to hope that justice will at last prevail.

As for the common plea adopted by those at whom the claims are made, the people give not a toss to believe nor disbelieve; except think both sides have hired the same brief who had advised them both to offer the same ‘prove it’ plea.

As for the people they are tired and they are weary and have long ceased to derive amusement from facetious Punch and Judy shows. Unless, of course, when there’s a twist in the tale. Then there’s no better sport than to watch ‘the engineer hoist with his own petard’.

But as things turned out to be two days later, this was not your run-on-the-mill tit-for-tat, exchange of fire. Apparently, Anura Kumara takes rather a dim view of the attack and holds his character in the highest possible esteem. He doesn’t give a toss if you steal his well-worn purse for you’ll be stealing his trash but if you ‘filch from him his good name’, you’ll rob him of his character, one he holds to be of inestimable worth.

ANURA JVP LEADER: Hits back at charges

The value he has set for damage to his saintly halo is a record 20 billion rupees.

To JVP leader Anura Kumara these SLPP claims—by party secretary Sagara and MP Tissa Kuttiarachchi—have damaged his unsullied pristine reputation to such a great extent that he has sent a letter of demand to each; and claims from each 10 billion rupees, to total a grand sum of twenty billion.

No fuss. A person has complete freedom to think no end of his name and to regard his reputation as the purest pearl to ever glow among the squalid waters of the Diyawanna. In his demand letter, he asks for no apologies. He only asks for the payment to be made within two weeks. If not, he warns, then legal action will ensue.

So, will we see the SLPP Secretary and its MP cough up the twenty billion demanded? And witness the good fortuned Anura become a billionaire twenty times over and also witness the philanthropic good nature in him donating the whole amount of 20 billion to his beloved comrades irrespective of him remaining at the helm?

But will the SLPP secretary and MP cave in and settle? Most likely not. Given the loss of face in succumbing, the SLPP die-hards will stick to their guns and opt to take the long meandering path through the legal maze.

At Sunday’s Gampaha rally, JVP leader Anura Kumara also said: “I or anyone of our party have never defrauded a single cent from the people’s purse’.

While JVP’s Anura Kumara can, no doubt, vouch for his own moral rectitude, can he grant certificates of good character to thousands of his fellow comrades and swear to their integrity?

And as for his proud boast that none in his own party of ‘all saints’, had ‘never defrauded a single cent from the people’s purse’, has anyone in the JVP ever had access to—or control over, —the public purse to steal a cent from it?

What a sham boast to make of such a hollow virtue when not only the JVP leader nor his party men who never had held public office since its birth, but all of Lanka’s millions, including common criminals, can also claim to have not robbed a single cent from the people’s purse. And swear to it on the Good Book or Truth affirm in any court.

If, however, the JVP pedantically dared insist that they held office once, then it was for the briefest of stints – a mere 14 months in the tsunami year of 2004 that devastated Lanka – as part of President Chandrika’s coalition Government; and, as her willing cat’s paw, helped her retain her tenuous hold on legislative power.

Under Chandrika’s thumb and hawk-eyed watch, the JVP perforce had to be scrupulous in their conduct; and even if temptations came within their narrow ambit, it had to be resisted at all cost, lest their damned blood-red image was further stained with the black blemish of corruption.

Although Chandrika used the JVP to bolster her UPFA rule in the House, the widowed President wouldn’t have failed to forgive nor to forget that it was the same JVP, in different attire, that had insurrected against her mother, Sirima’s regime in 1971, and shot dead in cold blood her husband Vijaya Kumaratunga outside their family home while she and their two children were within on February 15, 1988.

It is this murderous past that the JVP conveniently asks the people to forget but continue to hold celebrations to remember lest the youth of today remain in ignorance—as Anura Kumara said in an interview with the Sunday Times on April 4 two years ago—of how the youth of yesteryear ‘took up arms and fought’ and ‘how they cast aside their own selfish objectives’ and ‘the enormity of the sacrifices they made’ and ‘how such feats can be anything but most honourable?’

How can JVP’s killing feats, which claimed the lives of artistes of the calibre of Premakeerthi de Alwis and Thevis Gurage, university academics in the class of Dr. Gladys Jayawardena and even the first vice chancellor of the Colombo University, Professor Stanley Wijesundera, be  anything other than honourable?

SLPP MP KUTTIARACHCHI: Alleges

Double-faced, double-tongued, the Janus of both violence and peace, the JVP, while it seems to be suffering from severe schizophrenia, has the audacity to hold itself as fittest, and the most competent and, to cap it all, the most honest—with none dishonest to spare even if one is required in an emergency—all because, in Anura Kumara’s words, ‘I or anyone of our party have never defrauded a single cent of the people.’

In the first few months of this year, this moral virtue was incessantly plugged in their hard sell campaign during the run-up to the much-expected local government hustings; and to subliminally hammer home into the people’s mind that they’ve turned a new leaf, believing, as they once did and still believe without reserve, that honesty was, is, and will forever be for them, the best and only policy to follow should they ever be appointed as the ruling elite of Lanka, the island’s privileged new upper crust that holds the public purse.

Amidst the squalor of corruption that reeks in all ministries and oozes from the pores of those who breathe its foulsome air, the no-holds-barred depiction of the JVP as Lanka’s last remaining morally exacting group of uncorrupted honest souls must have seemed to eternal optimists as a whiff of pure oxygen, a most refreshing breeze to puff the sails of the state’s ship.

With such an honest skipper and crew first time on ship’ deck, with such unsullied hands – raw innocent hands that hadn’t pilfered even a small morsel of scrap meat from the ship’s cargo hold – on the ship’s wheel, safe honest hands at the ship’s helm, without corruption on board on deck or below, would not the JVP ship of good hope, blessed by the heaven’s fair auspicious winds, and armed with an old moral compass that’s permanently glued to the Russian Red Star, release itself from the surrounding rocks and, raising sails, journey on its  chartered course and safely reach JVP’s promised port.

This was the comforting, utopian daydream that the JVP’s hard-core campaign sought to paint, plant, and anchor in the public’s fertile mind. And then, who knows, had not a sudden drought made barren the election field, the JVP’s subtle efforts may have led to a better yield.

These phony claims to be the sole possessor of the highest morals in the land should be affixed with a ‘believe it or not’ sign to warn the people to beware of those who crow the hollow boast, ‘we haven’t robbed a dime from the people’s purse’ without admitting that, though they have twice tried to hijack it with armed might and shed blood in the two attempts, they’ve never been entrusted with the people’s purse.

SLPP SEC. SAGARA: Alleges

The JVP Messiah Anura’s proclamation in Gampaha that all his acolytes were saints, adorned with haloes that would never tilt whatever the circumstances but would stay steadfast to their highest moral creed no matter the temptations that enticed them to betray. This takes the cake.

Not even the Buddha nor Jesus Christ presumed that all their followers possessed permanent moral rectitude. Perhaps, the JVP’s brainwashing ‘5 Classes’ initiation rite, ensures this miracle in all; much more effectively and instantly than the Enlightened One could ever do with his incomparable Noble Eightfold Path nor Jesus with his Sermon on the Mount, howsoever profound.

Unlike their internationally tried, tested and failed and condemned Marxist doctrine but which they still expound to Marxist frogs in Lankan wells, they have been left with nothing else but forced to seek applause with claims to virtues still untried, untested but which the JVP chief claims all his
red-capped, red-shirted tribe of May Day goose step marchers hold inviolate.

But even as the strongest metal must go through the furnace of Promethean flames, no virtue is as weak as one that hasn’t withstood the test of all temptation’s fire.

As Abraham Lincoln said: ‘Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power’.