Columns

Well, it must get something balanced, shouldn’t it? After all, if everything is ship-shape, as our comrades seem to think and say now and then at the end of a first year at the helm, there could still be a thing or two that must have escaped their eagle eyes.

It is not that one is casting aspersions at the one-time Marx for missing some marks here and there in his enthusiasm to stand everything on its head amidst his busy travels, circling the globe and shaking paws with the aspiring leader of the universe—you know who. I mean, he cannot be doing every minor job, such as changing cabinets and dispensing with the presidency—not while he is in it, obviously.

After all, he cannot be doing everything. See how he made a devastating speech at the UN General Assembly the other day. If I had known he was going to issue worldwide warnings to the criminals and the corrupt in the chamber, Staten Island and others everywhere else listening, I would have had my journalist and diplomatic friends note who took to their feet and departed to the rows of toilets down the corridor to escape their share of Roman oratory.

But then he found time while visiting the Pacific and later to tell the world this time his plans to inject a more circumspect ‘balance’ he had intended into his pre-planned foreign policy. If he were still a full-blooded Marxist, he would have known what to do.

But no, today he was far more a Ranilist than the old-style Leninist and taken to offering clay oil lamps to the statues of the IMF in Washington. Those who followed the pre-election propaganda campaigns and parliament speeches will recall how they castigated Ranil for seeking, virtually on bended knee, the help of the International Monetary Fund. From podiums around the country, they vowed to throw Ranil’s complacent agreements into the dustbin along with the IMF’s hard-nosed proposals to rescue Sri Lanka from the edge of the precipice into which Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s intelligent wanderers and others who had little or no knowledge of economics were trying to dump the common people.

Whatever one might say about Ranil Wickremesinghe for imposing more taxes on the common people or increasing prices affecting them, he did pull the people away from the razor’s edge and brought stability little by little while AKD and his mighty warriors discredited from the top.

Yet those who threatened to turn the country on its head quietly grabbed the Ranil formula as the hard-served low-income people hung on to the Wickremesinghe-IMF apron strings, and many of them still survive to tell the tales.

Now it is all about balanced foreign policy, as though we are arming ourselves to battle Trump’s aces and jokers before they destroy the world with his tariffs and other secret weapons. That, I’m afraid, is something we did not hear, though we, citizens too and dual too, listened intently to our president’s peroration as we sat by to pick up every word as he told the world what he and his fighting forces are doing to overcome the evil underworld.

Sadly, what I didn’t hear about was the balanced foreign policy—whether it goes round the world to bring solace to the hard-pressed because of the criminal and corrupt world and how all of them should join Sri Lanka’s mighty men—and women too, after all, they are all included.

Though Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya is a vital cog in this Left coalition, it is not often one hears of her great revival of our education system, and surely she should be given her pride of place. After all, they have been taught to take the high places when surviving rotten bureaucracy is eliminated and when the NPP is ready with AI and other sharp weapons.

In the meantime it would have been nice if the world was told what the balanced system was all about and who was pulling the trigger. So far I know it is a balanced system, but who is balancing what, where, and how, and what on earth for, and what would happen if the person who is balancing the others slips and falls by eating too much, or what we would not know because the man who holds the purse strings cannot count even a hundred cadju nuts to get beyond the first dozen.

After all, we have seen how our counting counters did during UNHRC vote counting—adding the discarded votes to our measly bead count to increase ours at the Geneva count.

Talking of this, listeners might have noticed when our president lost his balance when he got to that part of his speech that came to those troubles in what is called Gaza and who is doing what to whom and who is dying and whether this killing is balanced, and if not, why not stop speeches and kill the killers too to make some balanced adjustment?

That might provide some balance to our foreign policy. But I am certain our balancing masters never said a word about something called genocide in Gaza, where thousands are dying—men, women and children and even those who have nothing to do with the war except go out there to provide food aid, medical facilities and safety, and that too at considerable personal risk.

Oh, I did hear the word Izrael mentioned once—like introducing the first steps to the new dance—and thereafter kaput—no mention of genocide, nothing about Izrael and genocide, which the whole world is screaming about.

Of course, I heard some Israeli supporters saying we provide the Israelis places to stay, accommodation and even policemen. How sweet, aney!

Still, my count tells me that it is not balanced, and poor Harini would have hastened her arithmetic lessons.

Meanwhile, time is running out, and the balancing act is getting small—my count says just two big fish in the Indo-Pacific.

Still, it is only two, and our chaps can handle both. That is what they were picked for, and veteran politicians can take a rest till the election—if there is one.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was Deputy Chief de Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)