Columns

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, once known as a Marxist-Leninist—possibly for the lack of a more appropriate appellation or the wit and repartee of another Marx—seems to be heading to discard his attire from his previous avatar.

Of course he now looks more chic in his Savile Row attire. He could not go round shaking hands and engaging in complex Kissinger-style exchanges regularly donned in those two-pocket shirts that might give shades of a Che Guevara, though his first JVP leader, Rohana Wijeweera, played the role, dressed more like the veteran fighting Cuban.

One can of course understand AKD’s predicament. He could not go having Russian tea bought in some Colombo tea auction like that. I mean, it might be savoir-vivre while splitting a chappathi with his new mentor Narendra Modi in Rashtrapati Bhavan, but certainly not with Comrade Putin in the Kremlin, especially now that the decades-old comrade is playing footsie with the capitalist and the Third World haters ensconced in Washington’s twin towers, busy trying to work out how to eliminate the poor nations with disaster-ridden policies and turn Sri Lanka into another Argentina.

Having ruined Argentina, Washington’s ruinous twins quickly turned that hit song “Don’t cry for me Argentina” to belt away at booze parties as though they really cared what happened to that lovely South American country.

So now that President Trump is playing joker, President AKD better be prepared if he is invited to the White House. Having visited some ASEAN states the other day and doing a jig, as it were, at the airport, the global leader aspirant is having some part of the White House changed into a dance floor.

Surely he is not going to dance alone even though he might sign presidential orders that devastate poor nations with one stroke of his pen.

Since this unpredictable nation might suddenly decide to invite AKD for a visit to the White House, our care-ridden president better learn the quick step. Not that I expect our president to join his host, who some writers and leaders of the Global South see as somewhat cranky—not without cause, I would say—but for the country’s safety.

So when I say AKD should learn the quickstep, it is not to walk onto the dance floor but to make a quick getaway. After all, some of his recent movements—more tango than slow fox-trot—have taken even our Global South by surprise, including ignoring the BRICS meeting and staying away from the important China-run gathering.

We heard our president say at some postprandial gathering, if I remember right, that Sri Lanka’s foreign policy will be a balanced one. Not having had the occasion to meet our worthy leader to ask him what that meant, maybe I should direct it to Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, who made such a masterly escape from the Geneva confab last month, saying he did not want to waste Sri Lankan people’s money, which I must admit is an unbeatable piece of argument by defeating his own reasoning.

I mean, if he wants to stop dipping into the public purse, he could very well have stayed at home and sent his speech (or whatever he and his ministry called it) to our mission in Geneva to be read out like our mission controller Himalee Arunatilaka did earlier in the UNHRC session.

Having read that stunning piece that set out what Sri Lanka has achieved since taking office, perhaps President AKD and his round table must have agreed that such an argumentative rebuttal sure deserved the foreign minister’s presence to read it out, convincing the congregation nobody but our worthiest must appear before our detractors and do a real Disraeli performance.

So concerned is this government to save every red cent (or is it silver-coloured?) to make it count in the pursuit of rescuing our people with their heads just above the poverty line, which, as some statisticians say, adds up to 25 per cent of the population.

Such precious care for our people from a people’s government does deserve public accolades. Even as potato and onion growers chide this recent budget as letting them down and parade the streets and road junctions in protest, their one-time advocates as saviours of the working class spell out their grand achievements from the posh padded seats of corporate lounges of high-flying business companies that now applaud the tattered working-class defenders of yesteryear.

And what of the large numbers of the retired public servants and other retirees and pensioners who are anxiously waiting for these Santa Clauses who were expected to bring gift horses for the needy?

All they see in these dark days after having voted for the frontline defenders of the poor is indeed a poor response. Remember how rather recently a member of the public applied to the Presidential Secretariat to know how much President AKD spent on some journeys he undertook.

Mind you, he was only asking for some journeys in the country, not around the globe as other globe trotters had spent.

And what did the vast minds that inhabit the Presidential Secretariat, oscillating between positions of power and gross high-handedness, refuse to divulge? How
many thousands of rupees of public money.

What is so ludicrous and disgusting is that the NPP’s parliamentary troika used to holler – if that is the word – urging the government to respond by revealing the information sought.

After all, didn’t these people’s representatives keep demanding transparency and accountability as important adjuncts of the great democracy they expected to bring to the people when they installed a new, clean government? Or were the slogans more rhetorical balderdash and hogwash?

This great budget, which economists and other sociopolitical experts called the IMF grand design, has been dismissed as mere proposals without the way forward but no way declared.

My Sunday column was written before the budget speech with the headline “So now a faithful ally of the once castigated IMF. Now that the budget was announced, many critics have dismissed it as a Washington handiwork, which seems to confirm my belief that NPP leadership are no longer defenders of the poor and deprived.

It has been sold to the IMF following a neoliberal agenda, as one expected.

Many would be quite worried that this has not been a Faustian deal, like the Narendra Modi agreements, which some claim leave a smell in the civic nostril.