Columns

I suppose it is traditional to wish your relatives and friends a happy and successful New Year. So I suppose one should adhere to custom before being accused of doing the dirty and dumping good luck to politicians and their kind in the bin.

I suppose it comes after covering fifty years of politics at home and over 10 years in another legislature abroad where unelected governments wielded power and yet did not curtail journalistic freedom, however much our regular weekly political commentaries and analysis of legislative sittings drew blood from a powerful bureaucracy.

If one harks back three years and more to a time that pre-dates the advent of the NPP/JVP power and the couple of years since its political complexion has changed, one begins to wonder whether the leaders of this coalition that even skirted the globe selling their wares in the pre-election days are the same political vendors who are sitting in comfortable seats today waving their wands of censure and retribution at all but their fellow partners, some of whom have stories to tell from decades gone by.

But what concerns me right now is the change in international geopolitics and where Sri Lanka will end up before long, for those changes have had an effect on Sri Lankan policymaking.

All earlier signs indicated that those great quotes from Marx, Lenin and Chinese politicians are slowly being ditched, as Indian influence under Narendra Modi has not only made Anura Kumara Dissanayake grasp Indian regional policy more firmly than ever before, but it would also emerge that one call from New Delhi and our foreign policy exponent would rush to the telephone, leaving all other work behind.

It seems that even appointments confirmed by other friendly nations, which in times of war had served Sri Lanka well, are pushed into the back burner to accommodate Modi’s envoy, however belated he might be, even in a private jet.

In defence of Sri Lanka’s president, it might be added that India came so quickly to Colombo’s assistance when the cyclone struck Sri Lanka and destroyed so much; only a nation in close proximity to us would have been able to meet Sri Lanka’s immediate and long-term needs and give Colombo some strength to begin the process of resuscitation.

But it is the wooing of Sri Lanka long before the weather gods were thought of bearing down on this small nation with unprecedented fury that India started playing nursemaid to Sri Lanka’s potential leadership, which had many Sri Lankan analysts and foreign diplomats speculating on the endgame.

If this attempt at surrounding Sri Lanka in its own way with promises of financial and material support and a physical presence of technicians stirred only the country’s Sinhala Buddhist nationalists at the beginning, who always seemed to smell a distinct odour in the civic nostril that signalled danger in the air.

One might remember the constant verbal battery that Anura Kumara Dissanayake fired regularly from the opposition, demanding that the then government table some of the agreements with the IMF and also President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s MoUs with Prime Minister Modi.

Were that all, we might have forgiven but not forgotten the former revolutionary of sorts, President Dissanayake, refusing to table in parliament his own MoUs with Modi and also the United States, including one agreement with the US Department of War, earlier the Department of Peace, until that unpredictable enemy of the world changed the name to one that appropriately suited his demeanour.

Since the signing of that MOU and the president’s announcing of it and parliament and others demanding that this be tabled, the president and his government have injudiciously avoided that, though the governing group would have reacted to the contrary if they were on the other side of the bench.

Yet that Minister of Health and Media, who also performs the task of a spokesman, would claim that the president exercised his constitutional right in nominating candidates for the Auditor General’s position and it is the Constitutional Council that has erred.

If Dr Nalinda Jayatissa is such a conscientious observer of constitutional and legal provisions, why does he not advise his president or the government to table those MoUs in parliament, which is also a legal requirement?

It is these actions of the government, which now stands its own policies on their heads, that make one wonder why these once upon a time great warriors now seem to have increasingly succumbed to new political pressures and shed their old commitments to democratic principles and vital aspects of democratic governance.

One begins to wonder whether the old warhorses that went to combat with democratically elected governments have their principles overturned to turn to the world’s leading country. Donald Trump has turned into a terror to the world, both militarily and economically.

We have seen Trump act in his own mental way, threatening nations near and far, even beginning to claim ownership of landmasses like Greenland while attacking maritime vessels of countries far away.

What is scary is that right-wing governments are rising around the world, including most recently in Chile. The rising turn in the political changes with right-wing parties gaining ascendance is becoming such a danger to the democratic structure that a handful of countries have joined together to defend against the growing menace of authoritarianism around the globe.

The danger is where our nation that has fought many times to save its democratic past will end up in the next few years.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London, where he worked for Gemini News Service. Later he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)