By WINSTON DE VALLIERE - From Ceylon Today
"Not to grab power even in the medium term which
Somawansa will see as politically unrealistic, but to step into the scenario
with a powerful third force in Parliament, a place that the Rajapaksa clan
wishfully presumes is their place in Parliament for the foreseeable
future."
Psychiatrists have long known that for several reasons, especially parental censure, that personality growth is arrested and remains so throughout life unless detected early in a child and remedied through counselling. Sadly, this has not happened for many. Children learn in infancy that crying and creating a racket can be used to blackmail parents and others to cave in to their demands.
In the Sinhala idiom: Andana lamayata kiri hambawei the child that cries gets the milk. In that infancy is born ideas such as 'Jana Gosha' first expressed at home and school by goading siblings and fellow students to threaten trouble as a means of forcing authority figures to concede demands. This is carried into physical adulthood. Sons will ape a father's habits such as boozing and womanizing. Daughters will play the harlot like their mothers. Until they find that suddenly the fathers and mothers care no more about the stupidity of rebellion that has gone beyond the bounds of human abuse.
The UNP, even then a hopelessly outnumbered minority, looked on as over 3,000 bribed hooligans deep-throated curses and threats to create a docile, slavish UPFA under Rajapaksa to sign the 19th Amendment into law on 8th September 2010 without even having seen it, let alone having read it. The Rajapaksa faction has earned multi-billion and will sign away all their birthrights had Rajapaksa placed such a paper before them. It's a flip of the coin as to whether any other country, laying claim to a democratic system of governance, has ever had such distinct shades of Machiavelli staining the pages of Rajapaksa governance.
There can be no more dangerous a weapon in the hands of a
cabal led by a man who hesitates not a moment before he unleashes the mayhem of
the common street thug in the hallowed halls of Parliament. The school boy and
elder sibling remains a potent threat to the entire socio-political canvas of
this country, well ensconced within an adult body. I say this because it's a
truism that everything that lives, grows, and morphs into forms of its own
desire.
Battle lines lifting
I said last week that the haze over the political, or to be exact, electoral battle lines was lifting rapidly, especially in the context of the next general election which has dumped a mammoth dilemma on Mahinda Rajapaksa's lap.
He will rue the day that he ever opted foolishly to team up with the most detested elements in Lanka's political dustbins and make them the mandrel upon which he proceeds to self-destruct by fashioning his come-back strategy on their combined corrosive nature. The anvil on which glass shatters is also the anvil on which steel is forged. The hammer is coming down and the glass is shattering. We quaintly call this the 'protest against the bribery Commission hauling Rajapaksa before it'. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The Sirisena/CBK/Ranil combine might, to the ordinary man, appear to be assailed by Rajapaksa's mob elements in parliament. Not so. The mob elements are in panic, in disarray.In the pithy Sinhala saying: The crabs can't stand the heat and are in their death struggle in the melting pot.
Many are seeing the hammer in the wrong hands. It's also the emergence of a revived JVP, a third force.
It's a final tussle between the forces of good and evil, even though that might sound a tad melodramatic. The CBK/Ranil/Sirisena trio have the hammer firmly in their grasp were you to look with the blinkers off. By using his cabal, as usual to his cat's paw, Rajapaksa has in effect said it loud and clear that he's guilty. Clinton did not baulk at going before Congress and admitting his guilt in a mater far more serious than bribery and corruption...and came out a leader who but doing so has won the grudging admiration of the world.
Rajapaksa stands juxtaposed to all of this. Truth and right would seem strange notions to him. The run-away juggernaut of mob uprisings and violence have been his known options. One reaps what one sows, in the ultimate essay. Churlish and egoistic in the context of the chaos into which he is wilfully plunging the nation instead of simply going before that commission, honouring the Constitution and telling the commission off by proving his innocence. That would not have entailed endless days of chaos and holding the nation and the Constitution, the dignity of the House, to ransom.
If this delinquent strategy of blocking the 19th Amendment was meant to create the psychological platform to launch anarchy couched behind the demand to rescind the decision to haul Rajapaksa before the Bribery Commission, it shows a pathetic inability to reckon with: A) President Sirisena's own grasp of political sense, intuition and courage to read, foresee, plan and execute rapid counteraction to reinforce his government's stability. And B: The deep significance behind Somawansa Amarasinghe quitting the JVP to form a NAVA LANKA JANATHA VIMUKTHI PERAMUNA, as a source in the know revealed to me.
Let me deal with this salient factor before I get down to Somawansa and the NEW JVP: The pro-MR cabal, with all the signs of being driven by dementia, is indeed pathetically lacking in intelligence. If this was not the case, they would never have been so stupid as to plan the aborted military cum political, cum judicial coup on the morn of January 9th.
They failed to see anything deeper in the JVP's support for President Sirisena's candidacy to ensure his victory over MR.
Assassination plan
The JVP, its ears to the ground, got wind of a plan to assassinate all its leaders along with Sirisena, marginalize its over 1.5 million supporters and, in a subtle post-election/coup use Weerawansa to harvest that mass support for his NDF and Rajapaksa. The failure of the JVP's new leadership (after Somawansa called it a day having given his entire life to its objectives), to press a positive probe into the planned coup was the only reason behind Somawansa quitting the JVP to launch his own Nava Lanka Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna. Not to grab power even in the medium term which Somawansa will see as politically unrealistic, but to step into the scenario with a powerful third force in Parliament, a place that the Rajapaksa clan wishfully presumes is their place in Parliament for the foreseeable future.
The move can also see the end Weerawansa's career, with his voters, sick of Rajapaka's failure to address living issues and kept silent by Weerawansa himself. The current JVP will not go its own separate way; they will not take long to then link up with Somawansa's new JVP. A couple of months the most. Somawansa is confident that this is how events will pan out. He is careful to not allow anything to come between him, his plans and the JVP he has quit. We could be looking at the end of Weerawansa's political career that has been marked all along with the stigma of cheap, opportunistic political choices.
Somawansa will almost immediately begin marketing the aborted plan to assassinate all JVP leaders. He has clung too tenaciously to life for nearly 45 years and is not likely to take kindly to anyone putting hi name in a coup list...and for a couple of weeks it's going to look bad for the others whom he has dumped for now. It can electrify the JVP electorate and create a considerable wave of sentiment that can be translated into a huge demand for Sirisena to come clean and order an immediate probe into the January 8 coup plot which now kooks unlikely as events unfold which demand a course correction..
The big question in the JVP camp is just that : Why hasn't Sirisena pushed that probe to its conclusion ?
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