C. Wijeyawickrema, LL.B., Ph.D.

Conciliation Fraud

A TNA MP was so overwhelmed by joy he grabbed the Batticaloa senior DIG of police by his neck and planted a heavy kiss on his face. Why, because police stopped Sinhala Buddhists crowds entering Batticaloa to visit Mangalaraamaya of the monk Ampitiye Sumanaratana. It is amazing that a human being in robes fight alone for decades to protect Buddhist heritage in the Batticaloa region. He has been in solitary confinement in a country in which Buddhism is supposed to have been given foremost place and protection by its constitution! The monk says ancient Buddhist sites are ploughed and converted to paddy fields and the authorities in Colombo are silent. Local officers are found behind such destruction witnessed by the bulldozer cutting across a satellite stupa of the Digavapi temple.

This picture must be taken in the context of Wigneswaran and his NPC’s resolution making it illegal to erect Buddha statutes in the Northern Province (NP has only 11 Buddhist temples). When the Justice Minister said in parliament that NPC has no power to pass such resolution Wigneswaran gave a stupid logic. He says the resolution was meant to prevent erecting Buddha statutes in places where there are no Buddhists residing, and doing it without the consent of the local elected representatives. Since ancient Buddhist sites are destroyed in a systematic fashion by hostile Muslim and Tamil elements, the best Buddhist way to save any remaining sites from this cultural genocide is to identify such sites with a Buddha statute, irrespective of the fact that the sites so discovered happens to be private lands or not. This is in line with the internationally recognized law relating to the discovery and protection of new archaeological sites.

Mangalaramaya is the only Buddhist temple in an ocean of kovils, churches and mosques in the Batticaloa district (in the small town of Kattankudy there are over 40 mosques!) Eastern Province is similar to the city of Colombo in having an equal distribution of the three ethnic groups. In the rest of the country, the ethnic distribution is like a scrambled egg, so mixed in geographical distribution. But it appears that Muslims follow a strategy of creating pockets of mono Muslim locations fortified by mosques supported by Arabic funds. The behavior of Wigneswaran crowd and the Muslim politicians demonstrate that the conciliation talk of Ranil-Mrs. Chandrika-Maithripala trio is only a pipe-dream, just like MahindaR’s pluralism-interfaith conversion in the past. In the end he lost Muslims, Tamils and most importantly, the floating votes of the Sinhala Buddhists.

GG Ponnambalam complained to the Soulbury Commission in 1945 that Tamils were discriminated by the Donoughmore ministers by providing funds for the preservation of the ancient city of Anuradhapura! Despite the bend over backwards behavior of the Sirisena-Ranil-Chandrika trio to please TNA politicians, the protest against the temple at Mangalagama is clear evidence of the same anti-Sinhala Buddhist attitude of Tamil separatist politicians that began in the 1920s, when they realized that they cannot become the ruling elites of an independent Ceylon.

Power without police power

Why was that the monk Ampitiya Sumanaratana so angry and agitated? He has become a soldier against injustice. The HQI of Mangalagama police station harassed him so much that the monk’s blood boils when he sees this policeman. When an old woman of 103 years old was given shelter in an abandoned house, the HQI came to remove her from that house. The grama sevaka files cases against Sinhala peasants for occupying vacant lands. These grama sevakas (GSNs) are silent when Muslims or Tamils when they destroy ancient Buddhist ruins.  The kiss on the senior DIG can be interpreted as a kiss on Ranil or Chandrika or Sirisena. But the behavior of the local HQI and the GSNs signals a very bad omen. If these people act in such biased manner when they do not have police and land powers, what would be the situation when they are given police and land powers?

Giving police and land powers to a set of politicians who are determined to create a separate country is lunatic behavior. SWRD in 1957 and Dudley in 1965 agreed to give land powers because both of them did not know the history or geography of the land they were born. They studied England history and London geography. They were black-whites. Think of the case of England branding Keppettipola Disawe and 18 others as traitors in 1818. If the Colombo black whites who thought that they got a free gift of independence from the British had an iota of national feeling they should have abolished the traitor gazette of Brownrigg in 1948 and not in December 2016.

This is a clear example to show why the country is in a mess today. Is there any area/subject that one could say good or satisfactory? In USA, two parties played a game for decades and finally voters got fed-up and elected a non-politician. The situation was so bad that in one county in Kentucky Democratic Party was defeated after 147 years. In Sri Lanka, blue, green and red jokers are ruining the country on a daily basis. Replacing Ranil and Sirisena with Mahinda and Dinesh is not a solution as they are all in the same rotten lot. The new lotus bud party leader is more federalist than Mrs. Chandrika. A new movement with a Sinhala Buddhist force only can prevent the imminent danger of breaking the island into a border-war filled hell. TNA is waiting to reap the benefit with foreign help. Unlike the stupid Sinhala politicians, Abraham Sumanthiran, Sambandan and Wigneswaran are open in their demand for a united Sri Lanka, because they know that is the path of separatism.

An example of how police power blunt legal power

Work to rule is an example of how laws can be frustrated by legal means. Therefore, law is not a guarantee of anything. Just like work to rule can bring any organization to a deadly halt gradually, it can also bring any policy decision to a nullity. With regard to granting of police powers under a federal system, it could become a pain in the neck for federal or other out-of-state law enforcement agencies, if a hostile provincial police wishes to sabotage a larger national plan, whether the plan is reasonable or not. I have found an example of this from Tamil Nad police (this was reported previously in an essay printed in the Island newspaper also on June 22, 2009).

Tamil Nad police and IPKF

“…The decision to wage a war against the LTTE was not an easy one for Rajiv Gandhi. Nor was he oblivious to the cruel irony in being forced to crush the very elements he and Indira had nurtured with care and money…Rajiv could abandon neither the Tamils nor could he support its chief representative, i. e. the LTTE…

…Confrontation with the LTTE had followed from the need to maintain relational control and to restore balance of forces between the various actors in Indo-Lanka relations. That the balance was in danger is clear from the account of the IPKF operations by Field Commander Sardeshpande:

‘We gathered credible intelligence through smugglers, boatmen… about exact bungalows, lanes, hospitals, beds, towns, cities and helpers of the LTTE cadres, convalescing Tigers, gunrunners and manufacturers of explosive devices and grenades and gave it to the Tamil Nadu police, only to be told that there were no such individuals and no such activities! We told them that the LTTE cadres after enjoying India’s shelter and medical treatment were returning to Sri Lanka and killing IPKF soldiers… All this made no impression on the Tamil Nadu government and the police….This was the tragicomedy played out on our own country.’

…Facing an impasse in Tamil Nadu and fearing its deleterious impact on the IPKF role in Sri Lanka, the Central Government on January 1988 imposed President’s Rule in the state.”

Source: Ethnicity, security and separatism in India by Maya Chadda, 1997, p. 169

So think of a Wigneswaran with a Tamil IGP (not a senior DIG) and Tamil GSNs and how he enforces his no Buddha statutes law. He said Prabakaran was a Tamil Keppettipola and he opposes mix-marriages. He said since 1948 Sinhala government continued Tamil genocide. And this man still lives in Colombo 7 with two, not one, Sinhala daughters-in-law. In this regard, one should pay attention to Kamalika Peiris’s essay on why kidney disease (CKDu) is prevalent on the border regions of the proposed Eelam boundary. Was it a case of genocide?