By Rohana R. Wasala

Sunday Island (June 2, 2024) published an interesting article entitled ‘Quo vadis?’  by retired electrical engineering professor, public intellectual and political economics commentator  ex Marxist agitator Kumar David, who died about four months later. I used to admire him, in spite of what I perceived as his rough edges. I liked reading his English language  newspaper columns that he imbued with a sense of scholarliness, wit and wisdom.The title ‘Quo vadis?’ (Latin for ‘Whither bound?’ ‘Where are you going?’) is rich with biblical connotations. In his Sunday Island feature just mentioned, Professor Kumar David made a questioning, perhaps a rather pessimistic, commentary on the performance of the fledgling JVP-NPP government up to that point. I was prompted to write a response to that article. It was published online under the title ‘KD buffaloeing KDLK’ on June 16, 2024. Sadly, Kumar David died four months later, in October 2024 in Los Angeles, USA, aged 83. I have drawn upon my own past writing in preparing this piece.  

In ‘Quo vadis?’ Kumar David called K.D. Lalkantha ‘Buffalo’. Why did the presumed JVP/NPP ideologue and mentor, whose name was even included in its national list, thus degrade a useful idiot? I have an answer to suggest. Please read on. I was reminded of Kumar David’s buffalo comment when I listened to Lalkantha on live stream TV on January 11 launching a vicious verbal attack on Dhammaratana Nayake Thero of the historic Mihintale Raja Maha Viharaya for criticising the prime minister Harini Amarasuriya’s educational reforms/her education ‘transformation’ proposals. 

Lalkantha referred to the outspoken monk as ‘mihintale inne vanachariya’(lit. jungle dweller)  meaning ‘the uncivilized man living in Mihintale’. The more frequently spoken form of  the term ‘vanachariya’ is the strongly contemptuous ‘vanacharaya’ meaning a sexually promiscuous male person, a cad. Though Lalkantha did not use the latter term, the Sinhala speakers that he was addressing, no doubt, heard its echo in that particular context. It is regarded as shockingly offensive particularly  when used on a Buddhist monk, and a Buddhist monk of Mihintale Nayake Hamuduruwo’s status at that, who has taken vows of lifelong celibacy. Proof of his fidelity to religious vows is a different matter.

Lalkantha is Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Land and Irrigation. Along with Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, he was gracing the 38th Annual General Meeting of the Kurunegala Agriculture College Past Students’ Association. Speaking earlier, Prime Minister and Minister of Education Amarasuriya expressed the government’s determination to go ahead with the proposed reforms despite numerous protesting voices raised by the Opposition, something that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has also already reiterated in different contexts. Lalkantha charged that the Mihintale Nayake monk targeted the prime minister on account of her gender, which no sane person in the audience would have taken seriously. 

Let’s return to the old Sunday Island feature by Kumar David mentioned above. In it, he predicted that, at the coming presidential polls (presumably, in 2029), the battle would be between Ranil and Anura with ‘Sajith wailing in the wilderness’, while ‘the utterly hopeless SLFP and SLPP will find refuge with Ranil Wickremasinghe’ (as he put it), which meant that Kumar David left Namal (Rajapaksa) out of the scenario that he foresaw. Probably, KD was trying wishfully to discern emerging signs of such a pre-poll division of political loyalties that would be advantageous to Ranil Wickremasinghe (the alleged kingpin of the 2015 regime change operation to which Kumar David intellectually contributed). The gist of what KD wanted to say in the relevant section of his article, as I understood it, was that the Anura-led faction would identify with the (in KD’s probable estimation)  retrograde nationalist forces as he hoped it would, and be routed by the West-oriented camp supporting Ranil; so he (Ranil) would  eventually be elected as president, thereby reversing the nationalist victory achieved with the defeat of separatist terrorism in 2009, a victory that was not to KD’s liking. 

There were certain revelations that former president Ranil Wickremasinghe made before a group of legal professionals he addressed at the Presidential Secretariat on May 28, 2024 as then reported in the media. RW’s claims sounded almost similar to what National Freedom Front (NFF) leader Wimal Weerawansa had earlier said in and out of parliament, and even wrote a book about, titled ‘Nine: the Hidden Story’ (April 2023). RW’s revelations were about certain alleged Western-led attempts to force him out of his premiership  immediately after the former elected president Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled his official residence in Colombo on July 9, 2022 amidst violent chaotic scenes created by the so-called Aragalaya (Struggle), but before he formally quit his post. As Wimal Weerawansa had revealed before, Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardane was coerced to take over as executive president, but only as a nominal head of state who could be led by the nose according to the whims of the powers that be. To his credit Mahinda Yapa refused to accommodate that unconstitutional demand of a particular foreign ambassador. It was widely believed that this was American ambassador Julie Chung (now gone, presumably her mission completed). But according to a recently published book in Sinhala about ‘the power of the Aragalaya from the ouster of Gotabaya to the arrest of Ranil’ by Prof. Sunanda Madduma Bandara (who served under president Ranil as his media adviser), it was the then Indian High Commissioner Gopal Baglay who gatecrashed into Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardane’s official residence in the dead of the night to persuade or pressure him to assume the presidency ignoring the Constitution! Baglay’s safe passage through the ranks of unruly protestors to reach the Speaker’s residence safely showed that the Indians had a direct connection with the Aragalalaya.

TNA MP Sumanthiran was seen among the Aragalaya protestors, advising them, apparently unchallenged, unlike a number of other MPs, including Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa of the SJB, who were actually physically attacked while trying to associate themselves with the evidently hijacked protest movement. This is something that suggested a link between the Aragalaya and the Tamil diaspora among other infiltrators. Can it be said that the recently revealed probable Indian connection with the Aragalaya confirms this?

Kumar David was the progenitor of the ‘single issue candidate’ idea that was discussed just before the presidential election at the end of 2014. The choice he originally suggested then as a ‘single issue candidate’ was the late Maduluwawe Sobitha Thero of Naga Viharaya, Kotte, with his revolutionary but nonviolent reputation. This was against the venerable monk’s own conviction and the accepted wisdom prevailing then as now among ordinary Sinhalese Buddhist voters that a Buddhist monk is not suitable for that post and that he won’t stand a chance of winning at an election. Later, then incumbent war winning president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s right-hand man Maithripala Sirisena who, apparently, had been disgruntled with his boss for denying him the premier’s post that he coveted, betrayed him and decamped in order to challenge him as the single issue candidate, and the rest is history. 

The JVP also contributed to the success of the foreign engineered regime change campaign that had co-opted Sirisena, and played an active role in the resultant  Yahapalanaya government, though from a nominal opposition position. KD, being an elderly ex-Marxist sympathetic to that party, was believed by critics to have misled the half-baked Marxist-Leninist (Bolshevik) JVPers to support the pro-West alliance. The above suggested contest between Ranil and Anura had been made more likely, according to KD, by ‘Buffalo Lal Kantha’s pronouncements’. Kumar David called Lalkantha a buffalo not for the now well known, notoriously stupid statements of K.D. Lalkantha of the JVP-NPP, but for the latter’s alleged claim in support of the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna): KD wrote that Lalkantha had stated ‘that ……. only the JVP and the Udaya Gammanpila party took a stand against the Tamils, opposed any form of devolution and supported the military in the war against the Tigers’. In fairness to K.D. Lalkantha, it should be stated that he would not have uttered such a thing. The JVP and Gammanpila (leader of the Pivituru Hela Urumaya, PHU) never took and will never take a stand against Tamils for being Tamils; they only opposed Tamil Tiger terrorists, with whom KD’s coethnic empathy is understandable, and excusable. But KD’s innocuous looking piece of casual misinformation is a subtle attempt to recirculate the malicious lie that the Sri Lankan government fought against the Tamil community, not exclusively against violent Tamil separatist terrorists.  Members of the JVP and the PHU are not racists, unlike KD. Their attitude to devolution is not likely to be so inflexibly rigid either; they were against a form of devolution that could only be an easy step to separation.  

It is only KD’s ingrained anti-Sinhalese Buddhist prejudice that has instilled such ideas into his hate filled mind. KD adds that the ‘import of his (Lalkantha’s) words is that ‘the JVP-NPP is going to be identified at the polls as a Sinhala party and this will have consequences. Will it draw the already radicalised Sinhala-Buddhist youth in larger numbers into the JVP camp or will it damage the JVP’s image? Time will show.’ What balderdash is this? If the JVP cannot attract anti-extremist peaceful Sinhalese Buddhist youth (those that the prejudiced call ‘radicalised’) and their counterparts in other communities into its fold, will it survive in politics, let alone save its image? To be continued