{"id":42346,"date":"2015-03-15T21:57:11","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T03:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=42346"},"modified":"2015-03-15T14:56:28","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T21:56:28","slug":"uncle-ranil-gay-aan-duwa-bangsa-well-la","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/03\/15\/uncle-ranil-gay-aan-duwa-bangsa-well-la\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cUncle\u201d Ranil-gay Aan-duwa Bang(s)a-well-la!"},"content":{"rendered":"

H. L. D. Mahindapala<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

When Arjun Mahendra was appointed as Governor of the Central Bank he, being a shrewd PR operator, made it known to all and sundry that he was on very close terms with Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Prime Minister, by referring to him as Uncle Ranil\u201d. Every other sentence began with Uncle Ranil told me\u2026.this and this\u201d And ended with I told Uncle Ranil this and that..\u201d But within\u00a0 days of his appointment the Nephew\u201d has pushed his Uncle\u201d over the precipitous cliff. The\u00a0 Uncle\u201d-Nephew\u201d team is now going down in a free fall. It proves all over again the old dictum of W. Dahanayake that the UNP is an Uncle\u201d \u2013 Nephew\u201d Party.<\/p>\n

Uncle Ranil\u201d must take responsibility for the fiasco of the mega-million deal in which his Nephew\u201d is\u00a0 involved. Thjis is another example of Uncle Ranil\u201d has gone out of\u00a0 his way to tuck under his sarong stray snakes running elsewhere.(Aha-ka yana nye aran redda ass-say da-gan-nawa). <\/em><\/strong>\u00a0R. Paskaralingam, the other so-called financial wizard who runs away each time Ranil falls from power, has also come back and is now inside Uncle\u201d Ranil\u2019s sarong. His reputation is well-known to businessmen who had dealt with him. It is common knowledge that he leads a life of splendid isolation in UK. On whose money? So why did Uncle\u201d Ranil bring these snakes from abroad and tuck them inside his sarong?\u00a0 What is it that they can do \u2013 or have done \u2013 which the locals can\u2019t do? Why is he trying to commit suicide so early when the due date for his natural demise is at the end of\u00a0 April 23, 015, the end of the magic 100-days which he promised would usher in the political nirvana.? When the next election campaign begins After 23rd<\/sup> will he dare go before the business community and promise to deliver another nirvana with a cleaner administration?<\/p>\n

No one is to be blamed for ruining the image of\u00a0 the Yaha-pala-naya\u201d (good governance) other than Uncle\u201d Ranil. He is the one who is running the Maithripala Sirisena, the SLFP\u00a0 and the government. He is the one who recruited his Nephew\u201d from Singapore, knowing his relationship with Raja Rajaratnam, the jailed insider trader in US. Clearly, insider trading is nothing new to Mahendra. It can\u2019t get any closer than that of his son-in-law grabbing \u00a0the lion share of the bond market. And Uncle Ranil\u201d alone should take responsibility for the insider trading scandal.<\/p>\n

As if that is not bad enough his Finance Minister, Ravi Karunanayake, has, flouting all known decent\u00a0 norms \u2013 forget the promises of running a clean administration within 100-days \u00a0\u2013 appointed his brother-in-law, T. M. R. Bangsa Jayah, an ex-Police Sergeant to a Rs. 600,000 per mensem directorship in the Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation. This is the last straw that breaks the charter of a pure administration within 100-days. Uncle Ranil\u201d has appointed Ravi Karunanayake into the key position of Finance Minister knowing that there is case of money laundering linked\u00a0 – surprise!! surprise! \u2013 to Raja Rajaratnam, the jailed insider trader in US. This is as good as Uncle Ranil\u201d appointing Gonawila Sunil, convicted rapist, as an assistant in his Ministry of Education in the days when his uncle, J. R. Jayewardene, was President. Everyone knows\u00a0 that it was his Nephew\u2019s intervention that influenced his Uncle JRJ\u201d to release Gonawila Sunil.<\/p>\n

All this adds up one simple fact: <\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0the Wickremesinghe-Sirisena government is now Bang(s)a-well-la\u201d! The Central Bank scandal and the appointment of\u00a0 a Police Sergeant as a director of the state run insurance company are sufficient to make the accusations against Mahinda Rajapakse look like pin pricks. The disillusionment in the electorate, particularly among the middle class, will ensure the return of Mahinda Rajapakse. a one-horse race.<\/p>\n

It can be reasonably assumed that Nephew\u201d Mahendra would not have fallen into disgrace before he could even warm the seat of the Central Bank if he was not banking on the support of Uncle\u201d Ranil. It is also absolutely clear that Nephew\u201d Mahendra\u2019s bonds (pun intended) with his son-in-law, Aloysius, is far stronger than with his Uncle Ranil\u201d. This marks the beginning of the end of Uncle Ranil\u201d claim to run a pure administration. His promise of delivering the pure and uncorrupted political nirvana within 100 days has come to an end within almost 50 days. What a fall for a man who boasted of his capacity to run the economy efficiently and without corruption! Unless the committee appointed to whitewashes the mega-million deal there is no way that Uncle\u201d Wickremesinghe can bring back his Nephew\u201d to head the Central Bank again.<\/p>\n

What is alarming is that Uncle Ranil\u201d has so far not asked for the resignation of his Nephew\u201d nor has he resigned as the head of the Finance Ministry. Since he knows the Westminster rules like the back of his hands he should know that even a whiff\u00a0 of scandal of this magnitude should oblige him to resign. Nor has Ravi Karuanayake justified the\u00a0 appointment of his brother-in-law, Bangsa, to the directorate\u00a0 of the Insurance company.<\/p>\n

The appointments made by Uncle Ranil\u201d and Ravi Kruananayake raise three questions: 1. Aren\u2019t there competent Sri Lankans who are better than Arjuan \u00a0Mahendra and Paskaralingam to handle the finances of the nation? 2. What is President Maithripala Sirisena, the High Priest of Yaha-pala-naya\u201d, doing to remedy the situation? and 3, Has the President\u2019s own action of appointing his brother to head the Sri Lankan Telecom tied his hands and prevented any possibility of taking action against his Prime Minister and Finance Ministers for violating the basic principles which he preached as if they are the revised precepts of political dasa seela\u201d?<\/p>\n

The shenanigans of the two leaders of the Yaha-pala-naya\u201d makes a mockery of the pure principles promised to the electorate. The President and the Prime Minister have jointly sabotaged their own future. They stand exposed not as members of a pure regime willing and able to change the corrupt political system but as abusers of power to feather their own nests.<\/p>\n

The entire campaign of the President and the Prime Minister was based on the single slogan of making a difference\u201d \u2013 when-a-suck. <\/em><\/strong>But the electorate is still waiting for the promised when-a-suck\u201d. <\/em><\/strong>\u00a0The rate at which the two leaders are violating the principles announced in the when-a-suck<\/em><\/strong>\u201d makes it amply clear that the promised when-a-suck<\/em><\/strong>\u201d will never see the light of the day \u2013 not in 100 days. Nor in a another 1000days or more.<\/p>\n

In short, the two leaders played out the electorate with bogus promises they could never achieve. Instead of giving the promised when-a-suck<\/em><\/strong>\u201d they have they have taken the electorate to the biggest ride of their lives. There is no when-a-suck<\/em><\/strong>\u201d in sight. They have jointly created only a disillusioned electorate of when-a-suckers<\/em><\/strong>\u201d who are now repenting for the change they made unwittingly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

H. L. D. Mahindapala When Arjun Mahendra was appointed as Governor of the Central Bank he, being a shrewd PR operator, made it known to all and sundry that he was on very close terms with Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Prime Minister, by referring to him as Uncle Ranil\u201d. Every other sentence began with Uncle Ranil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-h-l-d-mahindapala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}