{"id":45646,"date":"2015-07-13T03:25:41","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T10:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=45646"},"modified":"2015-07-13T03:25:41","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T10:25:41","slug":"ranils-anti-cope-eyewash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/07\/13\/ranils-anti-cope-eyewash\/","title":{"rendered":"Ranil\u2019s anti-COPE eyewash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editorial The Nation<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Ranil Wickremesinghe is a politician.\u00a0 Yes, not a statesman.\u00a0 A politician, let us reiterate.\u00a0 The next election and not the next generation is what fascinates him.\u00a0 Like other politicians from other parties of course, leaders included.\u00a0 Yes, like Mahinda Rajapaksa and Maithripala Sirisena.\u00a0 Ranil Wickremesinghe is a lawyer.\u00a0 He is not just a politician but a seasoned one.\u00a0 So when he says that D.E.W. Gunasekera, then Chairman of COPE, was out of order in releasing a draft of the COPE Report on the Central Bank bond issue, we have to take note.<\/p>\n

Wickremesinghe\u2019s argument is that after Parliament was dissolved, COPE ceased to exist and therefore has no legal standing.\u00a0 Consequently nothing that \u2018DEW\u2019 or anyone else in COPE says about any \u2018COPE affairs\u2019 is incompetent and irrelevant.\u00a0 DEW, for his part, has promised to respond.<\/p>\n

Wickremesinghe claims that it\u2019s not only DEW who is guilty of the \u2018contravention of the Parliament Powers and Privileges Act\u2019 but newspapers and other media that had published sections or the entirety of the \u2018draft report\u2019.\u00a0 His argument, apart from COPE ceasing to exist, is that some COPE members were not present when COPE deliberated because they were busy politicking.<\/p>\n

It is strange that Parliament was dissolved before the COPE could conclude its deliberations.\u00a0 It is strange that Wickremesinghe and the UNP campaigned tirelessly for a dissolution and that this campaign intensified as word got out that the COPE report could constitute damning indictment of key members of the UNP.<\/p>\n

All this is of course \u2018politics as usual\u2019.\u00a0 What is disturbing in the Prime Minister\u2019s complaint to the Secretary General of Parliament is his attack on the media.\u00a0 He has referred to a newspaper by name for contravening, like DEW, the Parliament Powers and Privileges Act.\u00a0 On earlier occasions too he has seen fit to vilify media institutions and journalists.\u00a0 This, even as he lambasted political opponents for doing pretty much the same thing.<\/p>\n

Wickremesinghe, in the fairytale days of the Maithripala Sirisena election campaign and into several weeks of post-victory euphoria talked about media freedom.\u00a0 Only one concrete fact has emerged in the five and a half months when Wickremesinghe operated as though he was ruling the country as Sirisena\u2019s proxy: the inability to move a single muscle to get the Right to Information Act passed.<\/p>\n

His agitation about the COPE, therefore, should not mask Wickremesinghe\u2019s latent, sorry very real, antipathy towards media freedom.\u00a0 The Chairman of his party, let us not forget, is reported to have instructed all state media (now UNP-controlled) to toe the party line.\u00a0 That directive most probably was endorsed by the Party Leader.<\/p>\n

What all this shows is Wickremesinghe\u2019s true media policy, stripped of rhetoric readily lapped up by Rajapaksa-haters and rights advocates who make a living talking about rights and freedoms.<\/p>\n

The letter to the Secretary General of Parliament regarding the COPE report therefore has to be read as a gag-seek in view of possible negative impact on the UNP campaign.\u00a0 It\u2019s about power and privilege, yes, but not of the kind he refers to and certainly not of any diminishing of these things.<\/p>\n

Mahinda Rajapaksa could have graduated into a statesman, but didn\u2019t.\u00a0 Wickremesinghe, especially after helping Sirisena defeat Rajapaksa on a \u2018yahapaalana-pledge\u2019 was even better positioned to advance.\u00a0 He has not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editorial The Nation Ranil Wickremesinghe is a politician.\u00a0 Yes, not a statesman.\u00a0 A politician, let us reiterate.\u00a0 The next election and not the next generation is what fascinates him.\u00a0 Like other politicians from other parties of course, leaders included.\u00a0 Yes, like Mahinda Rajapaksa and Maithripala Sirisena.\u00a0 Ranil Wickremesinghe is a lawyer.\u00a0 He is not just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45646","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=45646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}