{"id":72836,"date":"2017-12-17T00:10:58","date_gmt":"2017-12-17T06:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=72836"},"modified":"2017-12-16T16:58:26","modified_gmt":"2017-12-16T23:58:26","slug":"cockeyed-kumar-david-cues-for-suppression-of-democratic-opposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/12\/17\/cockeyed-kumar-david-cues-for-suppression-of-democratic-opposition\/","title":{"rendered":"Cockeyed Kumar David cues for suppression of democratic opposition"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

This refers to the feature entitled Arrest Gota or not per the evidence: NO to fundamentalism, racial-extremism and neo-populism\u201d (Sunday Island\/December 10, 2017) by Kumar David. The title itself is extremely misleading because what it suggests is malicious fiction. No evidence has been found against Gota; given the fact that three years of witch-hunting has produced nothing incriminatory against him or his brothers \u00a0it is not likely that any will be found in the future either. By \u2018fundamentalism\u2019 in the title, KD particularly hints at Buddhist religious fundamentalism, but there is no Buddhist religious fundamentalism in Sri Lanka or elsewhere whatever the biased\u00a0 Western media may say to the contrary; by \u2018racial extremism\u2019 KD no doubt means alleged Sinhalese racial extremism, but there is no such thing. The dictionary definition of neo-populism is: A cultural and political movement, mainly in Latin American countries, distinct from twentieth century populism in radically combining classically opposed left-wing and right-wing attitudes and using electronic media as a means of dissemination\u201d. Since by \u2018populism\u2019 we have up until now understood a certain bias or a special concern towards the welfare of ordinary citizens, which neo-liberalists argue negatively affects economic growth, neo-populism must be understood as a new form of the same pro-poor politico-economic policy frame. Critics used to accuse Mahinda Rajapaksa of populism, but he didn\u2019t see the rural based economic strategy he favoured that way. His successors seem to be committed to non-populist policies; they have however fallen short of MR\u2019s success level. So probably, KD fears a return of populism in the future. KD\u2019s resounding NO is to \u2018evils\u2019 that are non-existent among the majority of Sri Lankans; but of course, they could be innocent inarticulate victims of a minority of fundamentalists and racial extremists including KD himself. That is why I say that the title is misleading. Kumar David\u2019s slanderous opening paragraph that spews venom against the majority community runs:<\/p>\n

Ex-president MR is on record that Gota\u2019s arrest on trumped up charges is imminent. Joint Opposition-cum-Rajapaksa (JO-Pak) mouthpieces, hoping to stave off an arrest, warn of an almighty Sinhala-Buddhist backlash if he is locked up. This implies that a strong case which will hold up in court exists and JO-Pak is endeavouring to stampede the Sirisena-Ranil duumvirate – not a difficult task \u2013 to halt action. If burn-loot-rape gangs are let loose by JO-Pak or the BBS counter-mobilisation must clear the streets. Let the appropriate authority arrest Gota or not as obligated by the evidence; the scourge of racial extremism must not be allowed to panic society. Extremism, is my topic today, this panic mongering is a useable starting point.\u201d<\/p>\n

These extravagant imaginary false charges betray the fact that KD is deeply hostile to the Rajapaksas. He dislikes Gotabhaya Rajapaksa because he is a formidable threat to the scheme for dismantling the unitary state of Sri Lanka in order to install a confederation of mini states in its place as proposed by the current constitutional project that has been arbitrarily launched amidst widespread popular opposition. KD congratulates himself, as he has already done many times, for being the architect of the \u2018single issue common candidate\u2019 strategy that ultimately led to the unexpected ouster of Mahinda Rajapaksa in the January 2015 prematurely called presidential elections. GR served as the vital communication link between the all important political leadership provided by the president, his brother MR, as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and the battleground military leadership during the humanitarian campaign that defeated the terrorism that had plagued the country for nearly three decades. It is difficult to guess whether Kumar David sincerely condemned or secretly admired the terrorists for their cowardly excesses against the majority community, towards whom he nurses a visceral hatred. Of course, the terrorists didn\u2019t spare the other communities either when they stood in their way. So, all communities are beholden to the Rajapaksas for ridding the country of terrorism, which they did, putting themselves in the line of fire in the process, both literally and figuratively.<\/p>\n

Kumar David is reluctant to acknowledge the Joint Opposition for what it is: it serves as the real opposition in parliament, where the official opposition, according to critics, is performing a rearguard role for the survival of an increasingly unpopular yahapalana government. Instead, he describes it insultingly as the \u2018Joint Opposition-cum-Rajapaksa (JO-Pak)\u2019, which is completely unwarranted, particularly when such condemnation comes from an uncharacteristically racist, ill informed or deliberately misinformed ex-Marxist like Kumar David, without even a semblance of a following. \u00a0What is KD compared to MR as a politician or political analyst in the public estimation? How many Sri Lankan voters are even aware of the existence of a character called Kumar David, although his crafty stratagem worked with the vital support of the na\u00efve Sobhita Thera, who is no more now. There is no comparison between Kumar David and Mahinda Rajapaksa. KD completely misinterprets MR\u2019s candid warning a few days\/weeks ago that there was a move to arrest Gotabhaya Rajapaksa on false charges. I need not dwell on what is now common knowledge among the overwhelming majority of ordinary Sri Lankans of all communities. \u00a0The Court of Appeal issued a stay order on the FCID against the arrest of GR on November 29, valid till December 6. It was then extended to December 15, 2017. And now it has been further extended to January 25, 2018. Gota\u2019s appeal was based on the grounds that the FCID operation against him was illegal. His lawyers pointed out that no government money had been used in the construction of the D.A. Rajapaksa Mausoleum and the Museum containing wax images; there was no cause de jure justifying his arrest. Besides, given his august family history (to survive eighty years in national politics is an achievement in itself), his varied educational and professional background, and his long years in the military as a decorated soldier promoted to the rank of colonel during a UNP government (which is significant because he must have been known to the then authorities as a son of D.A. Rajapaksa, SLFP founder S.W.R.D. Bandaranayake\u2019s loyal colleague), and his proven moral stature, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa is least likely to do anything that could damage his personal honour \u00a0and public reputation. Full of malice, KD wrongly argues: Joint Opposition-cum-Rajapaksa (JO-Pak) mouthpieces, hoping to stave off an arrest, warn of an almighty Sinhala-Buddhist backlash if he is locked up. This implies that a strong case which will hold up in court exists\u2026\u201d. Who but scoundrels would suggest that Gotabhaya Rajapaksa could indulge in corruption exploiting, at that, a project done in memory of his own late father? The fact that hundreds of patriotic lawyers offered to defend him in court free of charge on an earlier instance of similar defamatory nature is testimony to the nation\u2019s attitude towards this iconic Sri Lankan.<\/p>\n

KD\u2019s nonsense about extremism<\/h3>\n

I had almost completed the first draft of the foregoing section of this article as a spontaneous response to Kumar David\u2019s Sunday Island article of December 10, when I found in The Island the next day (Monday, December 11, 2017) KD\u2019s reply to another writer, Bodhi Dhanapala from Canada, who had made a reference to him in an earlier article to the same paper. (I was sure then that Bodhi Dhanapala would respond to him appropriately in due course. Bodhi\u2019s response that I guessed would follow appeared in The Island today (December 16, 2017) and here in Lankaweb. Bodhi\u2019s is an excellent reply. This part of my article I completed as a separate essay along with the above a couple of days back, but I updated it today before posting the whole article on Lankaweb.) There (i.e., in KD\u2019s reply to Dhanapala in The Island of December 11), KD summarizes what he calls his views in the form of five points (a-e). He promises to deal with \u2018extremism in general\u2019 in his Sunday column of December 10. Actually, we have been looking at the article thus promised. (It is obvious that, by some quirk, there has been a delay in publishing KD\u2019s reply letter in The Island.) These five points are implicit in KD\u2019s Sunday Island article. Among the five points are two that are particularly relevant to us here. One of them is (b), which says: I have opposed LTTE terrorism as much as I opposed the state sponsored terrorism of the Sri Lankan military. The later in fact helped to breed the former. Without the carnage of 1983 the LTTE would have remained no more than a marginal force among Tamils\u201d. It appeared that the\u00a0 government of the day (in 1983) was initially hesitant, for reasons only known to them, in containing the mob violence that erupted following the common funeral in Colombo of some unarmed soldiers murdered in cold blood in Jaffna by LTTE terrorists; the military was not responsible for the deadly results of governmental indecision.\u00a0 The1983 riots were not due to the alleged barbarism of the Sinhalese either. There were complex realities that led to them. Besides, there are those who hold that it was actually an orchestrated event engineered by a third party. Reacting lawfully, but with appropriate intensity, to armed terrorism as ordered by the government is not terrorism. KD\u2019s statement here gives us the wrong impression that the Sri Lankan military acted on its own without direction from the country\u2019s political leadership in its operations against LTTE terrorism in its infancy. The security forces have always taken orders from the government; they have always acted intra vires. At the same time, it is common knowledge now that the LTTE terrorism was nurtured from outside; it was not\u00a0 something sponsored by the Sri Lankan military.<\/p>\n

The second point from KD\u2019s list that I consider relevant to us here is (e), which is: I comment on barbarism of all forms. Currently these include Burma -Buddhist instigated genocide, ISIS, the Saudi led blockade of Yemen, bombing in Syria and Hindutva mobs. In the past it included LTTE terrorism\u201d. All civilized people share KD\u2019s sentiments regarding barbarism. But we who know who are barbarians and who are not cannot agree with KD when he identifies Burmese Buddhists as barbaric terrorists who have initiated violence against the so-called Rohyngias. In most of KD\u2019s newspaper articles that I have read, he demonstrates his deep prejudice against the majority Sinhalese Buddhist community. He extends this to Burmese Buddhists as well. The truth about what is actually happening in Myanmar is cleverly hidden from the world by the Western media. It is a predominantly Buddhist (88%) country where Muslims account for only 4% of the population. Traditional Muslims live in peace with their Buddhist neighbours, without being subjected to any discrimination. The Rohyngias are Muslim migrants from Bangladesh who are settled in the Rakhine region of Myanmar. Western media falsely depict them as the most persecuted minority in the world\u201d. Though they are described as having lived in that region for centuries, the truth is otherwise. It was during the British occupation of Burma (1885-1948) that Muslim migrants arrived there. These Muslims, supported by money flowing from Islamic fundamentalist groups from the rich Gulf states, have lately begun to agitate for their own sovereign Islamic state in the Rakhine region. It is they who started killing innocent Buddhists and Buddhist monks in that region, burning their places of worship, and houses. Little about such ethnic cleansing activities by religious extremists against the native Buddhist population is reported in the mainstream media due to the influence of money. These media have already demonized all those innocent Buddhists and monks who merely react to fundamentalist violence. Among these monks, Ashin Wirathu Thera, who leads a completely justified anti-Islamic fundamentalist movement. A 2013 issue of the TIME magazine carried a front page photo of Wirathu Thera with the caption Face of Buddhist terror\u201d. His only fault is articulating the plight of innocent Myanmar Buddhists who are being persecuted by a minority of murderous religious lunatics who are determined to Islamize this predominantly Buddhist nation. But media coverage is only for purported violence by Buddhists against Muslim immigrants. Money from the rich sponsors of Islamic terror in West Asia buys the latter false victimhood in the media. The poor wronged Buddhist majority are unheard and unseen. Wirathu Thera says: No money, no media\u201d.<\/p>\n

It appears that the government of State Counsellor (Prime Minister) Aung San Sun Kyi has decided to use the military to contain Islamic extremist violence and answering acts of violence from their victims. This has earned the wrath of the\u2019 international community\u2019, who do not care about victimization of Buddhists in Myanmar and elsewhere including Bangladesh. I remember reading courageous Bangladeshi feminist writer and formerly a medical doctor by profession Taslima Nasreen\u2019s 1993 novel \u2018Lajja\u2019 (Shame) which describes in graphic detail atrocities committed against Hindus and Buddhists in that country.\u00a0 She was accused of making a \u2018blasphemous\u2019 proposal for a revision of the Quran (but according to her, she only called for the abolition of sharia, which amounts to the same thing, though), and was threatened with death. Since 1994 she has been living in exile. The article titles Will the Pope raise the plight of Buddhists and Hindus? Crisis in Chittagong in Hill tracts\u201d by Savako Utsumi and Lee Jay Walker reproduced in Lankaweb on December 15, 2017 strongly suggests the duplicity of KD\u2019s Holy Father\u201d, for he says parenthetically:<\/p>\n

(Aside: Pope Francis could have safeguarded his moral stature if he had not gone to Burma at all, nor spoken in soft, muted and muddled tones. Holy Father, didn\u2019t you know that these people call themselves Rohingya?)\u201d.<\/p>\n

We know why the Pope spoke \u2018in soft, muted and muddled tones\u2019, as it appeared to KD. The Pope has a moral conscience unlike his deracinated little dumb kid . The Pope\u2019s eyes are at least half open to the unenviable lot of the innocent non-Muslims. For political reasons, he will not come out with the truth, which could be harmful to dominant global agendas. KD has no such moral qualms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala This refers to the feature entitled Arrest Gota or not per the evidence: NO to fundamentalism, racial-extremism and neo-populism\u201d (Sunday Island\/December 10, 2017) by Kumar David. The title itself is extremely misleading because what it suggests is malicious fiction. No evidence has been found against Gota; given the fact that three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rohana-r-wasala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72836","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=72836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72836\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}