{"id":74739,"date":"2018-02-13T03:11:50","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T10:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=74739"},"modified":"2018-02-13T03:11:50","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T10:11:50","slug":"the-just-opening-bud-of-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/02\/13\/the-just-opening-bud-of-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"The just opening bud of hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

“Although voters gave a clear win for Mahinda\u2019s SLPP, they deliberately avoided giving SLPP 50%. In fact, Mahinda\u2019s party received 2% less votes than January 2015 when he was replaced by Sirisena. Put it differently, the Sirisena Alliance (DNA, Swan) retained its 6.2 million votes while Mahinda lost 700,000 votes from his 5.8 million.” So writes Dilrook Kannangara (\u2018LG Election 2018: Voters Gave the Village to Mahinda for 17 Years, the Nation to Sirisena Alliance for 5 Years\u2019\/Posted February 12, 2018 Lankaweb).<\/p>\n

Though I admire Dilrook Kannangara for his usually insightful political comments, I am afraid the above observation of his on the sweeping victory of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna unofficially led by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa\u00a0 at the recently concluded local government elections demonstrates some patently false logic. How can a whole electorate vote so as to “deliberately (avoid) giving SLPP 50%\u201d? Mass clairvoyance is unheard of. Isn’t it more rational to compare the current statistics, rather than current ones with those of 2015, which in any case, cannot have remained the same. Probably, the fact that the voter turnout recorded at the LG elections took very high values such 85%, 78%\u00a0 etc in some places gives the impression that the number of votes cast in favour of any party has no chance of falling compared to 2015. Further, with each year passing new voters get registered and the electorate numerically expands. However, in the 2015 deliberately muddied electioneering background for which the regime change plotters were responsible, there were many unheeded vote rigging allegations in areas friendly towards that project, as Udaya Gammanpila once plausibly pointed out.<\/p>\n

As early as just 100 days after the inauguration of the yahapalanaya, people started grumbling against it, because they had realized by then that they had been gravely misled to abandon Rajapaksa on January 8th. So they wanted to install Mahinda back in power as Prime Minister (since he couldn\u2019t become president again) at the August 2015 general election. Even state opinion pollsters predicted a massive Mahinda victory. The UPFA campaign had been galvanized by \u2018Mahinda magic\u2019, something that still remains. But, what did Sirisena do? He made those infamous, illegal, immoral, malicious election-eve statements warning\u00a0 the people that he would not make Mahinda PM even if he won; by that ploy Sirisena succeeded in discouraging a substantial section of \u00a0the innocent Mahinda supporters from casting their vote. Wasn\u2019t this a deliberate ruse to baulk the success of the SLFP-led UPFA and that of Mahinda as well? Sirisena\u2019s motive was not national interest; his motive was to fulfill a pledge made to his accomplice Ranil that the latter would not be deprived of his premiership; that Sirisena has always been his acolyte is a different matter. Sirisena himself confessed the fact that he wanted the UPFA to be defeated. He said this several times before, once very recently, too. So, it is beyond doubt that more people support Mahinda today than they had a chance to do during the past three years.<\/p>\n

It is no longer a secret to anyone that what happened in 2015 (the so-called regime change) was the result of a conspiracy led from abroad. Why did Ranil have SF, and MS face Mahinda instead of doing so himself at the presidential elections of 2010 and 2015 respectively? As you the readers know the answer, I need not repeat it. MR policies were sound \u2013 rural based economic strategies with adequate attention paid to the urban sector, for example; and he achieved much for the country. This is undisputed. Even the plotters didn’t have much to criticize in the Mahinda \u2018regime\u2019 in that regard. That’s why they settled on the alleged corruption and autocracy issues as their main election platform. These are actually peripheral matters in governance. But. As is not unknown, Americans use such allegations against good strong leaders of countries that refuse to subserve the \u2018American interest\u2019 at the expense of their own national interest in order to bring them down through the strategy that they call \u2018regime change\u2019 (as Noam Chomsky points out). Ven Sobitha was roped in by these satanic traitors. They have not been able to think of anything more substantial or convincing against MR than that. In the case of MR\u2019s \u00a0‘corruption’ they made a mountain out of a molehill. These corruption allegations are the same as those war crimes allegations. They remain unsubstantiated. Of course, if the witch hunting yahapalanists had the slightest excuse they’d have tried to invent more false charges against the Rajapaksas as they have tried to do in the case of Gota, who is widely believed to be incorruptible. We now know who the real rogues are.<\/p>\n

Those who value the security of the country will not want to have it divided; they will not agree to the selling of the country’s assets; they will not allow their nation to be humiliated among other nations; they will not connive at religious fundamentalist \u00a0enclaves (potential foreign terrorist havens) established in land wrongfully reclaimed from the country\u2019s forest reserves on some pretext or other; they will not choose to turn a blind eye to the ancient archaeological sites in the north and the east being encroached upon or vandalized or simply razed to the ground by non-Buddhists. The present government is allowing all this apparently as a part of its policy. It’s true that even under the previous government forest reserve encroachment took place, but it was not meant to happen. The opportunistic Muslim politician whose notoriety in this connection is public knowledge has abused the concession given in a critical situation. Under a future truly patriotic nationalist government these things will stop, we can be sure. Such a government will have to introduce a new constitution which will strengthen the unitary state and eliminate the threat of division for ever. The traitorous attempt to pass a federalist constitution drafted by the sympathizers of the internationally proscribed LTTE under the supervision of interventionist\u00a0 foreign powers must be defeated at any cost. The victory of the SLPP augurs well for the nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala “Although voters gave a clear win for Mahinda\u2019s SLPP, they deliberately avoided giving SLPP 50%. In fact, Mahinda\u2019s party received 2% less votes than January 2015 when he was replaced by Sirisena. Put it differently, the Sirisena Alliance (DNA, Swan) retained its 6.2 million votes while Mahinda lost 700,000 votes from […]<\/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-74739","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\/74739","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=74739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}