{"id":94963,"date":"2019-11-08T17:19:01","date_gmt":"2019-11-09T00:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=94963"},"modified":"2019-11-08T17:19:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-09T00:19:01","slug":"is-sajith-the-son-of-ranasinghe-premadasa-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/11\/08\/is-sajith-the-son-of-ranasinghe-premadasa-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Sajith the son of Ranasinghe Premadasa? Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

In watching the video of the launch of the UNP\nmanifesto, one of the factors that surprised me most was the performance of\nSajith Premadasa. I had never seen him so stiff in delivering his public\nspeeches. He was speaking more as a ventriloquist than as a fired-up,\nrabble-rousing politician gesticulating frenetically, or beating his chest on\npublic stages. He stood there at the launch as stiff as a statue made of clay.\nOnly his tongue was moving to make noises. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody must have told him that to look presidential\nhe must not throw his hands around and blast his opponents at the top of his\nvoice. So he was as solemn and stiff as he could be, cutting a very poor image\nof a want-to-be president. The image he projected was that of defrocked priest\ndelivering a Sunday sermon from his pulpit which is about to come apart. On the\npublic stage he comes across like a street-corner evangelist, (inspired by the\nborn-again cult of Rosy Senanayake, a family friend), who promises to bring\nparadise down to the  earth before  the  day\u2019s sun goes down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it must be conceded that the flow of his\nverbal gymnastic was flawless. But it was all puffery. It was all sound and no\nsubstance. Sajith is a man in a hurry to make an impression. He is trying to\ncover his immaturity and inexperience with sounds of empty phrases. He is\ncertainly better than Ranil in performing on the stage. He has also energised\nthe crest-fallen UNPers to be more active. But all his rhetoric so far comes\ndown to offering freebies, ranging from gewgaws, lollipops and tampons. His\noffering of tampons to villagers is the equivalent of Ranil offering computers\nto farmers in previous election campaigns. I was wondering whether Sajith got\nthis idea of distributing free sanitary pads from Prince Charles who once wrote\nendearingly to his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, saying that his ambition in\nlife was to be her tampon! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All his sound and fury can be reduced to one simple\nargument: he is going to be the new broom that will sweep all evils away in one\nswipe and bathe Sri Lanka in milk and honey. There is nothing new in this. He\nis repeating what Ranil and Sirisena promised in 2015 \u2013 a vena-suck<\/em><\/strong>\n(difference). And he was an integral part of the Yahapalanaya <\/em><\/strong>(good\ngovernance) which promised the difference. But what did he do when he was a vena-sucker?\n<\/em><\/strong>Did he lift afinger, or raise a whisper to stop\nthe daylight robbery of his leader, Ranil?0r when Ravi Karunayake found guilty\nby the courts, was reappointed as a Cabinet minister, sitting next to him? Or\nwhen his leader failed  to honour  his  promise of\nbringing  back from Singapore the crook who steered the robbery on the\nfloor of the Central Bank? Etc? Etc? If he did nothing then how can we trust\nhim to do something now? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He admits that the state of which he is a key figure\nis rotten. His new-found political guru, Victor Ivan, too states that the Yahapalanaya<\/em><\/strong>\nregime of which he was part is rotten to the core. But he promises to\nclean  it up. How? Now it is obvious to even the blind man\u2019s blind dog\nthat if and when Sajith is elected (Fat chance!) he will have to work with the\nsame rotten mob. How can he fulfil his promise of restoring purity, honesty and\nintegrity to his government when he is bound to appoint Ravi Karunanayake and\nRanil Wickremesinghe, two of the leading political apparatchiks behind the\nbiggest bank heist in Sri Lanka, to his Cabinet?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is lying through his teeth when he  promises\nto be  the next Mr. Clean\u201d of the UNP. He knows that he can\u2019t fulfil his\nfake promises. Obviously, he is making these fake promises because he knows\nthat he will never be asked by the people to honour his promises on November\n16. They know as a vena-sucker<\/em><\/strong> he went along with the rotten\nstate\u201d (his words) of his leader Ranil. And despite his bravado on the stage, he\nwill continue to go along with the same rotten mob which will pressure him to\nfall in line with their rotten politics. If he is the honest man that he claims\nto be can he gives the nation an assurance now that  he will not appoint\ncrooks like Ranil and Ravi? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sajith is tied, hand and foot, to Ranil\u2019s rotten\u201d\npolitical agenda. His desperate attempts to project himself as a new force\nwithin the UNP, divorced from Ranil, lacks credibility because he has fallen\ninto the hands of Ranil\u2019s doppelganger, Mangala Samaraweera who is with Victor\nIvan and the NGO gangs who constitute the so-called civil society. The\ndifference between Sajith and Ranil is only a personal conflict of interests \/\n<\/strong>ambitions and not ideological, defining two different political philosophies.\nSajith\u2019s flowery language is a mere cover to hide his hidden commitment to\nRanil-TNA political agenda. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this critical stage when he has to walk a tight\nrope between the South and the North he is unable to reveal his hand. That is\nwhy he and his minders hired Victor Ivan to propagate the fiction of a new\nconstitution as the final solution to the national crisis. To the vast majority\nthe talk of a new constitution is as dangerous as one of the bombs made by\nVictor Ivan when he was a JVP fascist. Sajith is promising to devolve uparima\nbalaya <\/em><\/strong>(utmostpower) to the Tamils within a united\nnation which is the mechanism designed by Ranil and Sumanthiram. All this\nmeans, that the UNP has put forward Sajith, dressed in national costume and pirith\nnoola<\/em><\/strong>, to sell the TNA agenda instead of Ranil marketing it in shirt\nand trousers. In this election the stand taken on constitutional reforms is\ncritical to win the Tamil votes. Gotabaya Rajapakse has bluntly rejected the 13\nproposal put forward by the Tamil extremists. But Sajith is silent. Instead he\nputs forward Victor Ivan to praise the necessity of constructing a new\nconstitution \u2013 a concession that goes to please only the Tamils.  When on\nthe day Sajith makes his firm pledges to the nation he invites Victor Ivan to\npreach the value and the necessity of constitutional changes as drafted and\npromoted by the TNA he is indirectly guaranteeing that he will give top\npriority to the devolution of uparima balaya\u201d<\/em><\/strong> to the Tamils in\nexchange for a handful of votes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prioritising of the constitutional changes\u201d was the\nmain platform of the UNP at the launch of the manifesto. Sajith and his minders\nhad pre-planned in advance and picked Victor Ivan to deliver the message of\nconstitution-making as a sine qua non<\/em><\/strong> for the future of the\nnation. Events on political stages of this magnitude do not happen by chance.\nKey events are pre-planned. Which means that Sajith had embraced and endorsed\nVictor Ivan to be his spokesperson. And victor  Ivan was the ventriloquist\nwho uttered the words of Sajith. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sajith should hang his head in shame for committing\nthis betrayal. He was not only betraying the nation but also his father,\nPresident Ranasinghe Premadasa. If his father wanted to betray the nation he\nhad the opportunity to do it when  he was the President. He need not have\nrisked his life. He sacrificed his life to save the nation from the Tamil\nextremists. Sajith, like Chandrika Bandaranaike, is somebody today because\nhis  father  gave his life to save his people. Sajith\u2019s lack of\nprinciples and readiness to betray fundamental decencies that define honest men\nof integrity was revealed when he invited the man who celebrated his father\u2019s\ndeath to deliver his betrayal of the nation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is doing exactly what CBK has been doing. She\nclimbed on her father\u2019s coffin to raise her image in the eyes of the\nsympathetic public claiming to be the legitimate heir to his heritage. Once she\nclimbed to the top she betrayed her father with no qualms. The children are\nshamelessly climbing up the public ladder by claiming to be the legitimate\nheirs of their fathers. When they get to the top they party on their fathers\u2019\ngraveyards, kicking their fathers\u2019 principles without any respect or gratitude.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a sense the whole scenario at the launch is\nhilarious. Imagine the giants like D. S. Senanayake, Dudley, JR and Premadasa\nof the Grand Old Party being told what to do by Victor Ivan, the bomb-maker of\nthe  JVP which went all out to decimate the UNP leadership. It is a comic\nshow that could be organised only by the UNP jokers. He was hand-picked by\nMangala Samaraweera and Harin Fernando \u2013 two of the key minders of Sajith.\nWhere does this leave Ranil? Is this the shape of things to come? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The battle lines are quite clear now: Gota has openly\nrejected the TNA demands. Sajith thinks he can get away by spinning rhetorical\nyarns to cover up his surrender to the Tamil demands. The launch of the\nmanifesto now has exposed him as a prisoner of the Mangala-gang within the UNP\nwho is equally committed as Ranil\u2019s commitment to grant the Tamils their\ndemands.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The internal struggles for power, the betrayal of\nnational interests, the bankruptcy of a  party which cannot \nguarantee a secure  future and, above all,  the rottenness of the\nleadership in the  UNP are factors that reveal the pathetic state of the\nUNP. Besides, the indecent act of Sajith inviting Victor Ivan to launch his\nmanifesto is reason enough to question whether the son carries his father\u2019s\nDNA. Victor Ivan not only celebrated his father\u2019s death but he took the son\u2019s\nstage to promote the political agenda of the Tamil Tigers who assassinated his\nfather. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a father! And what a son!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

H. L. D. Mahindapala In watching the video of the launch of the UNP manifesto, one of the factors that surprised me most was the performance of Sajith Premadasa. I had never seen him so stiff in delivering his public speeches. He was speaking more as a ventriloquist than as a fired-up, rabble-rousing politician gesticulating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94963","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\/94963","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=94963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}