Gota Goes: Diary Of A Disaster Foretold

By Dayan Jayatilleka –

The Aragalaya has invested the Sri Lankan flag with a new, positive patriotism and the Sri Lankan identity—Sri Lankanness—with a new, pluralist, inclusive sensibility, the sensibility of the youth, of young men and women. Above all else the Aragalaya has been a revolution of consciousness; a liberating cultural revolution.

My wife Sanja’s favorite visual which will probably remain indelible and emblematic is the clip of a young person who had climbed up a considerably tall lamppost, Sri Lankan flag in hand. The lamppost already had a flag tied to it. The climber moved beyond it, and while holding his own flag, bowed and gave a palms-together ‘namaste’ to the flag fluttering from the post, and then did the impossible: he arched his back so that it was parallel with the bar that connected the lamp to the post, lay down on it, and raised the Sri Lankan flag high against the sky.

There is considerable dismay in Colombo at the incidents of vandalism at the Aragalaya occupation of the Presidential palace, the Presidential Secretariat and Temple Trees, and the crowds flocking to those sites. Firstly, “revolutions are festivals of the oppressed” as Lenin said. Secondly, as quite literally a ‘child of ’56’, it reminds me of something my father Mervyn de Silva had written about the so-called Silent Revolution of 1956. A reporter and parliamentary lobby correspondent at the time, he wrote that commuters rode trains and buses without paying for their tickets, saying that it was “apey aanduwa”— “our government” –now. He had also seen a crowd in a benign invasion of Parliament, entering the well of the House and reverently touching the Speaker’s chair. Until then, Parliament had been a remote institution.

Today, the citizenry is queuing up to see the sites of governance and are picnicking on their lawns, swimming in the presidential pool. It is the spirit of freedom, of liberation or, to borrow a phrase of President Ranasinghe Premadasa from a different context, of “peopleization”.

As for Ranil Wickremesinghe, I had commended his readiness to step forward at a time of crisis but I had warned in this column that he was doomed to be a Kerensky, an allusion he should be very familiar with. He should have known that his time to step off the stage of history had come. He could have done so gracefully, to applause. He has chosen to look for wiggle-room.

If Prime Minister Wickremesinghe who is neither elected nor has a single MP from his party in Parliament, attempts to cling to office, the Aragalaya will swell again and find a political target to overrun. That will extend and radicalize the struggle.

The economic debacle that triggered the downfall of Gotabaya has a history. In mid-2018 Dilith Jayaweera and his wife graciously hosted dinner at his home for Gota and his wife, and me and Sanja. Gotabaya had been stung by the public criticism in the newspapers (Daily Mirror, 23 May 2018) of his much-applauded the Shangri-la speech, by me– someone who had supported him, episodically and not uncritically, in late 2016/2017, having been a bitter public critic for many years before that, in 2009-2015.

It was Dilith and our current ambassador to Germany, Manori Unambuwe who had brought about a ceasefire and cordiality between us. That was ending as Gota’s hawkish right-hand man Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekara started picking on me in the press by end-2017 for my support of the implementation of the 13th amendment and advocacy that Gota take that stand to firm up relations with India.

Gotabaya invited me to speak on foreign policy at the first convention of Viyath Maga in 2017. I accepted and did so, with my second sentence noting that was not a member of Viyath Maga. (I had declined to attend the opening ceremony at its office).

In 2018 at the second Convention at the Shangri-la, Sarath Weerasekara and Prof Rohan Gunaratna were the foreign policy hands.

During the Gotabaya presidency to date, Gunaratna has been a key advisor to Secretary/Defence (retd) General Kamal Gunaratna.

The decisive turn to the Alt-Right had been taken in 2018 or was already embedded and became manifest. Trump and Netanyahu were clearly the role models and the two ends of the ideological axis that the Gotabaya project was on.

Mahinda Rajapaksa phoned me the next morning and he was deeply disapproving about the drastic rupture with traditional centrism, let alone the center-left. He dismissed as “nonsense…rubbish” Rohan Gunaratna’s foreign relations ideology.

At dinner at Dilith Jayaweera’s in May 2018 I maintained and pressed home my published criticism on Gota’s economic perspective.

Gota instructed his chauffeur to return to Mirihana and pick up a book. When it arrived, he turned to a page in the heavily annotated volume and showed me that he had been influenced by the economic philosophy of President Xi Jinping.

I told him that I had read the book because it had been gifted to Sanja during our visit to Beijing which included our happy reunion at the Foreign Ministry with the then Vice Foreign Minister of China, Li Baodong, who had been my colleague, supporter and friend during my stint in Geneva. I went on to point out to Gotabaya that since I had read the book, I know that he omitted the very next paragraphs in President Xi’s speech he was quoting from, which laid heavy emphasis on the poor and the need for their rapid upliftment through programs of poverty alleviation. Gota replied that for reasons of time and space he had dropped that section and topic from his policy speech!

To complete the story with a topping of rich irony, after my article slamming Gota’s economic policy roll-out appeared in the press, Sanja and I were invited to dinner with Dr PB Jayasundara and Prof WD Lakshman (my old teacher of Economics from Peradeniya). They both commended my critique, PB even more fulsomely than Prof Lakshman.

It was weeks after this that I wrote two articles which were intended to stop the disaster I saw looming if Gotabaya were to be given the presidential candidacy. In July 2018, I proposed that Chamal Rajapaksa or Dinesh Gunawardena be the candidate instead of Gotabaya. The piece on Dinesh was published in the Island of 23/07/18. I cannot reproduce the Island links because the Archives have been deleted but the same piece under different titles appeared elsewhere. They are: ‘Lessons of Mexico’s left populism and the case for Chamal as JO candidate’ and ‘Why not Dinesh Gunawardena?’

Those are some predictive markers on the road that led Gotabaya, the Rajapaksas, the SLPP and the country to the debacle of today—redeemed partially, only by the Aragalaya, the uprising of the people.

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