Alien regime where nothing is foreign

DR. NO: despite the then de facto Foreign Minister’s denials last week, the coup machinery pulled the plug on Parliament – perhaps unseating more than two premiers, but rather the prospect of saving face in the international arena

A college professor of mine once told me the definition of an intellectual is ‘one who cannot lie’. But in the heady atmosphere of cerebral activity around a tattered piece of paper called the Constitution, I’m compelled to revisit that ancient wisdom. For it seems that those who could or should know better are economical with the truth, evasive about reality, and eventually deceiving no one but themselves.

My first bone to pick is with what then de facto Foreign Minister Dr. Sarath Amunugama recently said to assuage a sense of guilt, perhaps, that the legitimacy of his Government was shrouded in doubt. I think the jury is still out on the issue. But the last time I checked, both with the supreme law of the land as much as the court of public opinion in our democratic-republican space, the verdict on the ousting of our country’s erstwhile Prime Minister was flagrantly unconstitutional. And the good doctor’s promise to himself and the people that the usurping PM’s “legitimacy” would be finalised with a Parliamentary vote turned out to be a red herring at best or a canard at worst. If the former mandarin and one-time Minister in many governments fondly hoped that the new regime’s “legitimacy” would be proven on the floor, they’ve been dashed to the ground.

The next bone of contention is that Amunugama claims the takeover was simply a matter of timing and expediency. And that the expedition of the Sirisena-Rajapaksa combine into uncharted constitutional territory was just an issue of “who reached for the gun first”. Now I don’t know what pot-boiling westerns the erudite foreign minister had been reading of late. But as far as the House and a discerning public were concerned, there was no hint – not a jot or tittle of suspicion – that the Wickremesinghe administration may have been planning a coup against the incumbent President. And while it is true that the course of arranged marriages don’t always run smooth, it seems as if Ranil and his alleged ‘butterfly brigade’ were minding the store to the exclusion of Maithri’s wishes anyway, right? (At least that’s what Sirisena ‘aiyo’-ed about in public, no!) You can’t eat your cake and have it, Minister.

Debonair

Despite this casus belli, I am not at all surprised that Sarath Amunugama would be the new regime’s point man to defend the de facto Government against accusations of foisting the first successful coup in Sri Lanka’s history. Nothing succeeds like excess. And our debonair de facto Foreign Minister was the perfect foil to the hysteria of MR and the humble-pie eating dissembling of MR. Charming, eloquent, charismatic, educated – do I damn him with not-so-faint praise – he was the best defender of the faith to vouchsafe the regime against bribing MPs to obtain support in Parliament and delaying a vote until the government-in-waiting had the majority it needed. As it turns out it didn’t. And an increasingly spastic President has pulled the rug from out of the House’s back door. But don’t wait up for an apology from the Minister to whom nothing was foreign – he’s probably safe in the arms of Morpheus, sleeping the sleep of the just. As much as his President goes beddy-bye with Somnos, Hypnos, et al. I’m sure Dr. Amunugama – a classics scholar to top off his escutcheon – gets the allusions?

Although I am not sure if the one-time competent authority cum censor under another authoritarian regime has fudged his curriculum vitae a bit at least as regards his reading. Because in accusing the limp, late, lame-duck, little-lamented leader of the UNP, Amunugama betrays a taste for Lucky Luke rather than Lucretius. I quote: “They would have done absolutely the same,” he said, referring to ousted Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his supporters, who were [at that time] operating a parallel Government a mile away. “They are just the guys who have not been fast on the draw.” It’s as close as the learned reader of Machiavelli will come to admitting that the Maithripala-Mahinda heist of the people’s will and mandate of 2015 pulled a fast one.

Cavalier

Much of what Amunugama reads at night smacks of cowboy stuff. He’s alleged that the UNP was working to shanghai several MPs to garner a majority and oust its coalition partner. What he doesn’t deign to reveal is how the paltry minority of the Rajapaksa camp would have been bolstered to bridge the gap between 113+ and Western fiction. Was it love that made the frogs leap or money that made the monkeys jump, Minister? Would it have been a bridge too far for even deep-pocketed sponsors of the coup, which ultimately made the President pull the plug? Time won’t tell… it’s academic now – and we must all move on back to the barricades until it’s time to get those ballot boxes out again.

But not before we roast you a little more over your professional sophistry. Is it true that you downplayed the controversy over Mahinda’s appointment, claiming that he had only been ‘nominated’ to be Prime Minister until he was approved by the legislature? Why was it necessary to do so at all, when a year or so would have shown the nation at large the country’s sentiment about which Premier was more legitimate? Was it not imprudent to have drawn first and triggered off a Mexican standoff that has cost the state much in terms of image, productivity, getting on with governance, opportunity cost and currency in every sense? Who’s seeing these showdowns as romantic shootouts at OK Corral other than the bad and the ugly?

Romantic

For one, I suspect former Speaker Karu Jayasuriya had some similar glamorous notion about being a gunslinger. First, he vacillated. Then, he procrastinated. And finally, when he did speak up, which ironically speakers are not always good at doing, it was ‘too little too late’ for democratic-republicanism. Or perhaps it was the trigger that prompted the President’s knee-jerk reflex in dissolving Parliament. At least Amunugama was standing on firm ground there, pointing out that under the Constitution, the Speaker had no powers to convene the House. “Fixing a date for parliament to convene is the sole prerogative of the president,” fumed the Foreign Minister, forgetting – or omitting to mention – that Plan A was always to ‘shoot first’ and ask questions (of the people, not the House) later. At any rate, at the time of going to press, it was Court that was being asked the question.

Last but by no means least, a quick look at Amunugama’s putative foreign policy. The de facto FM said Colombo will not side with either Beijing or New Delhi, but benefit from alliances with both China and India. “We don’t lean towards anybody. We are equidistant from India and China,” he said. The FM is reported to have added: “There is no benefit to Sri Lanka by tilting to one side or the other.” And Socrates says a well-balanced philosopher is one who has a chip on both shoulders.

There is, I think, a large and growing consensus that under a putative Rajapaksa regime, Sri Lanka will flounder in strange currents. Over-obsessed by a glorious past, aloof from a post-Brexit EU, too attached to an empty SAARC and undervaluing any strategic alliance with an India worrying about how the neighbourhood is going south – or east – these days. And Amunugama among others has been at pains to underline the blatant lie that Hambantota is to be only a commercial port (“by no means is it a military port”). One hopes he, we and Ranil  – ironically Wickremesinghe was in the same boat at the Oxford Union of late, and since 2001-4 to boot – don’t have to eat our words and taste Chinese chilli paste in the dim sum. But as usual, our would-be diplomat had reassuring answers: “I don’t think that the Chinese government is giving money [to the coup].” But we don’t pay your salary to lie at home to your countrymen. No, minister.

Erudite

With that said, one must give the devil his due. I quote Daily FT: “Asked about whether Rajapaksa would favour China over traditional allies, the Minister says: ‘That is a wrong perception. We are friends of everybody. Why should you have a single diet when you have a smorgasbord?’” This is the cosmopolitan in him coming through. The thing is: I’ve heard many gems from Amunugama’s lips. The likes of which – “Sri Lanka is not the only pretty girl on the beach” (about tourism) – since the early 2000s have made me wary of eloquent cowboy diplomacy. Sorry to say it’s the type of thing – defending the indefensible – that made Sri Lanka go from No. 1 on Lonely Planet’s list of lovely places to be in 2018… to God knows where next year. Another Bali? Maybe not. Another Burma? Possibly. The untutored mind boggles.

And on recondite matters like transitional justice, our ministering angel to whom nothing is foreign leaves me cold and many of my fellow countrymen chilled to the marrow, no doubt. He said, about Sri Lanka’s war debt to its own citizens and the prospect of healing nationwide wounds through meaningful and sustainable reconciliation: “Our idea would be to put this all behind us. Now 10 years have gone. We can’t go on and on and on. In a war, there are war situations.” Take me away to the gas-chambers now, Herr Eichmann! I don’t want to hear you say later: “After all, we were only following orders.”

Despite that, it is clear – defender of the ruthless autocracy though he appears – he’s not quite the insider his most recent interview shows him to be. In it, he envisaged Mahinda serving for at least a year before any election is called, even though the country looked set to be heading for such an outcome at the time… a prognostication proven right by last Friday’s rug-pull.

Sanguine

However sanguine then, Amunugama and the Rajapaksa cohorts were also disestablished despite their avowals that Mahinda had sufficient support to get that 113+ majority. According to the interview, the then de facto FM was “supremely confident” that by 15 November, MR would be the official Prime Minister with the popular backing. By hook or by crook, there was supreme confidence that the de facto PM would lie down in his Procrustean bed with a craftily hacked and pastiched majority, which everyone on that platform near Parliament was so sure about. “He has, wait and see,” quoth he. Well, QED.

I’m sorry (well, I lie; but only a little: like the subject of my thesis today) if all of this sounds a tad ad hominem. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because it is personal. And the more intimately the intelligent masses were to consider how their free space is being encroached on, the more ad they’d hominem!

As for the other intellectuals who lie to the nation and deceive themselves into the bargain, their name is legion. One is a diplomat to the barren wastes of Siberia who seems to have neglected the fact that the Cold War has been over for some time now. The other is another Oxford don who – as a fellow constitutional expert of his put it – “very clever but not too intelligent”. Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against these two gentlemen and the topic of my column today. But I take it badly when those who cannot lie go against their better nature to bamboozle the reading public and compromise the national interest as a majority of Sri Lankans today see it. Doubt it? Just ask them… oh wait, your President has already suggested we do – let us await that result (rather than the rashly envisaged referendum) – with barely baited breath.

As for ad hominem critiques of the good, the bad and the ugly – just watch this space, doc.    

(Journalist | Editor-at-large of LMD | Writer #SpeakingTruthToPower)