Sophistry, lineage, and class war

When I read Professor G.L. Peiris's commentary on the Supreme Court determination on the 22nd Amendment in the Daily FT, I couldn’t help but recall Antonio Gramsci’s core dictum on elite class power and his theory of cultural hegemony.

Gramsci asserted that a ruling class maintains power primarily by winning the active consent of society rather than relying solely on physical force or coercion.

On reading it, I sent a WhatsApp text to Emeritus Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda simply querying: Have you read Professor G.L. Pieris in the Daily FT on the SC determination on the 22nd Amendment?

I received his response.  Professor Uyangoda: I read it. It is a restatement of positions held by The BASL, Sumanthiran et Al. GL lives in his own world, eyes closed and memory erased. It is a pity that AKD could not meet Professor Wade at Oxford!    

Professor Uyangoda’s revealing observation is the point of departure for this short essay. This is about the cultural hegemony that still has a grip on the class that stayed home at the last Parliamentary election.  A fact overlooked by cocky types in the NPP!

Prof. G.L. Peiris’s commentary in the Daily FT of 29 September on the Supreme Court’s determination regarding the 22nd Amendment (22A) is a supremely hypocritical exercise in legal charlatanry.

Dressed in the lofty vocabulary of “objective criteria” and “natural justice,” the critique is less an objective evaluation of law and more a symptom of a deeper, existential panic within our traditional political elite.

“I do not think President AKD or any member of the current NPP Government has ever stepped on the manicured lawns of Oxford or Cambridge, and it is therefore highly unlikely that any of them have heard of Professor Wade, whose dictum Prof. G.L. Peiris suddenly seems eager to recall.

This is a class war fought under the guise of procedural purity—a tug-of-war between the elite class and the obscure citizenry who have finally found a voice in the NPP.”

It is a raw manifestation of elite disdain for the ‘subaltern’ now tentatively in command. I use tentatively deliberately because I support AKD’s governance mechanics, but I wish he is more Presidential and more realistic in framing his rhetoric at his two years anniversary rallies.  

It is also fundamentally a matter of genealogy and power. Prof. Peiris is the son-in-law of Thomas Amarasuriya OBE, the elite planter who owned vast tracts of Southern Province plantations and served as the

 President of the Senate under the Soulbury Constitution.

Today, decades later, that same lineage clings to its command of the legal establishment, with Thomas Amarasuriya’s grandson, Rajeev Amarasuriya, sitting as the President of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL).

All said and done GL is the uncle of BASL!  

For generations, this interlinked network of wealth and prestige has viewed the law, the courts, and the State as their exclusive ancestral estate.

When stripped of its academic pretensions, Prof. Peiris’s thesis reveals a profound discomfort with the democratic mandate handed to a Government born outside these elite social circles.

Specifically, Prof. Peiris takes issue with the five-judge bench’s rejection of a “Full Court” hearing and their dismissal of the petitioner’s bias arguments regarding judicial retirement ages.

His weaponisation of the case Porter v Magill to construct a phantom “legislative bribe” is a textbook symptom of his patrician anxiety.

I am no lawyer. I don’t know of any Porter or any Magil. But I have read Tom Sharpe’s funny books.

Citing the Porter standard to imply the apex judiciary is compromised by a routine administrative policy reads like a bitter, inverse parody of Sharpe’s satirical novel Porterhouse Blue.

In Tom Sharpe’s walled academic world, the ultimate horror to the ruling class is when the Head Porter—the working-class custodian—unthinkingly ascends to become the Master of the College.

To the Amarasuriya-Peiris dynasty, the NPP Government represents exactly that: the sudden, terrifying arrival of the political “porter” into the masters’ chambers of State power.

Prof. Peiris’s sudden, selective conversion to this new ‘church’ of institutional checks and balances would be amusing if it weren’t so flagrantly hypocritical.

Where was this profound anxiety about “natural justice” and “public perception” in 2010, when he acted as the chief legal architect and defender of the 18th Amendment?

Back then, he enthusiastically backed a regime that wanted to remove the two-term limit so Mahinda Rajapaksa could rule indefinitely.

He saw no threat to democracy when the independent Constitutional Council was butchered and replaced with a toothless Parliamentary Council, granting the executive unchecked, absolute control to unilaterally appoint the Chief Justice and Supreme Court judges.

Even after those term limits were restored, Prof. Peiris put his legal reputation on the line to invent absurd loopholes for his political masters.

In August 2018, as Chairman of the SLPP, he publicly advanced a highly contorted legal theory, arguing that because the 19th Amendment was not explicitly retrospective, Mahinda Rajapaksa was legally eligible to contest for the Presidency a fourth time!  

Following the Rajapaksa electoral victories in 2019 and 2020, Peiris was again the loudest advocate for tearing down independent commissions, branding them “political tools” while laying the legal groundwork for the 20th Amendment to strip away judicial oversight yet again.

Professor G.L. Peiris has historically had no qualms about treating the supreme law of the land as an elastic band meant to serve the political ambitions of a single dynasty.

To see him now pretend to be a purist on “popular sovereignty” and “institutional independence” over a uniform administrative policy to clear case backlogs is the height of hypocrisy.

The record is clear: when the old guard twists the Constitution to secure dynastic longevity or erase judicial independence, Prof. Peiris calls it “Statecraft.”

But when a newly elected Government attempts transparent, system-wide institutional reforms through established constitutional channels, the gatekeepers of the old status quo cry foul.

His critique isn’t a defence of the law; it is the panic of a legal professorial mercenary who realises the rules are no longer being written for his masters.