Ranil’s arrest, political ethics and seeing “this administration’s true face”

Stabilised economy, taken handcuffed to remand jail

When Napoleon ordered the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, a Bourbon prince, in 1804, the great French diplomat and thinker Talleyrand reportedly said “it is worse than a crime, it is a blunder”. The phrase became legend. The JVP-NPP will learn the same about its many excesses, including the mean-spirited treatment of Ranil Wickremesinghe. 

Ex-President Ranil Wickremesinghe being transported to remand prison in handcuffs late at night after a protracted hearing on a charge of the misusing public funds to the tune of 16.6 million rupees, was a social shock, a scene the general public cannot unsee. It came as culmination of an unforgettable day, but is also the commencement of a shift in the balance of public opinion and the sociopolitical equilibrium. 

As a critic of Ranil’s role in the Central Bank bond scam, I don’t regard him as ‘a citizen above suspicion’, but it insults my intelligence to believe that Ranil wittingly diddled the state coffers for the princely sum of 16.6 million rupees which his family or a friend could have sent him (even as a loan) in minutes. 

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt once said somewhere that invisible lines are crossed in the sands of time, which when we turn around, have grown into walls behind us. Watching the dramatic proceedings of Ranil’s arrest and remanding on Ada Derana 24 throughout much of the day, one felt that such a line had been crossed by President Anura Dissanayake and his administration. 

Legal, not legitimate

A fundamental conceptual distinction that may be useful to understand the colossal error of judgment the NPP Government had made by permitting the arrest of Wickremesinghe, one of Sri Lanka’s most senior politicians and a former Head of State and Government, stood at the core of an exchange (1983 or 1984) between President JR Jayewardene and my father Mervyn de Silva, published at the time in his Lanka Guardian magazine, and in his weekly ‘Kautilya’ column in the mainstream press. 

In the post-July ‘83 LG interview, JR and Mervyn were debating, among many other things, the decision to hold a Referendum in December 1982 in place of the Parliamentary election of early 1983. “It was entirely legal,” asserted President Jayewardene flatly. “But was it legitimate?” responded Mervyn pointedly. The record shows JR didn’t answer, but there was no doubt he got Mervyn’s point. By contrast, the JVP-NPP leadership is unlikely to comprehend the ‘legality/legitimacy’ distinction. 

Hypocrisy, not radicalism

The moral-ethical crudity of the JVP-NPP’s behaviour towards Ranil on this issue doesn’t even have the justification of a radical (‘Jacobin’) government implementing a progressive program and instituting harsh justice on the old elite Establishment. Anura Dissanayake is implementing with blissful insouciance, precisely Ranil’s agreement with the IMF and agreement-in-principle with the foreign private bondholders. He is also implementing that which Ranil could not: the Indianisation of the North and East including strategically vital Trincomalee. While implementing Ranil’s programs dating from 2001 to 2024, which the JVP and JVP-NPP had forcefully attacked, Anura Dissanayake has presided over the arrest and jailing of Wickremesinghe. So, it is hardly a case of a radical young socialist President playing Robespierre, Saint Just or Jacques Hebert and bringing justice to bear like some avenging angel on the decrepit ruling classes. 

Namal arrives at Ranil’s hearing at 2 p.m., leaves after 10 p.m.

Replying to Saliya Pieris QC who implicitly likened the arrest of Ranil to Julius Caesar’s fateful crossing of the Rubicon, Bimal Rathnayake countered with an assertion on X that the JVP-NPP “crossed the Rubicon to establish a true Republic”. Bimal is seemingly unaware that it was the opposite that happened in History: the end of the Roman Republic. If his point is that the JVP is intending to do otherwise and establish ‘a true republic’, he doesn’t know that forcefully (in Julius Caesar’s case, military force) violating the existing democratic-republican mores and ethos is not the pathway by which a ‘true republic’ gets established. It is the way an existing republic is destroyed and replaced by tyranny. 

The JVP-NPP is doing is exactly the sort of thing that earned several radical experiments in history a bad name and caused a pendulum swing of a ‘restorationist’ character. Avoiding excesses and adhering to moderation, the USA, the first modern republic, avoided such ‘restorationist’ outcomes.

Ethics and overkill

What the NPP Government has done by arresting, manacling and incarcerating a former President on a comparatively flimsy issue is not to display its commitment to social justice, but to advertise the sheer pettiness and fanaticism of its leadership. The question is not whether it was correct for Ranil to do what he did on his London trip. I regard it as having been ill-considered. The main question is one of ethics: given especially his most recent service to the nation, i.e., being the exception who same forward to stabilise the economy, is his punitive treatment proportional to the alleged crime? I daresay he caused the saving of and addition to the state coffers of a great many times more than 16.6 million rupees. 

Justice, legitimacy and ethics involve proportionality and balance—virtues the JVP never had and the NPP hasn’t either. 

Arresting Ranil Wickremesinghe was a human (though not humane) decision. The FCID is not a disembodied AI program operating on an algorithm. If the arrest of a former head of state on a charge which almost automatically carries the penalty of non-bailable incarceration has been carried out without reference to the President, it is dangerously irresponsible, but if it has been greenlighted by the President, then it was counterproductively myopic. 

The decision to proceed with arresting Ranil not after an exhaustive investigation on something substantive such as the Central Bank Bond scam or Batalanda, but on the misuse or abuse of regulations to the tune of Rs 16.6 million, is a political, not merely an administrative decision. That a well-known You Tuber (no masked eccentric) had accurately predicted it, lends credence to that hypothesis.   

Mahinda visits Ranil in jail, condemns arrest

I have been a critic and opponent of Ranil Wickremesinghe for decades, since the Liam Fox agreement (1997), but the way he is being treated on this issue is just plain wrong. It is not only wrong, it is ugly. Regulations are one thing, law is another. A mistake is one thing, a crime, another. The letter of the law is one thing, ‘the spirit of the laws’ (Montesquieu) is another. The latter pertains to culture. 

The JVP-NPP’s ‘political culture’ lacks culture. Like Rohana Wijeweera, the founding father, Anura Dissanayake, Tilvin Silva, Bimal Ratnayake et al don’t and won’t get the significance of Lenin’s insistence in his Last Testament that Stalin should no longer be General-Secretary of the Bolshevik party for a sole, non-ideological reason: personal rudeness. More clearly there’s Fidel Castro’s emphatic insistence that “Moreover, one always has to be gentlemanly, even when one has to fight against wretched people”. (Fidel Castro, ‘Cuba at the Crossroads’, Ocean Press NY, 1996, p 147.) This was not in an interview Fidel gave a western media superstar like Barbara Walters. It was a militant address to the Cuban people marking the 35th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Matanzas, April 16th 1996.

Those weren’t mere sentiments; they were practiced consistently. A team of Cuban specialist doctors restored the eyesight of the almost blind ex-Sergeant of the Bolivian Army, Mario Teran, who on the orders of his superiors sprayed the bullets that killed the wounded captive Che Guevara in October 1967. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/02/cuba.international) 

Any authentic Left must have a higher civilization, culture and code of conduct than its opponents, the Right. But what would the very term “gentlemanly”, leave alone Fidel’s imperative “one always has to be gentlemanly even…” in combat against foes, i.e., without exception, even mean to Anura, Tilvin, Bimal and Nalinda? It is ontologically alien, incomprehensible, unassimilable. 

A civilised democratic Government would have contented itself with putting Ranil on the backfoot in its Parliamentary speeches, following it up with an administrative or legal admonition and perhaps a fine. But as the JVP always did throughout its history—eventually paying the price—it engaged in ‘overkill’. The arrest and remanding of Ranil on this misdemeanour can win the applause only from the JVP-NPP’s savage hardcore supporters, not society at large. 

As I have noted in an earlier column, hardcore JVP-NPP supporters have a consciousness born of ‘ressentiment’ (resentment) as Nietzsche said. I’d add that this resentment-driven consciousness, invoking ‘absolute equality’ (an idea denounced by Marx and Engels) is the class standpoint and perspective of the lumpen-proletariat, even when expressed by an upper-middle class academic or lawyer. 

Opposition convergence against dictatorship

In contradistinction, the consciousness of the broad public, the national-popular consciousness, has a strong streak of natural justice and balance. For the national public, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s mistakes, blunders, and treacherous appeasement of the Tigers, have been paid for by consistent electoral defeat. He was never elected by the people to lead the nation. However, his cumulative national participation and contribution over decades, most importantly his acceptance of the Prime Ministership in May 2022 when Sajith was waffling during the economic collapse, and his partial stabilisation of the economy, cannot be outweighed or eclipsed by 16.6 million rupees.  

In pathos-tinged remarks in Sinhala, recorded on Akila Viraj Kariyawasam’s phone and played later at a media briefing, Ranil Wickremesinghe lucidly concluded that “what has been uncovered today is the true face of the present administration”. 

From here on in, society and public opinion will be more polarised. The public will begin to perceive the “true face” of the Anura administration by its actions towards a predecessor; an ‘Elder’. 

World history, starting with the French revolution, shows that those who resort to the guillotine inevitably become its victims. If the guillotine is non-violent and legal, so too is the inevitable backlash (e.g. Felix Dias Bandaranaike). If kinetic, so too is the blowback. 

Ranil’s political karma

Political karma plays its part in Wickremesinghe’s current situation. He delayed giving Sajith the nomination in 2019 until Gotabaya had begun touring the country as Pohottuwa candidate. This sealed Sajith’s defeat. He missed the magic 50% by only 8%.

Ranil ran for President last year, 2024, failing to defeat either Anura or Sajith, and coming third, having yet again ensured Sajith’s defeat and this time, fatefully, Anura’s victory. If Sajith had been President, Ranil wouldn’t be in jail. 

Sajith convenes all Opposition parties

Sajith has lost twice, but Ranil has failed to be elected to the Presidency by popular vote for several decades now, and his weak health prevents him from running. An SJB-UNP bloc could have Ranil as Chairperson Emeritus, but must have Sajith as leader.

Tolerant, flexible democratic elite 

If the bi-partisan Establishment adopted the same intolerance and fundamentalist invocation of law and justice the JVP-NPP is manifesting (again), the party would still be behind bars. Instead, the old Sri Lankan political elite, adopted a composite policy of resolute military counterattacks, extreme interrogation, politico-electoral pragmatism, de-proscription, socioeconomic reform and humanitarian policies of rehabilitation and release towards the JVP after two insurrections (1971 and 1987-’89). Rohana Wijeweera never had to serve out his long sentence as prescribed by the 1970s Criminal Justice Commission. 

Premadasa declared a unilateral ceasefire and released 1,500 JVP detainees in the middle of a civil war. Today’s JVP survives because Premadasa opted, just as Mrs Bandaranaike before him, for post-conflict rehabilitation. After 1989 Premadasa didn’t re-enforce the proscription. Chandrika permitted unfettered freedom after 1994.

That was the old bipartisan political elite, demonised by the JVP-NPP. Since the JVP is adopting an intransigent if legalistic maximalism towards the bipartisan political elite it electorally bested, it is evident that the old Establishment had greater civility and tolerance than the JVP-NPP. 

Exemplary civility of MR, NR

For the UNP and those with a UNP mindset, nothing and no one was more abhorrent than the Rajapaksas, starting with Mahinda Rajapaksa. The Rajapaksas were the collective ‘Other’. Against the backdrop of the Mulkirigala by-election Mahinda Rajapaksa was framed for murder and jailed (1984) by the UNP Government, at the insistence of Ranil Wickremesinghe who overrode the objections made to JR by Mahinda’s respected UNP opponent Dr. Ranjith Atapattu “Mahinda is no murderer”). Mahinda attended his mother’s funeral in handcuffs, a shirt and sarong, escorted by prison guards. A shade over 20 years later he was president.  

Elected President in 2005, re-elected in 2010, he remained in office till 2015. Not once in that decade (2005-2015), did Mahinda at the zenith of popularity and power, seek vengeance on Ranil or JR’s family. JR’s grandson was a diplomat during MR’s presidency. When the Yahapalanaya government ruled with Ranil as PM (2015-2019), Basil Rajapaksa was locked up for a few months and Namal for longer. When the Rajapaksas returned in 2019, there was no attempt to jail Ranil in retaliation.

Last week, when Ranil was arrested and faced a gruelling 10 hours in the Magistrate’s court, Namal Rajapaksa was there from 2PM and stayed with the crowd till the Black Maria took Ranil Wickremesinghe in handcuffs to the Remand prison. Namal answered every question the thick clump of reporters posed to him in Sinhala and English, with spirited solidarity. 

The next morning, Mahinda Rajapaksa visited Ranil Wickremesinghe in prison and while in his car, gave reporters replies that reminded us why he is the most respected and best-loved political figure on the island-- a high bar that AKD can never aspire to. Even at his most popular, Anura couldn’t reach 50% (winning with 42%).  

The JVP is determined to evict, and Bimal Rathnayake is openly threatening unspecified legal measures against Mahinda Rajapaksa, who as a Human Rights lawyer, travelled to the UN Geneva and lobbied the on behalf of JVP detainees in 1989. 

Mahinda and Namal have shown themselves civilised gentlemen, whose standard of conduct towards political rivals was and is far above both UNP and JVP-NPP. 

Hard landing ahead

Comparative global political analysis shows that a President, PM or party is re-elected for a second term if at least one of two conditions are fulfilled:

1.Economic prosperity or growth in economic wellbeing, with an improvement in equity. However, if there is no growth or inadequate growth (e.g., SLFP-LSSP-CPSL 1970-1977), or high growth is accompanied high or growing inequity, a Government (e.g. UNP 1965-1970). 

2.Strong nationalist/patriotic factor in favour of the Government. 

Neither of these two conditions obtain for the JVP-NPP administration. A government which has moderate growth, high/expanding inequity and poverty, with 50% emigration of graduates and an exodus of professionals and specialists, is never re-elected. It is on its way down—and out. 

There cannot be any patriotic/nationalist factor in favour of an NPP administration which has entered secret pacts with India on matters it attacked in Opposition. 

AKD and the JVP-NPP have already lost most of the votes that came over from the SLPP, SJB and UNP, most of which have gravitated back to their original camps. 

That said, no single Opposition party or leader can combat the grim, dark, ‘true face’ of JVP tyranny and barbarism. Sri Lanka needs its broadest Opposition ever.

(https://dayanjayatilleka.webflow.io/ )