Foreign Minister
Mangala Samaraweera is well known for gaffes.
One can’t blame him. He’s an
honest politician. With Mangala, what
you see is what you get. If he trips it
is because he has been careless about where he puts his foot. If he puts it in his mouth it is just because
he doesn’t know any better. But in a
PARALLEL UNIVERSE it would be different.
He would be honest and smart.
He did visit such a
parallel universe recently, i.e. just after returning from India. Reflecting on the visit, he smiled. He thought about all the people he had met
and everything he had said and thought to himself, ‘I was good, very
good’. Then he thought about his
meeting with a group of Indian journalists. Then he frowned. Then he started sweating. Then he had to rush to the toilet. And he thought. He read Maithripala Sirisena’s
manifesto. He read the 100 Days’
Program. This is what went through his
tortured mind.
What on earth was I saying?
I must have been out of my mind.
When I spoke about Tamils and reconciliation did I really ask,
rhetorically of course, ‘there are
already lots of proposals made to achieve national reconciliation, such as the
Thimpu Proposals, the Mangala Moonesinghe Proposals, the CBK Proposals, so why go
for a new Parliament Select Committee?’? Did I actually say ‘There’s no need to
reinvent the wheel’?
What was I thinking? All that is old hat. Everyone, including those who voted for
Maithri knows that the vast majority will have no truck with any of those
proposals. They all know how each of
those proposals was a glorified kappam,
something like a weak, cowardly kid paying the school bully to stop himself
from being harassed. Those were all
appease-the-tiger proposals. No one took
them seriously back then and now that the LTTE is out of the equation people
will laugh.
I was right in saying
there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
But we are talking of wheels here.
We are talking of a road called ‘One Way to Eelam’. I am going to get creamed for what I
said. Damn it, I should have kept my big
mouth shut!
I should have stuck to the
script. The script was pretty
clear. It’s all there in Maithri’s
manifesto. Or rather, it’s NOT there in
the manifesto. Nothing about devolution. Nothing about any of these
proposals. Nothing about road maps. Nothing about wheels, inventing or
reinventing them. How on earth did I
forget that this was not about those issues but about getting the system right,
but only about constitutional reform, rule of law, good governance,
transparency and accountability?
Someone is going to throw
the manifesto at me. Someone else will
throw the 100-Days’ Program at me. There
isn’t a single word in either document about this ethnic conflict stuff. There’s only some vague reference to
inter-religious harmony, nothing about Tamils, nothing about minorities,
nothing about grievances and aspirations.
I can’t even say that
there are other things in a country that need to be addressed but are not
referred to in either of these documents because Maithri and Ranil are
studiously avoiding important reforms promised such as changing the system of
proportional representation. It would be
as though we were not serious about Maithree-Paalanaya and the 100 Days’
Program and were interested in other things.
In other words that we took some 6.1 million people for a ride. We can’t afford to let people think that, not
at this stage. But damn me! Damn me!
Damn me! Why on earth couldn’t I keep my
mouth shut?
And with that Mangala Samaraweera took his copies
of the manifesto and the 100 Days’ Program and stuffed them both into the
toilet bowl. He flushed them down the
tube. Then he released a massive sigh of
relief. In a parallel universe, in case
you missed the qualifier.
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