Anura, Oxygen and Snakes

Q: So who gave Ranil oxygen, Anura?  A: මට මතක නැහැ නෙ! 

JVP Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake is taking pot shots at his UNP counterpart Ranil Wickremesinghe.  At least in public, let us add.  Quoting Wickremesinghe, who said that his Prime Ministerial oxygen would run out on April 23 (i.e. when the ‘100 Days’ of the reform agenda expired), Dissanayake concludes that the UNP leader is now surviving on ‘hora oxygen’ (rogue oxygen).  

He has a point.  It was an election promise made by Maithripala Sirisena.  There were many promises however and there is nothing to say that the by-the-100th-day part of it should be privileged.  The 19th Amendment was passed after a lot of huffing and puffing.  It did clip some of the president’s powers and that’s good.  The down side is that it came up with a Constitutional Council that’s only a tad different from a parliamentary select committee.  The government is now labouring to birth the 20th.  It’s long overdue.  Pertinent however is the fact that there is no urgency shown by the people.  They are willing to wait.  Anura obviously is impatient.  Why?

It’s simple.  The JVP stands to lose big time if the proportional representation system is reformed.  It is silly therefore for him to complain about delays in a self-righteous kind of manner when he is absolutely disinterested in promised reform.  

But let’s consider his oxygen analogy.  It wasn’t too long ago that Anura and Ranil shared space on the same political stage.  They were virtually singing each other’s praises.  Indeed, considering the fact that Ranil Wickremesinghe in endorsing Sirisena’s candidacy acknowledged his (Ranil’s) inability to defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa, we have to conclude that Anura and the JVP (among others, including Patali Champika Ranawaka, Ven Athureliye Rathana and the JHU) were sending lorry loads of oxygen cylinders to Ranil.  It is thanks to them that Ranil became Prime Minister.  

Anura went out of his way to ensure that Ranil continues to breathe (politically) when he uncritically supported the UNP-helping version of the 19th Amendment that Ranil tried to bulldoze through Parliament.  What he did in fact was to try and ensure a continuous oxygen supply to the party which (ironically) massacred the JVP.  

This is why we had to interject the ‘at least in public’ qualifier above.  Anura has behaved in the last 6-8 months or so as a virtual water-boy for Wickremesinghe and the UNP.  If ‘reform’ was what prompted him to align with what he himself and his party dubs as the ‘Far Right’ and if reform is the last thing on his mind (going by his recently discovered angst about elections) then we cannot conclude otherwise.  

We might have gone with that interesting Sinhala saying about thrusting a snake under the sarong and then wailing ‘I was bitten!’ except that Anura’s complaint doesn’t sound too convincing.  It’s almost as though he’s enjoying being nibbled.  We ask him, ‘who took the oxygen cylinders to Sirikoha?’  We ask him, ‘who placed the oxygen mask on Ranil’s face?’   We ask him, ‘do you know the meaning of the word “hypocrite”?’