The Anti-Mangala Brigade should get a life!

Rain and Mangala had headaches. They still have headaches.  Mangle certainly does not deserve them!

The Foreign Ministry has acknowledged that the minister, Mangala Samaraweera, had indeed met with representatives of the Global Tamil Forum (GTF) while in London.  There have been howls emanating from certain quarters over this meeting.  It’s the usual story about compromising national security, betraying the memory of the thousands who laid down their lives to rid the country of the terrorist menace and poking his fingers in things not relevant to his ministry.  YAWN!  

What’s wrong, people?  Don’t you now what’s what about this country?  What’s wrong with some Sinhala people hobnobbing with some Tamil people in the former Mother Country (the new one for the newly initiated is the United States of America).  But let’s get to that later.  First things first.

The first thing is an old idiom.  Old habits die hard.  ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ is another version of this.  To understand why this is ‘ok’ you have to understand the man.  Mangala was always friendly with the LTTE.  From the time he was Mahinda’s campaign manager according to some, and even before if you consider that he was always Chandrika’s blue-eyed boy (and we all know about how Eelamists were mollycoddled by her!).

There are many ways to be their friend.  First and foremost you have to worship that Maoist dictum, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’.  You know who Mangala hates so you can easily understand why he’s friend to GTF types.  And then you can also find ‘friendship’ in commonality of positions taken.  In post-LTTE Sri Lanka where Eelam is a bit too unrealistic, federalism is a fall-back option.  So Eelamists have to wave the devolution flag.  Guess who else waves it!  

But these are trivialities, friends.  

The most important objection to those who object to Mangala downing whisky and sharing a cigar with the Tiger Rump is that we are all beholden to the superior race, we are second-class, second-rate and what have you to Mr and Mrs White.  

Those who are howling in protest need a reality check.  Those of us who know what’s what have realized that being Brown Sahib is best.  That’s a Kolombian article of faith.  That’s how we got to run this country.  That’s why we can look down on the riffraff and have a good laugh when they think this is a sovereign country.  We only have conditional sovereignty and the condition is that Kolombians can lord it over the rest.  

The GTF knows this.  Mangala also knows this.  Why else do they go on bended knees to the Dog House of the White House at the drop of a hat?  Mangala (and of course his de facto papa and mama, Ranil and Chandrika respectively) knows that anyone and everyone who has pride about this country’s past is a moron totally out of touch with reality.  The GTF knows this too.  That’s why they prefer fiction to truth, legends and myths to history.  That’s why they talk of exclusive traditional homelands that never existed.  That’s why they are located outside Sri Lanka.  Smart dudes.  

So there’s nothing wrong with Mangala meeting them.  This is a Kolombian government.  Ranil

is the boss.  He is our boy.  Mangala is also our boy.  They are enlightened individuals.  They know what they are about.