Mr. Prime Minister, how would you like history to judge you?

Dear Mr. Prime Minister, 

‘Ranil rips up the press!’ is the headline in the Daily FT of 28 January. I could not resist writing in this regard to you although I do not have a hope in hell that you will even bother to read this because I am not personally known to you, and I am not Royalist, still, as one of the voters who risked life and limb one year ago by voting you in while simultaneously giving the boot to a despot, despite many personal doubts about your ability to stay the course based on your past performance,  I thought I must write to you even if to get a few matters off my chest.

Well done for ripping off the press. They, like everyone else, need to be given a tongue lashing every now and then to remind everybody that you are capable of being a boss. But what must necessarily follow is where you fall short, abysmally. You must win them over. In terms of managing human beings, you would do well to take many lessons from the self-appointed King who was dethroned and who you say is now setting up the press – and others – in an effort to come back. He did bark but could and would also embrace and hug anybody and everybody in an effort to win them over as personal buddies. 

You on the other hand don’t even look a Sri Lankan in the eye even when you are shaking hands. Your mass appeal is zero and it is much easier to dislike you as a pro-Western, pro-Christian, elitist, Colomba hathey sudu mahaththaya (which is the image you portray without any prodding by anyone) than to like you as a man of the soil, who at this  moment, and sadly for this nation, seems to be the only person who has the integrity and the political skills to take the country out of the morass that successive ‘leaders’ have led it into, over the past 60 years.

To do so effectively and quickly, because time is running out fast as you well know and yesterday’s ripping off was obviously a sign of the pressure build-up which all of can see and feel, you need to come down from the stratosphere and talk and walk with the common man.  By and large the voter base that catapulted the Yahapalanaya Government into power is still intact judging by interactions on social media, talk shows, etc., but the frustration over the inaction with regard to thieves and plunderers of the previous regime who bled this country into almost economic death-throes, and the lack of visible progress with regard to development projects which will boost the common man’s morale and ego, gives rise to situations such as the deplorable ones in Embilipitiya and Homagama, which are then spun every which way, depending on who is doing the spinning. 

Sri Lankans have demonstrated time and again, as recently very movingly commented upon by an UN Human Rights Officer who leaves Sri Lanka after some years here to go on to New York, that we are a resilient, weather-beaten, peace-loving, law-abiding people who want the best in terms of good governance and economic prosperity for our country. That was what last January’s and last August’s mandates were about. Now, almost an year down the road, it is only natural that the people whose expectations are so high and who really cannot grasp the extents to which our social fabric, societal systems, governance mechanisms and administrative institutions have been destroyed from within by a despotic and megalomaniac regime, and which destruction cannot be repaired and rectified in an year or two, are beginning to grumble, loudly.

And there is that lot to whom power was life itself, with their ears to the ground, poised and positioned to unleash their hounds with brazen audacity and shockingly uncivilised conduct to cause destruction and impediments to good governance, as evidenced by the Homagama incident. From now on they will continue to snap at your heels unless and until your government firmly and decisively stops it.

For all this Mr. Prime Minister, what the people need to see is a Prime Minister who is far more in control, who rips, flares, shines and shimmers on our skyline on a daily basis, who is decisive and willing to acknowledge mistakes even if it means taking key portfolios and other vital positions away from persons who have amply demonstrated their pathetic inability to carry such heavy responsibilities and appoint people who are obviously suitable and are in your full range of vision, who does not wait to react to situations until things boil over but responds to them as soon as he sees them simmering, and above all, a Prime Minister who is able to win friend and influence people not by rubbing shoulders and seeing eye to eye to with Toms, Dicks and Harrys, but with the Punchi Bandas, Periya Samys and Mohideens on our streets and in our villages. 

Good luck Mr. Prime Minister. This is your last opportunity to determinedly and forcefully rise above it all, be a statesman and build, out of the debris that the selfish and the blood-thirsty left around us, a Sri Lanka which will hold its own on the world stage.    

Mr. Prime Minister, how would you like history to judge you? As the one who let it happen (which is what you are doing now), the one who made it happen (which is what you should be doing) or the one who wonders: what happened?”

Mahendra Fernando

Sri Lanka