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

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”.

- By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

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.

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.