Weligama watershed, leftist legacy and tomorrow’s post- JVP Lankan left

SRI Lanka has witnessed many assassinations of elected political representatives-- elected executives and legislators-- but apart from that of Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike in 1959, they were during the two civil wars North and South, and the killings were by armed anti-state organizations the LTTE and the JVP.

- By Dr.Dayan Jayatilleka

The murder of Lasantha Wickramasekara, the elected Chairperson of Weligama Pradeshiya Sabha, is different. It didn’t take place in the context of a civil war. And, unlike the sporadic murders of municipal councillors (Wickramasekara was a Chairman) over decades, it took place while he was discharging his duties as an elected legislator, not while he was off-duty in a private locale.

Speaking in Parliament within hours of the shooting, the Minister of Public Security Ananda Wijepala labelled the victim as a gangster and the killing as an inter-gang shooting. This alacrity contrasted with the statement of a French Minister who refused to say anything about the perpetrators of the Louvre robbery on the public record because it had only been three days (at that time) since the crime, and investigations needed more time for a clear picture to emerge.

In Weligama, for the first time, an alleged gangster was killed when he was functioning in his capacity as an elected politician, a chairperson of a representative institution, and in broad daylight, with his staff and public in proximity on the premises. It is as if the killers did not want to murder Lasantha Wickramasekara, so-called gangster, but rather to murder Lasantha Wickramasekara the Chairman of the Weligama Pradeshiya Sabha.

Lasantha was a member of the Samagi Jana Balavegaya, the main parliamentary Opposition, which has never been tainted by association with gangsterism and is simply not a credible target for a gangland killing.

However, the SJB does have a feature which could make it a target of ex-military mercenaries and/ or gangster triggermen. It has been winning or heading winning coalitions at a string of recently held Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society elections, as well as a clutch of earlier-held Pradeshiya Sabha elections. NPP representation on most of those recently-elected MPCS Executive Boards has been zero.