First appearance before High Posts Committee

Given subsequent developments and the progressive estrangements that have taken place over a period of time, in retrospect, one feels there was a serious insufficiency in the kind and quality of the visits to Jaffna and the North, by those from the South of the country, particularly from the Governmental entities in the South.

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Even for us in the Ministry of Food and Cooperatives, this proved to be the only organized visit during a fairly lengthy period of time. The post 1983 situation made interaction more difficult.

The sorry situation we now find ourselves in is due to a failure of policy, or perhaps more accurately due to the lack of a policy by successive governments. The divisiveness and the greed for power involved in Sri Lanka's politics, both North and South, were not fallow ground for the commitment, the stamina, the patience and the objectivity required for the formulation of sound policy. The focus was on the next election whether Local, General, later Provincial, Presidential, or even Cooperative, and how to achieve power at these, progressively, at any cost. It is extremely difficult, if not almost impossible to breed sound policy from such sterile soil. It was not due to nothing that an intelligent and discerning Asian statesman chose some years ago to describe or categorize a Sri Lankan election as "An auction to distribute nonexistent resources.

The High Posts Committee of Parliament