Selective republicanism of socialist regime rules

NO good deed goes unpunished, mused libertarian socialist Oscar Wilde, no doubt while in Reading Gaol and reminiscing about that ironic truism in his own short life.

- By Wijith DeChickera

The pre-election promises spanning political, social and economic dimensions have been seemingly kept on a selective basis

Perhaps some of the stalwarts in governmental ranks share a similar sentiment about the electorate at large today, sensing dissent even beyond the ranks of Tuscany.

Perhaps the NPP regime suspects that for all the lip service its loyalists pay to the powers be, there is an emerging feeling of dissension at the state of the nation a year down the road.

In the main it is because the government of the day has not necessarily done too badly for itself and the people it represents but also that, like the regimes it aspired to replace, it has not done enough for the parts of the polity it does not necessarily represent.

We mean by this paradox that while the National People's Power has kept some of its promises to some of the people, it has arguably not lived up to the full promise and potential of the new broom that was envisaged to not only sweep well but utterly cleanse the Augean stables of local politics.

Is it only the law's delays that keep the erstwhile miscreants at large while justice languishes? Lasantha's and Thajudeen's killers? Ekneligoda's abductors? The perpetrators of massacres other than at Chemmani?

A start has been made, for sure; but the element of self-scrutiny whereby 'judgment must begin in the household of god' seems to be missing!

While the shambles of a republic in ruins after decades of the uni-political culture that ruled the roost would certainly take a comparable or longer time to set right again, the first year of the tyro administration has yielded slow and steady, yet strangely disappointing, results for a hopeful citizenry beyond the pale of the JVP strongholds.

The good deeds