Anura’s crooked dance floor and why Harini is no answer

A sardonic Sinhala saying has it that "when you can’t dance, you say the floor is crooked". President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has found a crooked dance floor to blame for his misplaced, inadequate and downright bad policies. He calls it a 'shadow system':

- By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

"...while our country may appear peaceful on the surface, a hidden shadow system continues to operate beneath....This shadow system has long been protected by political authorities. It also includes certain state officials, illegally armed individuals, and even some members of the media.

Therefore, we are confronting a highly organised shadow system. I assure the people of this country that this shadow system will be dismantled...Unless this shadow system is broken, the country will not be able to move even an inch forward..." (https://www.sundaytimes.lk/250608/columns/govt-s-anti-corruption-drive-on-top-gear-600903.html)

AKD must tell us when this shadow system came into being, how it grew to be so powerful and responsible for so great a role as blocking the country’s ability “to move even an inch forward”.

If the shadow system grew strongest during Mahinda Rajapaksa’s two terms, how then to explain that at an annual international conference (at which I was a paper presenter) Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence noted that in Mahinda’s postwar second term Sri Lanka was clocking the second highest growth-rate --below only China-- in Asia, which had the highest growth-rate in the world?

The paranoid search for enemies and saboteurs within began with an SLFP government’s abolition of the Ceylon Civil Service (much admired by Lee Kuan Yew), and its substitution by a politically dominated administrative service. From the penalisation of ethnolinguistic and religious minorities (‘Catholic Action’) by Sinhala nationalist governments, to the scapegoating of leftists—chiefly the JVP—for July 1983 by the rightist Government of the day, the diversionary witch-hunt of saboteurs within, instead of a search for correct policies, has blighted the country’s forward movement far more than any ‘shadow system’ has.

Citizenry assigned ‘third party’ status