A mission tainted with hypocrisy

Minister Bimal Rathnayake has said Ranil Wickremesinghe should have been arrested about four decades ago over the Batalanda torture chamber, the 1983 racial violence, etc.

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The former has also flayed the latter for the Treasury bond scams (2015).

It is now up to the judiciary to scrutinise charges against Wickremesinghe, arrested and remanded for alleged misuse of state funds, and determine whether he is guilty or not. Those who are keen to have corruption and misuse/abuse of state funds eliminated rejoice when politicians and state officials are prosecuted for such offences and understandably so.

Their concerns should be appreciated and their call for stringent action against the corrupt heeded. But the question is whether the JVP/NPP has any moral right to condemn others for causing losses to the state coffers.

Minister Rathnayake may not have realised that it was self-defeating for him to refer to what happened 40 years or so ago. He has unwittingly reminded the public of the JVP's wanton destruction of state assets in the late 1980s. The JVP burnt 553 SLTB buses, 15 SLTB depots and workshops, 16 trains, 24 railway stations, and countless transformers and pylons belonging to the CEB, according to media reports published during that period. The human cost of the JVP's mindless terror and the UNP's savage counterterror was incalculable.