Hitler Had His ” Brown Shirts” While Gotabaya Has The Equivalent In The “Saffron Cohorts”, Its Lay Fellow-travelers And The ” Rana Viru” Myrmidons.
That is our parliamentary crucible; toads, newts, adders and scorpions being stirred in a poisoned chalice and strained through a kurakkan satakaya. The Diyawanna script is written in Medamulana and offered to the nation, along with Atapirikara and jasmine flowers and couched in sonorous, mock-pious statements, delivered from diverse friendly Aramayas, with open approval from a compliant, complicit and adulatory Sangha.
Whilst the most prominent casualty of the unsuccessful no confidence motion was President Sirisena, the outcome has enabled Ranil Wickremesinghe to reunite, perhaps momentarily, a gradually disintegrating UNP and, though he may not acknowledge it publicly, to realistically re-evaluate his own leadership strategy and a possible future direction for himself and the party. He is obtuse but not too dense to learn something, to take away a minor positive, from the near-catastrophe.
Sirisena has emasculated himself politically with his own hand. The conduct of the SLFP parliamentarians in the no-confidence motion affair, reinforced the painful lesson that the local elections should have taught him – but from which he did not obviously learn – that he has little support in the SLFP. The latter no longer exists as a political party but has a flickering, unstable, half-life as a pathetic adjunct to the SLPP which, itself, is not quite a political party but a genie conjured by the Mahinda Rajapaksa magic.
Having done much to both publicly, and privately, undermine the UNP and its leader for many months previously, Sirisena cannot expect any further support from the UNP, except in matters related to the coalition’s governance of the country, if the coalition can last the regular term. And having no dependable political power or support base personally, not even in Polonnaruwa, his home electorate which the SLFP lost, he stands totally isolated.