By

C.A.Chandraprema

It was perhaps supremely fitting that we ended 2016 with a scandal involving a key cabinet minister and the Angoda mental hospital. This scandal became public for the first time due to a video posted on SlVlog.com by journalist Darshana Handungoda who explained the whole sordid episode in great detail with a powerful cabinet minister, his valet who got involved with a beautiful Korean woman, ending up with six electric shocks administered to the unfortunate valet’s head in the Angoda mental hospital. This video can be viewed on the following link – https://youtu.be/RLC7YGJb1Oo. We watched it and then forgot about it because the story was too Hollywood-like to believe. Such things can’t happen in real life was what we thought. Then last Thursday, the aggrieved valet appeared in person at a press conference with an affidavit attested by Commissioner of Oaths Mahanama Dissanayake dated 15 December 2016.

What the valet said at that press conference can be viewed on the following link https://youtu.be/Bzzjyw9KHrM. According to the contents of his affidavit, the name of this aggrieved valet is Harshsa Bandara Thilakasiri. He claimed to be an executive chef by profession who had got involved with the Anti-terrorism movement in the 1990s, and worked with Minister Champika Ranawaka for the past 16 years. He had been on Ranawaka’s ministerial personal staff for the past ten years in all the ministries that he had held from 2007 up to now. He had also been the executive chef of Water’s Edge hotel (no less) and the menial work he did for Ranawaka was obviously due to his allegiance to the cause. His task had been that of a personal valet, cooking for Ranawaka, washing and iroing his clothes and even massaging the Hon. Minister!

The long and short of the story is that this executive chef turned valet who also apparently speaks Korean got involved with an attractive Korean lady and a certain ministerial one had wanted to have fun with this lady which request the valet had refused and this led to a whole chain of events resulting in the valet falling out with the minister, leaving his service and then being literally abducted by the minister’s security guards and henchmen and taken to the Angoda mental hospital where he had been given electric shock treatment.

The fact that a minister and his valet fell out over a woman is not unusual – men do quarrel over women and even if a minister in heat tried to pressurize his employee to yield up his girlfriend to him and actually came to blows over the lady, that too is not unusual. But what is unusual is what is said to have gone on at the Angoda mental hospital. This Harshsa Bandara Thilakasiri in his affidavit claims to have been taken to the Angoda mental hospital on 10 September 2016 by a group comprising of a police officer called SI Herath, two other police officers, one Chandana Ranasinghe who is supposed to be a working director of the UDA and one Pradeep Alwis described as a driver of Champika Ranawaka. Tilakasiri says that he was kept in Ward No: 5 bearing Ticket No 5521/16 and that on the day he was warded, no patient in his ward had been permitted to receive visitors.

The next day, when his brother Lankendra Tilakasiri and a journalist by the name of Shantha Wijesuriya had arrived at the hospital they had not been allowed to see him. From the third day onwards, Tilakasiri claims to have been given electric shocks as treatment. The consultant psychiatrist treating him has been named in the affidavit as Dr Jayan Mendis. Tilakasiri claims that when he had asked this doctor to allow him to go home, the latter had refused to allow him to leave as he was not yet ‘cured’. Tilaksiri says that though the patient profile states that he had a history of mental disturbance twenty years ago and once again in 2013, that is false. If there is any truth at all in what Tilakasiri claims to have gone on at the Angoda mental hospital, this is the worst medical scandal to ever to come to light in this country.

Tilakasiri’s affidavit reads like a Hollywood film script with evil doctors waiting to do the bidding of conspiratorial politicians and declare perfectly same people to be insane. We have read of perfectly sane people being confined to lunatic asylums by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. Hollywood has also produced some blockbusters including a fairly recent one starring Leonardo di Caprio where you have evil mental hospital administrators who seem only too willing to keep sane people in captivity and treat them for mental illnesses they don’t have. After this story hit the fan last week members of the medical profession were reeling in shock that such a thing could take place in real life in this country. Of course we have to be careful in this because just because someone says something even in a sworn affidavit it does not mean the story is true. We have a long history of false affidavits especially in relation to people in politics.

The Sri Lanka Medical Council should look into this matter very seriously and ascertain 1) whether an individual called Harsha Bandara Tilakasiri was admitted to the Angoda mental hospital, 2) who had brought this individual to be admitted 3) if those accompanying him were not his next of kin, who had accepted the patient 4) the psychiatrist who had first examined the supposed patient and decided that he was indeed mentally ill 5) whether the hospital inquired from the patient or tried to get the police to trace his next of kin before administering advanced treatment like electric shocks etc etc.

Courtesy:Sunday Island