{"id":66920,"date":"2019-12-29T18:29:03","date_gmt":"2019-12-29T23:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=66920"},"modified":"2019-12-29T18:29:03","modified_gmt":"2019-12-29T23:29:03","slug":"the-man-most-responsible-for-jathika-hela-urumaya-leader-champika-ranawakas-arrest-is-patali-champika-ranawaka-himself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=66920","title":{"rendered":"The man most Responsible for Jathika Hela Urumaya Leader Champika Ranawaka\u2019s Arrest is Patali Champika Ranawaka Himself"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy<\/p>\n

Uditha Devapriya<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a country dominated by Cartesian thinking, it\u2019s probably not surprising that a man vilified for the better part of a decade as a Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist, traditionalist, warmonger and opportunist should be celebrated as a martyr today. I remember coming across a particularly unsavoury (and no doubt defamatory) article on the man on an anti-Rajapaksa website before he decided to cross over to the side that the website was tacitly supporting at the time. <\/p>\n

I am of course talking about Patali Champika Ranawaka whose rise to national (and nationalist) prominence over the decades has been due to a combination of coincidence and perseverance. The UNP, hardly known for its sympathy towards the party Champika led before, the Hela Urumaya, now supports the latter\u2019s claim that it was he, not the government of the day, which facilitated the winning of the war. To lend support to such a claim is to lend support to the party and to the ideology it espouses, at least implicitly. <\/p>\n

Why do I say that? Because much of that ideology is built today on the view (some would say myth) that Jathika Hela Urumaya spearheaded the war campaign. Barring this, the JHU has precious little with which it can oil its wheels and spokes. Whether or not one agrees with their take on who should get the greater credit for what happened in 2009, one must concede that as far as propaganda goes this remains their rallying point. <\/p>\n

The question as to who really won the war in that sense will remains, for a long time, unresolved, and not even history books will apportion credit fairly and properly. The problem for the JHU is not that it can\u2019t claim any credit; indeed, I would be the first to say that it deserves greater credit than those whom party stalwarts refer to as pseudo-patriots. We know who the latter are. <\/p>\n

The problem is that the Hela Urumaya\u2019s claim to credibility and sincerity can\u2019t be squared with its transformation after 2014. Since the Hela Urumaya of today, for better or worse, is not only led but also embodied by Champika Ranawaka, the problem with the party is more or less the problem with the man leading it. And the problem with Ranawaka is that most of the principles he now claims to stand for are at variance with the political camp he has chosen to side with. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I do not say the JHU is alone in committing this cardinal sin; others from far more significant political outfits have chosen to go down the path of expedience, sacrificing everything for a handful of silver. But JHU\u2019s dilemma has been particularly compounded by the political landscape against which the Champika Ranawaka arrest on the one hand and tensions between Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa in the UNP on the other are playing out. To put it simply and succinctly, everything\u2019s in a mess. <\/p>\n

Champika Ranawaka\u2019s arrest should never have happened. <\/p>\n

The case can be made that he and Rajitha Senaratne are probably the most reviled political figures (outside the Royalist Brigade of the UNP) here, but that by no stretch of the imagination will ever be casus belli for their arrest, even if the judiciary is handing down the warrant. The last thing the government needs now is a martyr for the opposition, though he happens to be Champika or Rajitha. <\/p>\n

The UNP is probably in deeper waters than in 1994, which is why this is the sort of incident it can use to embarrass the government; arresting Champika smacks of political revenge and no excuse trotted out by spokespersons can conceal the reality of it being so. In that sense, I am not in support of it: unless compelling evidence are brought out into the open and proved, I will see in it an act of vengeance not only unnecessary but also uncalled for. It\u2019s the last thing we need now, especially after the Swiss Embassy fiasco. <\/p>\n

Years ago, an academic, in an essay on nationalist politics in Sri Lanka, implied that the JHU was responsible for the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005. This is, of course, an enticing claim to make, but it\u2019s preposterous and, to say the very least, simplistic: the JHU never unconditionally supported Rajapaksa and in any case, the campaign against the war led by the UNP and the Chandrika-ist section of the SLFP was enough to convince a majority within the party itself, who had been axed after Chandrika\u2019s takeover of the party in the early 1990s and its transformation into an outfit for anti-war brigades and for federalism, to select the populist from the South over a more cosmopolitan figure. <\/p>\n

On the other hand, there\u2019s no denying that the JHU laid the groundwork for Rajapaksa. To identify how they did this, it is instructive to return to the days of Soma Thera\u2019s passing away and funeral and understand what led to the rise of the JHU itself. Since I\u2019ve more tried to chart its history in this column before, I won\u2019t dwell on it again, except to say that without the JHU, the SLFP would have found it not a little difficult to mobilise sections of the petty bourgeoisie against the UNP. <\/p>\n

Today, the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist petty bourgeoisie are decidedly with Rajapaksa \u2013 Not the UNP, nor the SLFP and certainly not the JHU. Ergo, it is not with Champika Ranawaka. If there\u2019s one thing about nationalist politics in Sri Lanka we don\u2019t seem to have learnt, it\u2019s that no party in the periphery, no matter how much nationalist rhetoric it musters, can equal the standing of a major party. Malinda Seneviratne observed on more than one occasion that the likes of Rathana Thera (and Champika himself, I believe) better served their cause outside Parliament; he not unjustifiably lamented their Trotskyite practice of seeing everything in terms of black and white, a dichotomy which may have helped people to distinguish between the good guys (the UPFA plus breakaway factions of minority parties) and the bad guys (the UNP plus established minority parties), but which has only reinforced the belief that everyone against Rajapaksa are, by default, supporters of separatism. <\/p>\n

That Trotskyite practice seems to have worked against the JHU today. It cannot go alone. If it did, it would have found it irrepressibly easy to go solo after the war. For the record, the JHU did not choose that option. That option became viable and expedient only after Ranawaka fell out with Rajapaksa. If the 2015 election was an attempt to settle personal scores with those in power at the time, Champika, followed by Rajitha and led by Chandrika Kumaratunga, would have been at the top of the league. <\/p>\n

The irony of this was seen, most palpably, when he joined hands on the same political stage with the same people who were against the same nationalist credentials the guys propping him up claim for him presently. I am not thinking of Champika and Rajitha only here, but also of those known for their hostility to nationalism joining hands with the man who, more than anyone else, is responsible for the good guy\/bad guy dichotomy that was a crucial part of the ideological campaign that got Sinhala Buddhist nationalism back into mainstream politics and Mahinda Rajapaksa as its messiah. <\/p>\n

So we have the likes of Mangala Samaraweera and Mujibur Rahman (the latter of who once derided Champika as an Islamophobe) tacitly turning Champika to a martyr. What would be more incongruous? Maithripala and Mahinda as President and Prime Minister? Yes, but that happened. More incongruous would be Mahinda and Chandrika together again, though given how enmities give way to alliances of expedience I wouldn\u2019t consider that a no-no either. In any case, enmities like that happen to be more personal than political, more idiosyncratic than ideological. The rift between the likes of Mangala, Mujibur and Rajitha on the one hand and Champika on the other is, by contrast, more ideological. Ranawaka is responsible, perhaps more than anyone else, for making it possible for Rajapaksa to imply that opposing him is the moral equivalent of supporting, if not funding, terrorism. <\/p>\n

Where does all this leave us? It leaves us with the unenviable conundrum of seeing one party lambaste Champika as a traitor, and another party hostile to the ideology he earlier supported celebrates him as a hero. I don\u2019t know whether this can explain the lukewarm response to his arrest, even by those opposed to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, though that can partly be explained by the popularity of the President\u2019s other decisions (including his appointment of non-relatives to important positions) and the broad support they have got from the disgruntled middle-class. <\/p>\n

In any case, I can but only relish the irony of Champika\u2019s arrest, even if in principle I oppose it. The late, great, lamented S.L. Gunasekara used to say that, by his clumsiness and cruelty, the man most responsible for Prabhakaran\u2019s death was Prabhakaran himself. Just the other day a friend put it to me that, by his earlier Sinhala Buddhist nationalist association, the man most responsible for Champika Ranawaka\u2019s arrest was Champika Ranawaka himself. It doesn\u2019t get more ironic than that. <\/p>\n

Courtesy:Daily Mirror<\/em><\/p>\n

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By Uditha Devapriya In a country dominated by Cartesian thinking, it\u2019s probably not surprising that a man vilified for the better part of a decade as a Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist, traditionalist, warmonger and opportunist should be celebrated as a martyr today. I remember coming across a particularly unsavoury (and no doubt defamatory) article on the …<\/p>\n

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