{"id":83977,"date":"2024-05-05T03:00:27","date_gmt":"2024-05-05T07:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=83977"},"modified":"2024-05-05T03:58:04","modified_gmt":"2024-05-05T07:58:04","slug":"83977","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=83977","title":{"rendered":"Public Security Minister Tiran Alles has a penchant for conduct that sits oddly with his ministerial duties, the latest being his declaring \u2018Open Sesame\u2019 to the police to use their weapons to \u2018eliminate criminals."},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/p>\n

Kishali Pinto – Jayawardene<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do the actions of the Wickremesinghe Presidency and his Cabinet reflect strategic decision-making on the cusp of majorly significant national elections in Sri Lanka?\\<\/p>\n


\nThe Government\u2019s markedly asinine behaviour<\/strong><\/p>\n

The latest controversy to erupt is over the Cabinet outsourcing the handling of on-arrival visas to foreigners at the national airport to a \u2018private company.\u2019 This is in the wake of a Sri Lankan\u2019s fury at the company\u2019s representatives refusing a visa for his wife at Katunayake going viral on social media. We are told by the Presidential Secretariat that the company was only \u2018processing\u2019 the visa process while Sri Lankan immigration officers had the \u2018final say\u2019 on the matter.<\/p>\n

The Secretariat has also claimed that the company in question is used by other countries to process visa applications for non-nationals entering their borders. But do those countries permit its representatives to strut around at the border point of entry? <\/p>\n

That is strictly a matter for immigration officials and is a question of high national sensitivity if not security.<\/p>\n

The Minister of Tourism has frantically denied that he had anything to do with the unseemly row attributing the change in procedure to a Cabinet paper by Public Security Minister Tiran Alles. Adding richness to this unsavoury cake, he has also confessed to a \u2018problem\u2019 as his observations as Tourism Minister had not been called for.<\/p>\n

A Public Security Minister who heightens security concerns?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Meanwhile stakeholders, including the Sri Lanka Association of Inbound Tour Operators, have denounced the replacing of a hitherto virtually free state service with a private company poised to claim potentially massive profits. Now the nation awaits the clarification by the Public Security Minister on Monday which the Government has promised will \u2018clear up\u2019 the dispute.<\/p>\n

Not much confidence can be placed in that promise however. The Public Security Minister has a penchant for conduct that sits oddly with his ministerial duties, the latest being his declaring \u2018Open Sesame\u2019 to the police to use their weapons to \u2018eliminate criminals.\u2019 Objecting vehemently, the Bar Association has called for the President to remove the Minister from his portfolio, pointing to a pattern of \u2018irresponsible, arbitrary and misleading\u2019 remarks.<\/p>\n

True to form, the call by the Bar has been shrugged aside. All this signifies a Government at \u2018the end of days. That ugly dissonance is evidenced from the very head downwards. As observed last week, only a remarkably insensitive mind-set will gleefully boast that a luxury hotel is being opened at the site of the erstwhile \u2018Aragalaya\u2019 (peoples\u2019 protest of 2022) which threw out former President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and his family from power.<\/p>\n

Seeing the good, bad and the ugly of the \u2018Aragalaya\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact that President Ranil Wickremesinghe made these inappropriate comments at the opening of the ITC Ratnadipa while former President Rajapaksa was sitting in the audience aggravates the matter. <\/p>\n

To repeat ad nauseam as these remarks continue to shock the conscience, the President\u2019s juxtaposition of a luxury hotel with the \u2018Aragalaya\u2019 is crass. In fact, the President and his United National Party (UNP) cannot wash its hands of giving the \u2018karapincha\u2019 treatment to the \u2018Aragalaya,\u2019 using it to grab power and then discarding it.<\/p>\n

Whatever we may think about the political \u2018capture\u2019 of the 2022 protests, this was the first genuine people\u2019s movement in post-independent Sri Lanka despite internal fractures and dissensions. Disparate \u2018Aragalaya\u2019 segments cannot be lumped into one monolithic whole. <\/p>\n

We see this too in regard to mass student protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza currently sweeping across the United States.
\nBoth faculty and students have been kicked, beaten and arrested by the police. <\/p>\n

In some instances, as US President Joe Biden said, the students may have been violent. But in others which the President failed to acknowledge, the overly violent response of US law enforcement contradicted the right to dissent. In any event, the US has firmly divested itself of the right to moralize on the international rights order.<\/p>\n

Strategic and sensitive reactions needed<\/strong><\/p>\n

But to return to happenings in Sri Lanka, the Government\u2019s schizophrenic convulsions in an election year are getting \u2018curiouser and curiouser\u2019 as Alice may wonderingly note to herself. Public resentment of the political order has become menacing with the Deep South paying a high price for \u2018Rajapaksa-loyalty\u2019 as existential poverty swallows up its communities<\/p>\n

. Across the land, the gap yawns wider between \u2018the privileged\u2019 (the elite) versus the \u2018non-privileged\u2019 (everyone else).<\/p>\n

Lest I be misunderstood, this is not to say that Sri Lanka must not have more hotels, luxury or otherwise. That would be patently absurd. Rather, the President and his Cabinet must be far more strategic if not sensitive. But to expect that would be foolish. <\/p>\n

Now let us proceed to a somewhat unexpected \u2018Right of Reply\u2019 to last week\u2019s column exercised by Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo.<\/p>\n

While appreciating his generous plaudits in regard to the \u2018Focus\u2019 column that he says he reads with enthusiasm every Sunday and acknowledging the \u2018sentiments of profound respect and friendship\u2019 that he has personally proffered, I must correct (subject to constraints of space) a serious misunderstanding that has arisen thereto.<\/p>\n

Setting misunderstandings about the \u2018Focus\u2019 to right<\/strong><\/p>\n

Objecting to what is opined under the paragraph headed \u2018sinister findings and obvious conclusions\u2019, he has inferred that I had made a \u2018non-objective insinuation\u2019 that he had \u2018somehow knew beforehand of the Easter Sunday attacks\u2019 and had done nothing about it. <\/p>\n

This cannot be further from the truth, I must say with force. At no point did I say or intend to say that the Roman Catholic Church let alone the Archbishop knew in advance of the bloody Easter Sunday attacks in 2019.<\/p>\n

The column\u2019s offending paragraph reads to the effect that \u2018So for the head of the Catholic Church to claim blissful ignorance of all those warnings and to profess to child-like innocence in saying that he \u2018supported\u2019 Rajapaksa and had been \u2018misled,\u2019 is to insult our intelligence no less.\u2019<\/p>\n

But to clarify, referencing \u2018blissful ignorance\u2019 was made entirely in the context of his supporting the candidature of former President Rajapaksa.<\/p>\n

This was in a fraught background where a parliamentary report et al, had already raised grave warnings regarding the political context of the attacks and \u2018intelligence lapses.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Further, the Archbishop has gone on to say that, \u2018placing my hand on the Holy Bible, I did not know anything about the Easter Sunday tragedy beforehand\u2019 and that \u2018Had I known about it, I would have been the first to close the Churches and protect my flock.\u2019 That is evidently the case.<\/p>\n

What Christ preached<\/strong><\/p>\n

He has also declared to being a \u2018supporter\u2019 of the former President, yet that he cannot be faulted for that as he was only one of 6.9 million voters who also believed in the President\u2019s promises. <\/p>\n

But that is where I beg to differ. Religious leaders are expected to rise to a higher standard of shunning party politics in the public sphere as opposed to what they may do as a matter of private choice.<\/p>\n

As such there is a clear difference between men and women of the cloth and ordinary voters. The Archbishop has quoted Pope Francis who has called upon \u2018men of the cloth\u2019 to stand up for justice and truth. That too, I wholeheartedly agree with. But publicly advocating for those admirable objectives does not mean that \u2018men of cloth\u2019 must \u2018support\u2019 politicians.<\/p>\n

The most powerful object lesson of Jesus Christ\u2019s teaching was precisely to that effect, namely not to put trust or \u2018believe\u2019 in the powerful but on the contrary, to reduce the powerful to the level of a \u2018servant.\u2019 That said, the Archbishop has affirmed that \u2018misunderstandings must be cleared in the service of truth.\u2019<\/p>\n

Certainly there can be no quarrel with that assertion.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:Sunday Times<\/em><\/p>\n

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By Kishali Pinto – Jayawardene Do the actions of the Wickremesinghe Presidency and his Cabinet reflect strategic decision-making on the cusp of majorly significant national elections in Sri Lanka?\\ The Government\u2019s markedly asinine behaviour The latest controversy to erupt is over the Cabinet outsourcing the handling of on-arrival visas to foreigners at the national airport …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Public Security Minister Tiran Alles has a penchant for conduct that sits oddly with his ministerial duties, the latest being his declaring \u2018Open Sesame\u2019 to the police to use their weapons to \u2018eliminate criminals.’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83977"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83977"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83980,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83977\/revisions\/83980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}