Taking The Masses For Asses (Or Are They?)

By R. Abeywickrema

Notwithstanding Mathata Thitha — the flavour of the day — a time tested cocktail, laced with all the right ingredients, is being liberally poured out by the dedicated stewards of the administration. The state-run media is awash with this perennial favourite of the Blue camp. The time tested ingredients in this cocktail — “secret pact” (rahas givisumak), “unpatriotic” (deshadrohi), “dividing the country” (rata bedanava), “international conspiracy” (jathiyanthara kumanthranayak), etc. have served the Blue camp well in the past. One still recalls the heady “Ali – Koti Rahas Givisuma” cocktail of 2005, which gave the Greens a hangover to last a few years.

To their horror the Greens realised there was a ‘Sandanaya – Koti Givisuma’ instead only on election day, and with that realisation ended their presidential hopes in 2005.
Now the same concoction is being presented in a different bottle. The Tigers have been replaced by the TNA and all the rest of the trusty ingredients have been added for good measure. The eager to please sommeliers such as Weerawansa, Ranawaka and Siripala are serving it up — shouting themselves hoarse trying to market the old wine in new bottles. Whether Sri Lanka’s so-called educated electorate will buy the same stuff remains to be seen.

After all, it is the same electorate that lapped up wines of different vintages such as ‘rice from the moon’, ‘bread at Rs. 3.50’, ‘abolition of the Executive Presidency’ X 3 (’94, ’99, ’05), ‘ali – koti givisuma’ etc. only to realise that when the ‘kick’ disappeared, they had in fact  been kicked well and truly in the posterior.

One cannot help feeling nauseous when watching what passes for “news” on state TV these days. There is a ‘flashback’ segment that takes viewers back to the ’88-89 period when the country was in turmoil. Viewers are shown how the JVP wreaked havoc in the country and how the state responded. Twenty years later this is “news” according to our state media.

However to the average viewer, the selective amnesia of the state media is nothing new. The dark period the government has suddenly remembered was the time the persecuted journalist, Tissainayagam, was at Mahinda Rajapaksa’s behest, compiling reports for the then human rights champion, to present at the UN in Geneva against the government of Sri Lanka. Nothing of that in the “news.” If anyone were to do such a thing today, one can just imagine the consequences. “Traitors” apparently are a new breed in this country.

It is also amusing to note how naïve the state media can get when they choose to highlight the second JVP insurrection. They expect the electorate to suddenly remember 1989 conveniently forgetting 2005, when Rajapaksa and Somawansa Amarasinghe, arm in arm and bosom buddies, went around the country campaigning together for the presidential poll. When Rajapaksa won, Somawansa was the apple of his eye. When they fell out, Rajapaksa remembered ’89. How come the state media couldn’t remember this bheeshanaya in 2005? Five comes before 10 right? Right?
The daily ITN flashback “news” show of ’88-89 also fails to show what the newfound mouthpiece of the government, Weerawansa was doing at the time. The other present day ministers, JVPers Gunatillaka and Jagoda, and their destructive role in the chaos of ’89 are also conveniently ignored.

It seems the masses are being taken for asses, and it is a dangerous strategy that has every likelihood of backfiring. The flashback “news” show is bound to make people recall what the bigwigs of the government like SLFP Vice President, Karuna Amman and Chief Minister Pillayan were doing from ’88-89 to 2004. They are also likely to recall 700 unarmed policemen being rounded up and shot at point blank range in the east, allegedly on the orders of the LTTE’s no.2 at the time, and present Vice President of the SLFP. It will be interesting to see, though the state media can be very forgetful, whether the people can also be that forgetful since their collective memory is now being jolted.
That the government and its cheer squads are taking the masses for asses is apparent by the comment the President himself made to a group of English and Tamil journalists last Wednesday. Here, while the likes of messrs. Weerawansa and Ranawaka were shouting with all their put-on fury that ‘Fonseka has a secret agreement with the TNA to divide the country,’ no less a person than the President himself let the cat out of the bag, and strangely enough the Presidential faux pas has gone largely unnoticed. Rajapaksa had boasted to the scribes that most of the Tamil parties and members of the TNA were supporting him!

Does that mean he too has a secret agreement with the TNA? After all according to the likes of Weerawansa and Ranawaka, the TNA being the TNA will settle for nothing less than the division of the country. So then if members of the TNA are, as the President had supposedly said on Wednesday, and duly reported in the lead story of the Daily Mirror on Friday, “secretly backing him,” then who should be having an ‘agreement’ with whom to divide the country is the question that needs to be answered.

The mind boggles at the possibilities considering what happened in 2005, and it would be prudent for the Fonseka camp to call for a clarification, lest the ghost of 180,000 voters returns to haunt them on the morning of January 27.