HERE WE GO -- HARIMA SHOKE!
For sheer wanton braggadocio and hubris, this man
should be given the highest award on offer in Sri Lanka. Or
maybe a Nobel should be created exclusively in his honour ...
Harim Peiris is the name. If anybody remembers, he was a
former Secretary of some sorts, and a factotum to the then
President Chandrika Bandarnaike Kumaratunga.
Said Peiris recently in a newspaper tract that spoke about
his ex boss's apparent opposition to the impeachment motion
against Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake, that Chandrika
Bandaranaike has been so good as to give her successor in office
President Mahinda Rajapaksa the 'freedom and latitude to govern
as he sees fit.'
Politely speaking, it was his boss who was known to be late.
Here is somebody who has with time, decisively surpassed his
Superior in that department. Harim Peiris is - make no mistake
about it - a full seven years behind time.
He seems to be absolutely convinced that his boss (who was
NOT in any case known as the late Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunga
...), is still President. He seems to think also that therefore
she gives Mahinda Rajapaksa 'the freedom and latitude he needs
to govern.'!
Dear Harim --- Mahinda Rajapaksa became President of the
Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka seven years ago, and
if you have Rip Van Winkle-like woken up a few minutes back,
please grab the morning coffee to perk up your system and get
you up and running, and squared with the prevailing reality.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa is the President, and he has been
called the strongest Executive President in our history by N.
Ram, the former Editor of The Hindu newspaper. The last person
he needs any 'latitude' from to carry out the day-to-day or
long-term tasks of governance, is the -- to be charitable - -
retired, effete and now irrelevant Chandrika Bandaranaike
Kumaratunga.
Of course President Rajapaksa has given her - Kumaratunga --
the latitude to make lame and unsubstantiated claims against his
government, and the space and leeway to make snide and seemingly
jealous statements from her irrelevant corner in retirement.
Now, that is called latitude.
How persons of a washed out and has-been past such as Harim
Peiris get the attitude to say that Chandrika Kumaratunga gives
the 'latitude' to Mahinda Rajapaksa to govern, is more than a
little astounding. But then, these are people who always carried
a bushel of an ego above a molehill of a cranium, during the
time they strutted about the corridors of power.
But more astounding than the generally hubristic Peiris's not
so astounding tendency to be hilariously bombastic, is his
former boss's tendency to be a pontificating pretender who still
thinks in some way that she is fit to be the President, or
perhaps that she is still the President.
Kumaratunga has said in a recent speech made in some rather
remote conclave in some forgettable capital city, that certain
Governments 'tend to conjure up "an enemy" from peoples who
belong to different ethnic, religious, caste or political
groups. History is replete with examples of States and
Governments employing the concept of the "other", represented as
the "enemy", as a tool of Government management', she said.
She has also said that 'the constant economic, social and
cultural deprivation of the Northern and Eastern regions is
clearly related to the 'violent conflict we have witnessed.''
She has said this without observing that unlike her
administration, the current dispensation has done a great deal
to rescue these provinces from their fate of long running
penury, by ending the war and ushering in a promising peacetime
economy.
The problem with people such as Kumaratunga is that when they
make blanket statements to the effect that the North and East
suffers under continual conditions of neglect and poverty, she
infers that this is the current situation somehow, meaning that
in her time she could not help it as there were hostilities, and
the poverty that necessarily followed.
Why does she neglect to mention that the war is now over -
something that she decidedly could not accomplish - and that
slowly but surely, the people are coming out of this state of
'economic social and cultural deprivation' that she is talking
about.
There is no 'OTHER' or 'enemy' about this. Be it North or
East or South, people are happy that the war ravaged areas are
now on the rebound. It's just that CBK and her brand of
factotums are not on the rebound and never will be - and more is
the pity! |