SRITHARAN AND HIS BAG BOY

TNA MP Sritharan’s Coordinating Secretary being caught with explosives is a story with potentially explosive connotations being downplayed deliberately by a group of liberals and bleeding hearts for whom such a scene showing up on the national news radar is a potential calamity. But what is a TNA MP doing with explosives anyway?

He went fishing he says! There are fishy stories, and then there are fishy stories! This is TNA, the quisling party that never refuses to hold the palanquin for the Tiger leadership. A man with close connections to a TNA political leader who mouths the words democracy at the drop of a hat, being apprehended with a stash of explosives is reminiscent of that hoary old kids’ bedtime scare story – of the fox being caught in the chicken coop.

That’s enough said about that aspect of the story. The question is, what are they going to give us the rest of the peace-loving folks as an explanation in those civil society seminar rooms from where the pro-diaspora tracts on good governance and reconciliation regularly emanate?

Will they say that we will all have to join Sritharan’s Coordinating Secretary in a fishing expedition, or better still, that we have to go with rod reel and bait with him in Killinochchi?

The TNA and its political project have had close parallels with that of the JVP. Time and again, the JVP sent thousands of youth to their deaths with their unique brand of revolution a la Galkatass. Never once did the JVP leadership stop to ponder the results of past failures. There was a pathological desire to see the youth wallow in seemingly endless orgies of blood.

Tamil militancy followed the same pattern – and both the JVP and LTTE political projects were at one time or another led by pathologically fanatical monsters. With the LTTE now demised, the TNA of course as one time quisling, has not been too keen on abandoning the rhetoric of hate and rampage to say the least.

When a TNA MP’s Coordinating Secretary is arrested with explosives, close on the heels of the news that LTTE type training camps were discovered in some parts of Tamilnadu, there would naturally be alarm bells about the TNA’s capability of carrying off a LTTE 2, in the same way that the JVP carried out a JVP 2 in 1989, following-on from the disastrous rampage of 1971.

After 30 and more years of war, the JVP TNA and cohorts (read UNP) are collectively miffed about the atmosphere of promise and potential that prevails in the country. Together, they are paranoid about a slide into irredeemable irrelevancy. At all costs, they want to stay politically alive, and if that means carrying explosives and coming out with fishy stories when caught -- that could be a telling sign of things to come.

How the UNP and the JVP close ranks in Parliament with this kind of truculent JVP is a moot point, but then when all things are considered, perhaps it is not surprising after all. All of these parties have been prone to condoning needless violence.

Enough has been said about the TNA and the JVP in that respect but as far as the UNP is concerned, the party could verily be called the Mother of all Subversives. The 1977 UNP it was, that first established the trends of violence and armed aggression in place of constitutionalism and consensus.

The JVP and TNA and are in every sense, twins in the pursuit of heedless rebellion, and together with this combine, the UNP is the other pea in the pod. That all of these forces get together and vote in tandem on issues of national import such as the impeachment, tell a story that is potentially more explosive than the explosives found in Sritharan’s Coordinating Secretary’s pouch.

The national security apparatus, thanks to Gotabhaya Rajapaksa is on a continuous red alert. There is no alternative when the general outline of the strategies of these three potential allies in embrace can be seen clearly, with the fishy story of the Coordinating Secretary being the most visible symptom of a much deeper going malaise.