-By Virgil
(Lanka-e-News -27.Aug.2025, 7.15 PM) “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~T S Eliot
A journey of infinite promise and predictable heights that began as far back as 1977 seems to be ending in remand where every felon, high and mighty or very common and ordinary goes to sleep at night and wakes up the following morning, within four grey walls and a bare cement floor. That is the fate Ranil Wickremasinghe, our onetime President is facing. A man who was branded as the 'Batalanda villain' is now being accused of misappropriating public funds and the magistrate who presided over the proceedings has delivered her verdict: the Ex-President cannot be granted bail for the enormity of the alleged law-breaking is too great for such a leniency. An extremely sad and heart-wrenching saga for his loyalists and a gleeful and euphoric one for his adversaries. Life, as Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha explained, is a continuing passage of peaks and valleys.
My intention is not to probe further into the pros and cons of the very substance of the case in question. It has been heard and the prosecuting attorneys had won the day.
To make matters worse for him, Ranil Wickremasinghe's health is not on the acceptable settings of the scale. He is known to be afflicted with diabetes; as most men experience at his age, the blood pressure too is not within the normal range and a once vibrant and handsome young man today is seventy six years old and his walk too has become less ringing and rangy. The very optics of our Ex-President being escorted in handcuffs and a countenance depicting the gravity of events that befell him is an unforgiving fashion life treats one every now and then.
When the United National Party (UNP) led by his uncle J R Jayewardene was returned to power in 1977, Ranil was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and later was promoted to the Cabinet as Minster of Youth affairs and Employment in 1978. Born into a political family, Wickremasinghe graduated from the University of Ceylon and qualified as a lawyer from the Ceylon Law College in 1972. He entered politics in the mid-1970s with the UNP, first being elected to Parliament in 1977. Over the years, he held various ministerial positions, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Youth Affairs and Employment, and Industry, Science and Technology. He first became Prime Minister in 1993 following the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The great irony being, his ascension to Premiership was after one assassination, that of President Premadasa and elevated to be the Leader of the Opposition after the another political assassination, that of Gamini Dissanayake, the then Leader of the Opposition. Fate indeed has had an unmistakable effect on his eventful journey.
Yet his gleeful days may have come to a sudden halt; he was handcuffed and taken to remand prison after he attained his first and last dream of becoming President. Even the greater irony is that he met with his saddest misfortune after and because of what he had done, an act in the very capacity of his dreamlike lofty position, as the country's Chief Executive-President. Rarely has destiny played a more sardonic and cynical part in one's life.
Ranil Wickremasinghe's performance in the field of politics has not been received gleefully by the majority of Sri Lankan average man and woman. Devoid of any empathetic feeling towards his fellowmen, Ranil never took time nor gave any space to the non-elite class of people. Even from amongst the so-called elite, he chose his friends and cohorts very selectively and had time and place to wine and dine with them without any hesitation. Such characters do not belong in the annals of politics; yet he survived close to a half century, thanks mainly to his closeness to the supra-elite of Ceylon and the devotion that supra-elite protected the system that sustained that exclusive club of men and women.
His accomplishments on the plus side are minimal, to say the least. Establishment of the Vidyapeetaya, which is now known as Mahaweli National College of Education, whose primary task remains as leading teacher training center is one of them. It was established in 1985 when Ranil was the Minister of Education in the J R Jayewardene government. The second accomplishment is the restructuring of the National Youth Service Council which, in fact, saw the light of day in the year 1969 in the Dudley Senanayake government. Both these tasks have embellished the governance and political resume of Wickremasinghe but has not earned any palpable lasting benefits from these two initiatives.
Ranil, however, is well known and even notoriously entwined with most of the dark side of the UNP regimes he has been associated with. The echo of Batalanda is still reverberating and the sound it generates has reached sky-high. How did all this happen? Was he corrupt and dirty from the very beginning of his political journey or did he get gradually allured by the sweetness of power? Did his undisguised association with the masters of corruption- the Rajapaksas, spoil hi?? How did did he try to cut off some leading and charismatic rivals such as Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake in his own Party. How did he get so close to R Premadasa in the nineteen nineties? How did he mange to win over the UNP parliamentarians so easily? If he was so popular and likable with the inner chambers of the UNP, yet so unpopular and disliked by the average man and woman in the country, what went wrong?
All these questions can be answered; one can write volumes of Ranil's deeds and misdeeds. How did Mr. Clean become so dirty? That is the fundamental question one has to ask. The answer and explanation are both embedded in one crucial quality he was either born with or had cultivated over the four decades he was in power. To lose election after election and still remain as the leader of his Party is no ordinary feat.
In the ultimate analysis, it is not only Ranil himself that is accountable for his own failure. Those who chose to accept him as leader, come what may, are also accountable to the country for this disgraceful leader in the persona of Ranil Wickremasinghe. Politics is fundamentally winning over friends and more friends. Ranil did just the opposite. He mastered the way of antagonizing men. He should be able to write text books on the very subject- how to make enemies. Who would look the other way when shaking hands?
He employs very able reputed advertising masters in order find out how to run an election campaign and how to sustain a robust and strategic public relations exercise. Yet he has fallen far short of the expectations. The people do not seem to trust him. The most essential ingredient in political campaigns is trust and unfortunately for Ranil, trust is what he lacks.
His close friends and loyalists, if there are any, must be mourning; for them it's a disaster, not for any patriotic feelings they pretend to possess but because the long arm of the law ultimately reached one of their class-comrades. Those who mourn are the ones who benefited from his policies and class-friendliness and those who rejoice are the ones whom Ranil has managed to cross path with in his forgettable political life. The way he fashioned himself in the image of the Rajapaksas, the way engaged in crude cutthroatism against his own party stalwarts like Lalith and Gamini, the most unfair and biased manner in which he handed party nominations to his own friends and cohorts, the totally disinterested and aloof manner he interacted with his own party workers and the abject way he treated his subordinates and party grassroots members is abhorrent, to say the least.
He learnt everything that is offensive and dismaying from the Rajapaksas but refused to learn the fine arts of making friends which was a tremendous plus of Mahinda Rajapaksa. Such men like Ranil Wickremasinghe belong amongst the rejects of the voting factory that spring up every four to five year intervals. The wonder is he still survived more than four decades.
However, the average Sri Lankan may not all that be affected, one way or the other. For them Ranil is no subject that they would waste their time and energy arguing about. He has more demanding and challenging chores to complete within a day. At the end of the day Ranil Wickremasinghe will be consigned to the ash heap of history.
We are not living in the twentieth century. Demands and challenges in the twenty first century and decades to come would be vastly different. I'm sure AKD and his government have realized the freshness of the tasks ahead. At the same time they also must realize that the time that they have now is short and the people's patience is running thin. They simply cannot afford to lose even one minute of that time, nor a yard of that space. Ranil's political obituary is not yet written, but the beginning of the end is in sight.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
Virgil's Collection
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/21
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by (2025-08-27 13:48:23)
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