-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -13.Aug.2026, 8.30 PM)
"Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." — Sun Tzu
"Everyone sees what you appear to be, few know what you really are." — Machiavelli
Twenty lawyers walked into the Presidential Secretariat carrying what they believed was a mandate — three thousand raised hands, a unanimous vote, and a phrase sharpened over months of drafting: "ad-hoc, personal, and capricious." They walked out having conceded, on the record, that the President had met them with an open mind. Somewhere between those two facts lies the entire story of how the Bar Association of Sri Lanka lost a battle it had already declared won, and how President Anura Kumara Dissanayake converted a defensive legal skirmish into a public demonstration of command.
This is not an essay about who is constitutionally correct. It is an essay about strategy — about the difference between having the better argument and having the better war. Sun Tzu warned that the general who wins is the one who calculates before the battle; Machiavelli warned that the prince who survives is the one who understands that virtue and the appearance of virtue are two different instruments, used at different times. AKD used both. BASL, for all its constitutional learning, brought a brief to a battlefield.
Sun Tzu's first lesson is that positioning determines the outcome before a single blow is struck: "the skilful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible." BASL did the opposite. On the very morning of the meeting, the Association issued a public statement — a pre-emptive strike meant to lock in its moral position before the President could speak. It was a tactic borrowed from litigation: file first, frame the narrative, force the other side to respond to your terms.
But a courtroom is a closed system with a judge bound by precedent. A national political contest is not. By firing before the meeting even began, BASL handed AKD the one gift no strategist should ever give an opponent: proof of bad faith. Within hours, the Association was forced to concede that it had, in fact, come to the table with an open mind — directly undercutting its own morning statement and, more damagingly, undercutting its central grievance that the government had never consulted it. Machiavelli would call this a failure of virtù — the disciplined judgment to act at the right moment, not the urgent one.
The deepest strategic move AKD made was refusing to fight on BASL's chosen terrain. The Bar wanted a constitutional argument: retirement ages fixed since 1978, conflict-of-interest hazards, the sanctity of tenure. AKD, instead, treated the meeting as what Sun Tzu calls "ground" — terrain to be selected, not accepted. "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight." AKD chose not to fight on law. He fought on legitimacy, mandate, and moral character, pulling the confrontation out of the seminar room and into the register of a national address.
Note his opening gambit in the transcript: he does not rebut the legal argument at all in his first moves. He talks about stability, about coming with an open mind, about not returning to his country if he had come in bad faith. This is a politician converting a private grievance session into a public-facing performance of transparency. BASL entered a negotiation. AKD staged a demonstration.
Where BASL spoke in principles, AKD spoke in numbers. Supreme Court judges rising from 11 to 17. Court of Appeal from 12 to 20. Fourteen vacancies opening in the Appellate Court. High Court cadre climbing from 110 to 120. Eleven new court complexes. CIABOC expanding from a single Colombo office to twenty-four regional branches, with 373 new investigators. Police cadre climbing toward its full complement of 100,000. Twenty-one thousand applications for 260 judicial administrative posts.
This is Machiavelli's virtù made literal: mastering the granular mechanics of governance so thoroughly that mastery itself becomes the argument. BASL's constitutional principle is timeless; AKD's spreadsheet is immediate. In the theatre of public perception, immediacy wins.
Machiavelli's most misunderstood teaching is not that a prince should be cruel — it is that a prince must control which of his qualities are seen. "It is unnecessary for a prince to have good qualities, but it is necessary to appear to have them." AKD frames the amendment as a burden he is willing to lose everything over: he is "ready to take those risks... if it leads to my departure, ready to accept that gracefully." He invokes the Easter Sunday inquiry, borrowing its moral weight as evidence that he moves toward danger, not away from it.
Attach your contested policy to your uncontested courage, and critics are forced to attack both at once. You cannot cross-examine a man's willingness to die for his convictions. You can only watch him say it.
The most Machiavellian moment: AKD's handling of the conflict-of-interest argument — BASL's sharpest point, since sitting judges would eventually rule on the constitutionality of the amendment extending their own tenure. AKD did not deny it. He accepted his position was "not 100 percent" airtight.
This looks like weakness. It is the opposite. Sun Tzu counsels that "when you surround an army, leave an outlet free" — never corner an opponent so completely they have nothing left to lose. By openly ceding a fraction of the argument, AKD removed BASL's strongest line of attack while surrendering almost nothing of substance. It was a calculated wound, self-inflicted precisely because it was survivable.
BASL is, in composition and instinct, a gerontocracy — led by former presidents, senior counsel, and constitutional academics whose authority rests on precedent and pedigree. That authority is real inside a courtroom. It is close to worthless inside a press conference. The argument that fixed judicial tenure shields against executive patronage is serious — but it is also an elite claim, phrased for an audience of the converted. It never translated into a stake ordinary citizens could feel.
AKD's material — backlogs, police shortages, corruption-investigation delays, promotion bottlenecks — did translate. Independence of the judiciary is an abstraction; a citizen waiting years for a court date is not.
BASL's threat that "this matter must inevitably be placed before the people through a referendum" was, in retrospect, a weapon assembled without ammunition. A referendum threat only deters if the threatening party can credibly deliver one. Three thousand lawyers voting in a room is not the same as a mobilized public. The card was played, and then quietly allowed to lapse.
Tactical defeat is not the same as being substantively wrong. BASL's underlying worry — that altering fixed judicial tenure mid-term creates at minimum the appearance of executive leverage over the bench — is a recognised concern in comparative constitutional law, not a fringe position. AKD's own admission that the objection is "not 100 percent" answered is, read less charitably, an acknowledgment that the core legal defect survives the political win. AKD won the theatre; whether he won the law is a separate, still-open question for the courts to settle — not the press conferences.
Sun Tzu's deepest teaching is that "the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." A government that treats every encounter with the Bar as a battle to be won will eventually fight the same battle on worse terrain — humiliated institutions do not disappear, they wait. Machiavelli's sobering warning is reserved for princes who mistake force for foundation: "the prince who builds his power on the goodwill of the people... will find it difficult to be undermined."
Judicial reform of this scale cannot be implemented against the will of the fraternity that will staff, interpret, and litigate every part of it. A judiciary reformed over the objections of its own bar is reformed on paper. A judiciary reformed with its bar is reformed in fact.
The people of this country did not ask for a duel between the executive and the legal fraternity. They asked for courts that work, judges who are trusted, and a justice system that no longer makes citizens wait a decade for a verdict. That outcome will be delivered — if it is delivered at all — by both sides recognising that this war was never meant to be won by either of them alone.
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity." — Sun Tzu.
The opportunity now belongs to whichever side reaches for partnership first.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-08-13 15:03:02)
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