Maithri Over Mahinda: The Tale Of Two Campaigns
Hudson
Dr. Liyanage Amarakeerthi
The Common Candidate Maithripala Sirisena (MS) is not just a person. He is a symbol, as well. Different people have different interpretations of this symbol. The supporters of the Rajapakasa regime are the poorest interpreters of this symbol. According to Hudson Samarasinghe, who has reduced radio medium into a kind of booing at people who does not think the way he does, the Common Candidate is a conspirator supported by the West. This man Samarasinghe, the chairman of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, has been insulting people with unimaginable impunity during his two-hour radio diatribe called “Rata Yana Atha” during the last few years. His kind of journalism, if one wants call it ‘journalism’, is only possible with the support of his tasteless master. Then there is another man Wimal Weerawansha. Only concept left in Weerawansha’s pool of thought is also “Western conspiracy.’ For him the Common Candidate is a plot designed in the US Embassy of Sri Lanka. As Gunadasa Amarasekara has put it, the Common Candidate is a conspiracy of the West whose handmaid is a group of Buddhist monks led by Rev. Maduluwawe Sobhita and Aturaliye Rathana. The aim of the West is to destroy the nationality of Sinhala people. For these uncritical defenders of the regime Rev. Sobhita and Rathna are evil monks equal to the robe wearers who assassinated former prime minister SWRD Bandaranaike. All these conspiracy theories have now lost their power of persuasion partly because that line of thinking has become so one-dimensional that it captures none of the complexities and nuances.
The response to the Common Candidate by the ideological supporters of the current regime shows one thing important to note: They do not have any fresh ideas and they have fallen into a kind of ideological slumber after the ending of the war in 2009. They have failed to create a mode of thinking suitable for the post-war Sri Lanka. That failure itself is a major cause of creating the Common Candidate – a fact the regime is still to recognize. After ending of the war, the ideologues of the regime fell into an ethical slumber in addition to the intellectual one. That is why they failed to produce an internal critique of the unprecedented corruption and waste of public resources by the regime, specially the ruling family. For that reason, all the stories of corruption narrated by the Common Candidate Movement have become extremely appealing. In fact they are stories of horror that can instantly make people hate the regime.Read More
