Rajapaksa, Cricket And Power Politics In Sri Lanka

By Vaibhav Vats -August 7, 2013

Vaibhav Vats

Until a few years ago, Hambantota was an obscure town in south-central Sri Lanka, around 190 kilometers (118 miles)  from the capital Colombo, with a population that barely exceeded 10,000. Its daily rhythms were defined by the twin activities of farming and fishing. But once Mahinda Rajapaksa, one of its native sons, became president in 2005, all that began to change.

Mr Rajapaksa’s dream was to transform his sleepy hometown into a modern industrial city, an urban hub to rival Colombo, the country’s capital. His ambitious plans forHambantota included a 2,000 hectare international airport costing $210 million, while another $360 million were to be spent on the construction of a seaport.

These projects were under way in 2011 when I visited Hambantota while reporting on the cricket World Cup. Of the 13 cities that hosted the tournament, in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India, Hambantota was the most unlikely venue of all. In the Colombo newspapers, there was persistent talk of Hambantota’s transformation into a world-class city. But the great claims seemed hollow, because Hambantota was still a largely rural expanse. In one of the tournament’s matches, elephants had appeared at the boundary fence of the stadium.

I had arrived in Hambantota exactly 100 years after Leonard Woolf made a journey in the opposite direction. As a fresh-faced 24-year-old, Mr. Woolf had been inducted into the colonial Ceylon Civil Service. Following spells in Kandy and Jaffna, he arrived in Hambantota in 1908 as the chief administrative and judicial officer. Mr. Woolf was said to be an active civil servant, enthusiastically traversing the district on his pony and occasionally by bicycle. In 1911, after three years in Hambantota, he left for England on leave but subsequently resigned from the job.

In 1913, Mr. Woolf wrote “The Village in the Jungle,” a novel inspired by his years in Hambantota. This was a year after he had married the 30-year-old writer Virginia Stephen — the novel is dedicated to her. Not possessing the literary genius of his rather more famous spouse, it was one of only two novels that Mr. Woolf ever wrote. Later, he was to call that book “a symbol of the anti-imperialism which had been growing upon me more and more in my last years in Ceylon.”                                   Read More