Between Modi & The MoD: Mahinda’s Choice
By Dayan Jayatilleka -May 14, 2014
Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
Mahinda Rajapaksa has just won the Sri Lankan Presidential election of 2015. The Modi mood sweeping India has given a second wind and a fresh momentum to the Mahinda incumbency. However, the dramatic new chapter in the Indian epic, if misunderstood and underutilized by President Rajapaksa, can enhance rather than decrease the pressures on Sri Lanka. Given that he is named after the son of a great leader of India —Ashoka—who bore the message of the greatest son of the Indian subcontinent— Gautama, the Buddha— there’s a question, more geopolitical than metaphysical, that Mahinda Rajapaksa must ask himself: what if King Devanampiyatissa had declined to convert or delayed in converting to the doctrine of the neighbouring metropolis? 
Between Modi & the MoD
India has caught up with Sri Lanka yet again. It was twenty years after Ceylon, that India spawned a two party system. It was only in the 1990s that India had its first “SWRD/SLFP” type administration— that of the BJP under Mr Vajpayee. This month, India had its Mahinda moment— the victory of Mr Modi’s tougher minded BJP.
The Modi victory will re-legitimize and reinforce Mahinda’s majoritarian religious nationalism and grind the main democratic opposition, the neoliberal cosmopolitan UNP (with or without its Mangala mediated CBK auxiliary) with its minoritarian profile— it appears to be the country’s largest NGO and possibly its largest INGO— into the electoral dust.
The scenario of the mono-issue monk as a common candidate is merely a symptom of the collective craziness and political paralysis that has seized the Opposition. Read More
