How you can eat the cake and have it also
Two weeks after Maithripala Sirisena had declared his candidacy on 21st November 2014 to battle Mahinda Rajapaksa for the presidency, slain Bharatha Laksman’s daughter Hirunika, who had curled up to the Rajapaksa fraternity to move them to bring her father’s killers to trial, walked away from the man whom she had hailed as her foster father to join Sirisena’s camp fires; even as he was setting up tent on the opposite banks and knowing not the way in which the river would soon flow.
Fortunately the current flowed upstream and carried the Sirisena riverboat to the source of supreme power. If Hirunika had jumped aboard the barge, not just for the ride but to achieve her declared mission to see justice done by her late father, the Yahapalana policies that Sirisena introduced saw her father’s murderers condemned to death last fortnight: and Hirunika received the justice she had been clamoring for so long.
Last year in December, four months after her election to Parliament as a member of the Sirisena government, allegedly ordered her goons to bring to her political office a man who was supposedly having a love affair with the wife of one of her supporters. He claimed that he had been forcibly held there. She admitted he had been detained in her office some time while she gave him a sermon in morals and the dangers of having amorous affairs with married women. The man, who was released after receiving this tongue lashing from Kolonnawe’s new agony aunt, complained to the police that he had been abducted and held against his will.
Unbeknown, perhaps, to Hirunika, the old order had changed; and the new order did not form any dalliance with the old notion that some sacred cows were above the law.
The public outcry that followed this incident which took place on December 21st last year rose to a crescendo when the police appeared to be dragging their feet. Soon the charge was leveled against the Sirisena government that it was involved in a shoddy cover up and their professed commitment to the Yahapalana doctrine that tolerated no selective law enforcement, sparring those who were loyal to the government and crucifying those who were not, was but eyewash; and that the new order was nothing more than the same old order under a fancy name.
On January 9th however, the then Attorney General ordered the police to arrest Hirunika and produce her in court. The magistrate deemed it fit to grant her bail; and she has remained enlarged on such terms and conditions the magistrate imposed on her.