Is there anything wrong in leasing these disused tanks to the Indians - in return for much needed foreign revenue - to be used as storage tanks for oil to be transshipped to Indian ports to meet the Indian demand?
ing to see Vesak or pandals; they say he is coming for Vesak but he is really coming to sign the agreements that would betray this nation. We say to you that to demonstrate our protest against it to fill the whole country with black flags for Modi to see. Vesak kale thoran bala bala idhala hurry yanne nai. No use in seeing pandals during Vesak. “
And what has the Prime Minister of India done to deserve this dubious honour bestowed gratuitously upon him by this self proclaimed greatest son of Sri Lanka? Where flags – be they black or white- are asked to be flown from every Lankan rooftop in Modi’s name on Vesak Day – usurping from the nation’s mast the Vesak flag hoisted by the people in sacred homage to the Buddha on the full moon day in the month of Vesakha in commemoration of the birth, enlightenment and passing away of India’s greatest son?
According to Wimal the black flags of protest must replace the Vesak flag during this Vesak because: “Ranil want India to sign MOUs to give India not only Trinco’s oil tanks but the entire Trincomalee harbour and the entire Trinco town. “It is only because we were physically separated from India that we have been able to establish our own indigenous civilization and culture in this country. It is to erase that culture, to erase that cultured and civilised tradition that we enjoy here and to fill it with Indians that these MOUs have been signed.”
Three questions must be raised. On the question of the unused oil tanks the British left behind after erecting them during the Second World War to fuel their South Asian fleet and which had lain idle for nearly seventy years after Japan’s surrender in 1945, is there anything wrong in leasing these disused tanks to the Indians - in return for much needed foreign revenue - to be used as storage tanks for oil to be transshipped to Indian ports to meet the Indian demand? As Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake said recently,” Being our closest neighbour, India has a need for it. If not to India, to whom should we lease it out to? North Korea?
The second is that while Wimal Weerawansa and his JO ilk find all things wrong with neighbour India, why was it that the new port city which they could clearly see from their Galle Face Green dais on that May Day afternoon, being built by the Chinese and rising from Lanka waters to be occupied by the Chinese for the next 99 years, did not attract their condemnation, and gave no patriotic prompting to any fancy saline fed farcical fast unto death until it is demolished and submerged a thousand leagued under the sea?
The Colombo Chinese Port City was a result of an unsolicited proposal put forward by the Chinese which the previous Rajapaksa regime accepted without question and was even prepared to give part of its acreage to the Chinese on freehold terms until the Maithri government rescinded the agreement and made the Chinese settle for a 99 year lease instead as a compromise. Why did it not provoke any patriotic protest over possible sovereignty loss or evoke any condemnation on having on the nation’s western coast right on the capital’s shore, a de facto permanent base for a regional superpower with the largest army in the world with an active military force of 2,330,000 personnel, to occupy ?
The third question is why does this A’ level drop out, this remand bird allowed temporary flight of freedom from his Welikada cage, think he is supremely qualified to lecture on the supposedly insular nature of Lanka’s culture and to claim that thanks to the geographical divide Lanka’s had been spared of any Indian influence on Sinhala thought, culture and civilization for the last two thousand years and more?
To him the 22 kilometre geographical divide enabled Lanka to develop her own