Namal says: A father cannot pass presidential baton to son
Namal Rajapaksa, whose four-year outstanding electricity bill of Rs 2.6 million was paid at last by Puttalam’s Sanath Nishantha last Monday, declared this week that the people could not expect a president to pass on the baton to his son and make him the next President of the country.
Is that so? What a revolutionary idea? If it had been said ten years ago during his father’s regime people would have been jailed for blasphemy and strung up for treason.
Addressing the media at the SLPP headquarters in Battaramulla on Tuesday, he told reporters: ‘It is something for the party to decide who will be their presidential candidate. A presidential father cannot gift the presidency to his son.’
Of course not. Where on earth had he got the idea that anyone thought his father could? That Mahinda Rajapaksa was able to pass on the crown and sceptre to Namal and could and would anoint him, his eldest son, as his chosen successor to the Lankan throne?
The divine right to rule and hereditary succession as enjoyed by kings of yore have long since vanished; and for the last 208 years had been nonexistent in the Lankan political landscape.
But following the terrorist war’s triumphant end in 2009, had the brief hour of glory and the fleeting hero worship which had all but crowned him, evoked in Mahinda megalomaniacal visions of a Rajapaksa dynastical rule for the next thousand years; with Presidential immunity for every succeeding heir as an updated version of monarchial absolution which had given Lanka’s kings till 1815, absolute power to torture people to their deaths in ten most heinous ways?
Had these delusional visions of grandeur pervaded the air at his Medamulana household that it had made Namal suffer the belief he had been born to rule? And when the day dawns ‘No more Mahinda’, it will be ‘Long Live Namal’.
But his father still retained a straw of his cherished dynastical hope when he reportedly told a visiting team of SLPP’s Romanian branch officials this week, ‘I will not oppose him becoming President.’
So, when Namal made the rhetorical statement to reporters at the press conference that ‘ a president cannot pass the baton to his son’, was it merely to confirm that his dreams had been shattered and his hopes wrecked?
Sorry Namal. The right royal horsedrawn carriage you thought would come someday, will not arrive for you for such a carriage doesn’t exist. The best-laid plans of sire and son have already been disposed of by the sovereign people of Lanka. They now demand their leaders must be schooled and skilled to rule.
The country is no longer the Rajapaksa family firm.