SUNDAY PUNCH 3
“Colomba sanniya coming sweet’ walking all the way from Kandy to the capital. Her figure was over twenty million people. That’s more than Lanka’s entire population.
The more realistic figure according to independent observers was a modest 4,000 or so walking from Kandy replaced by similar groupings from district to district. No more than 30,000 brought from different parts of the island walked the final lap of 6 miles from Kiribathgoda to Colombo’s Lipton Circus.
But then, like time and space, numbers are infinite, so who's counting? own ambition which was to exert her dominance over the region as the new Asian superpower.
China did what commercial banks do to defaulters. She called in the loans given to the Rajapaksa regime. Ex parate execution. And the cash-strapped Sirisena regime, heir to the coffers which the Rajapaksa regime had left bare with their squander, waste and corruption had no alternative but to bend the knee, proffer the bowl, face reality and kowtow to China’s ultimatum.
As far as Lanka’s pathetic beseeching to China not to demand her pound of flesh went, China’s terse reply was ‘no port city, no dice’. And her strategy paid off. Upon his return from Beijing in April, Ranil Wickremesinghe announced the port city project was on again, though renamed as Financial City.
The Joint Opposition sees no reason to condemn this double take on the part of the Government after the Lankan Prime Minister received a bone-breaking panda hug from the Chinese to make him see financial reason and renege on his pre-election promise to scrap the port city. That is because bowing to Chinese pressure has been the norm for the Rajapaksa regime.
Neither do they criticise the reasons why the UNP prime minister, environmentalists, legal experts and India were all against the port city project.
For joint opposition MP, the former Education Minister Bandula Gunawardena, for instance, anything is good if made in China. On Wednesday he stated the project was launched by the Chinese President. “How can they suspend it just because India told them to do so?” he asked.
But when questioned about the shortcomings of the first agreement signed by the previous government and the detrimental clauses in it to Lanka, Bandula Gunawardena stated the agreement was not presented in Parliament and therefore he didn’t see the contents. Isn’t it bizarre that a senior minister of the Rajapaksa cabinet should now say that he had not been told