Sara is also one of my heros after he fought that lone battle in the courts to stop northern and eastern Tamils from being evicted from Colombo. However, I think Rajiva Wijesinha has a point when he says that some of the positions Sara takes are knee-jerk ones (these are my words not RWs) which are not fully thought out. I think this frequently happens when progressives feel embattled; they become entrenched in their views and often do not even try to find out all the facts before rushing to draw conclusions because they are so sure who the bad guys are. In this regard, I think you guys should not only be discussing the sovereignty of the nation but the sovereignty of NGOs in Sri Lanka because I do think you allow your donors to set the agenda for you far too much. Why do you always have to look for the initiative to be taken by the UN or a Gareth Evans? This is something which would never happen in India because activists there are much more conscious about figuring out issues for themselves by themselves.

And on the issue of Mani’s attractiveness. Have you ever seen her in action at a party, Eleka? Believe me, she is one confident woman who manipulates her beauty to great advantage (in fact, when I first met her, I thought Weerakoon was her doting doddering husband and she was, not surprisingly, looking for younger fodder!) and as someone who has done the same, I don’t see any thing wrong with that. I just don’t cry about it afterwards, I just sock it to them where it hurts!

Even setting aside the preceding unauthored articles with unattributed sources spilling the beans on the ICES in the Nation and other papers, I think, to put it charitably, that this would be a fairly basic understanding of how the media works and how it’s used.

I don’t think character attestations are any less “insinuative” than the acknowledgement of what everyone knows; that there is a struggle going on here for control of the ICES, people are making claims on it and its Colombo director has been effectively expelled from Sri Lanka. To read Jeganathan’s interview, one would think that the latter episode was merely epiphenomenal – it doesn’t even warrant a mention. So given that he’s a person, as has been noted in other interviews, who chooses his words carefully, I choose to read this as intentional.

It is ambiguous and, worse, insinuative. It leads the reader immediately to the desired and UNFOUNDED conclusion of the first commentator that, “If the recent interview with one of the main protagonists in the past weekend’s The Nation is anything to go by, there is now a conscious attempt to shift the agenda to discussion of altogether more purely “professional” issues – re the financial predicament of the ICES, its internal structure etc…Dr. Sara’s piece has the virtue of reminding us what this all really about. The calling in of the CID and the cancellation of Dr Mani’s visa were not merely collateral.”

Personally, being a friend of Pradeep Jeganathan’s and finding it impossible to reconcile the man I know with the gossipy allegations that are being levelled against him, I thought it was a good thing that he responded to the allegations made against him in Bradman Weerakoon’s interview on the Sunday before. There were few explicit accusations made, and he responded to them, in a very convincing way, I thought.

It is unhelpful to anybody’s understanding of the situation to beat around the bush. And, this article does that.

If the recent interview with one of the main protagonists in the past weekend’s The Nation is anything to go by, there is now a conscious attempt to shift the agenda to discussion of altogether more purely “professional” issues – re the financial predicament of the ICES, its internal structure etc…Dr. Sara’s piece has the virtue of reminding us what this all really about. The calling in of the CID and the cancellation of Dr Mani’s visa were not merely collateral.

Two further points.
As I understand it, the ICES association with the GCR2P was for the purposes of research, debate and discussion of the concept of R2P, ie critical intellectual scrutiny. So this is an issue of the policing of intellectual space and freedom. It is the very possibility of such critical intellectual activity that has been undermined from “within” as it were by those who would term themselves progressive. A very dangerous precedent.

Second, the use of proxies in the media. Dr. Mani was targeted on the principle of her vulnerability as a foreign woman of south Indian descent. Vide much of the unashamedly xenophobic, racist, sexist and xenophobic media coverage from the usual suspects. If one is to understand this as a well-planned putsch, and I have too much of an estimation for the machinatory abilities of its authors not to, then it would seem that there was a simple division of labour between the self-styled progressives and the chauvinists.