And Then They Ruled Happily Ever After?
Photo courtesy of Twitter Think of it as the Rajapaksa fairy tale. Mother Lanka is captured by the messy and wobbly monster called Democracy. The Rajapaksa brothers and sons rescue her by…
Author: Tisaranee Gunasekara
The Rajapaksa Tidal-wave and the Anti-Rajapaksa Tsunami-wall
The Rajapaksas are in a hurry. They have a constitution to make and a country to remake. Currently, the road to both destination seems as wide and as clear as a super-highway….
Stopping the Landslide
Basil Rajapaksa (Daily FT – 29.7.2020) Basil Rajapaksa is the Rajapaksa family’s thinking man. Unlike his brothers and nephews, he doesn’t shoot his mouth off. His remarks should be taken seriously, because,…
The Night on the Horizon
Phillip Larkin (Going) That was Fort magistrate Ranga Dissanayake speaking in open court, on June 24th 2020. The pictures the CID officials wanted to show possible witnesses just before an identity parade…
Politicising Archaeology, Militarising Virtue, Gaslighting the Electorate
Photo by Eranga Jayawardena/AP Photo via HRW Arundathi Roy (Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy – The New York Review of Books – 3.9.2018) The Eastern province is the most ethno-religiously pluralist…
Election against Democracy
Photo by Tharaka Basnayaka/NurPhoto via Getty Images from It is a modern morality tale about the dangers of misusing the military, of militarising civilian tasks, of expecting generals to handle pandemics. By…
The President in the Pandemic
Photo courtesy NewsInAsia “…by tomorrow, everything will already look different; by tomorrow, everything will already feel different.” – Viktor Klemperer () It was October 1348. Bubonic plague, known to posterity as the…
A bell tolls for the world
Image courtesy WHO Frank M Snowdon (Epidemics and Society – from the Black Death to the Present) This week, Chinese authorities heaped praise on ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, absolving him of the charge…
En route to Promised Land
Image via TRT World “Let me bow before you my country, where It is ordained that none will walk the streets with his head held high.” Faiz (Let me bow before you)…
The work begins
Photo by AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena via Yahoo! News “If we lift the hideous rags of History, we find this: hierarchy versus equality and order versus liberty.” – Éric Vuillard (The Order Of…
The Return
Photo courtesy the President’s Twitter account “As if our democracy was nothing but a short-lived dream,” says Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa in her new documentary dealing with the slow unravelling of democracy…
The Aftermath
AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena via Yahoo News Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Interview with the ITN – 24.2.2010) If Gotabaya Rajapaksa wins the presidency, he and his family will have two priorities: secure the premiership for…
Helping Gotabaya to murder democracy?
AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena via Yahoo News Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Interview with Chris Morris of the BBC) In 2015, a majority of Lankans voted to give themselves a democratic government. Do we vote to…
Asking the Future
Photograph courtesy ‘The Brother’s Grip‘, Global & Mail, by Ishara Kodikara, AFP ### The past is what Gotabaya Rajapaksa invokes when he tells us to vote for him. In his glitzy…
Is there a Gotabaya-wave? Can it be broken?
Image from “Sri Lanka: Reconciling and Rebuilding”: Framing the lies What would a Gotabaya Rajapaksa Presidency look like (Economist Intelligence Unit – 11.8.2019) Saviours need crises, not the average inflation-unemployment…