# A Response to Kumar David’s article titled “ A bright light at the end of the tunnel. Facilitating Rajapaksa’s Departure” appearing on page ten in the Sunday Island; November 30, 2014.

By Surendra Ajit Rupasinghe

Kumar David is a perceptive analytical thinker. He has a wide store of information, a panoramic conceptual landscape and a powerful vocabulary. These attributes are combined with an ability to cut to the bone. In this piece, Kumar David has performed exceptionally as a political surgeon. For all its surgical skills, however, I thought that this piece requires comment for its blunted vision and political gimmickry, if not for the prophetic self- adulation of the author. “Still I am delighted since it is rarely that a prophet enjoys such fulsome validation….And why can’t a prophet be right twice”.

What Kumar David is arguing for is the precise intensity of lazer-targeted radiation, just the measured, graduated amount of radiation to be delivered at the right time, so the patient won’t overdose, collapse and die. He has prescribed what is most desperately required to keep a tottering Capitalist State and a cancerous feudal-colonial social system and political order alive- and kicking. It is a project to regenerate a Comprador Capitalist State and ruling class that survives and thrives on imperialist profit and plunder. He wishes to see a unified country under a unitary State ruled by a new ruling class coalition that would better facilitate imperialist, neo-liberal penetration and plunder. The oppressed Tamil nation and the Moslem and Hill Country nationalities will just have to stand in line and wait until their problems and issues could be addressed in due time. The toiling suffering masses being thrown into abject poverty, indebtedness, degradation and misery will also have to take their turns, Just place your faith in Maithripala Sirisena until he becomes the next person to rule the Capitalist Dictatorship and get his act together. Just wait until he abolishes the Executive Presidency and restores democracy and good governance. All will be hunky-dory in Paradise Isle. That is the “bright light at the end of the tunnel” that Kumar David envisions through his heartfelt endorsement of Maithripala Sirisena as the next Executive President. Now, it may be that at present and in the immediate future, Maithripala Sirisena represents the only bourgeois alternative to the Rajapakse Dictatorship. He has captured the need of the suffering masses and of good honest people who overwhelmingly desire to see an end to the Rajapakse dictatorship. If, and to the extent that he honors his pledge to the people to dismantle the chauvinist-militarist-fascist state apparatus and establish a pluralist, secular democratic State he should be supported. To the extent he capitulates to the chauvinist- supremacist-hegemonic agenda within and outside his coalition, he should be exposed and opposed. This is in opposition to placing blind faith in an idealized, mystified, personified image of Maithripala Sirisena as the savior of democracy and freedom that Kumar David decrees in all his prophetic wisdom. Maithripala’s own record will speak for itself. He celebrated the war that resulted in the political subjugation, territorial hijacking and military occupation of the Tamil nation and participated at the victory parades with great dignity and pride. He defended his dictator with utmost loyalty and passion when he voted in favor of the 18th Amendment and when the former Chief Justice was hacked to pieces by a kangaroo court in parliament. It was under his watch as Minister of Health that it was hijacked by a parasitic crony mafia clan who made astronomical wealth through bribery and corruption and caused public health services to ruin and rot. Kumar David’s prescriptions are clear. He prescribes that the surgical operation is centered, and limited, to the superstructure. Basically, the prescription contains constitutional and institutional bourgeois democratic reforms to ensure good governance- in the style of the “19th Amendment to the Constitution” proposed by the JHU and adopted by Ranil Wickremasinghe. The fact of the matter is that the JHU (and the JVP) will agree on such a clean-up act to wipe off the blood from the Capitalist State. But they shall surely draw the firing line on the question of defending the supremacist-hegemonic Sinhala-Buddhist unitary State. The prevailing unitary State is viewed as the supreme prize of the military victory, the prize for which the Rana Viruwo had fought and sacrificed. Any dilution of Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy and centralized hegemony will be declared to be an act of treason. The JHU has joined the Maithripala Sirisena bandwagon only to advance its mission and agenda, being that Mahinda Rajapakse had proved to be a corrupt, murdering intolerable mafia despot who has endangered the sacred mission and betrayed its cause.