Daily News Editorial

MR and the kalu suddhas

29 September 2016

Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has called the UNP a party of the pukka sahibs kalu suddho and bemoaned the fate that has befallen the Sri Lanka Freedom Party who he said had thrown in their lot with such a party, going against the principles of the founders of the SLFP which represented the pancha maha balavegaya, in stark contrast to the highly westernized UNP which pursues the capitalist doctrine and anti-people policies.

Speaking at a temple ceremony in Yatinuwara, Rajapaksa said, as a party that rose against the oppression, the lifestyles and policies of the pukka sahibs the SLFP should be the last party to have anything to do with the UNP who has been identified with the kalu suddhas from its very inception. Rajapaksa no doubt may be harking back to the UNP of the days of the Senanayakes and Kotalawalas who no doubt were epitomes of the wealthy capitalist class whose demeanour and way of life were not much different to the colonial rulers who had only just left our shores. That is primarily the reason why SWRD Bandaranaike broke away with the UNP (so it was said), founded the SLFP and won an overwhelming mandate in 1956 to usher in his social revolution and Rajapaksa, it could be verily said, was one of the children of 56 panas haye daruwo.

This set the benchmark for all subsequent SLFP governments to ride to power exploiting the zombie like psyche of the rural, illiterate and the uninitiated electorate. Rajapaksas was no exception picking up the threads from where his predecessors left off continuing to din into the largely brainwashed electorate more of the same nationalist diet, taking the flood of the subsequent war victory at its tide.

That was of course Rajapaksa the politician. But Rajapaksa the layman was not exactly averse to savouring at least some of the aspects of the culture of the kalu suddhas he readily labeled the UNP as being, in the same way that Wimal Weerawansa who raves and rants over the designs of Uncle Sam on Sri Lanka had no misgivings of reveling in the delights of Disney Land, with spouse in tow, sometime ago.

To begin with, Mahinda Rajapaksa who was an Old Boy of Richmond, Thurstan and Nalanda had no qualms of admitting his offspring to the elite Anglicised School by the Sea. Neither did he frown upon them taking into an elitist sport such as Rugby (essentially a game of the kalu suddhas) of which later on, as President of the country, he went out of his to lend patronage, even naming a tournament after his ancestral home in the deep south, for his trio of sons to indulge in to their hearts content.

Rajapaksa the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist, untainted by the influence of the pukka sahibs also had no hesitation in looking the other way when his offspring took to the speed track, and what is more, stage night races in close proximity to the Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy in defiance of the advise of the chief prelates. The former President to whom anything western was anathema also had no compunction in meeting former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the latter’s holiday retreat and also being the chief guest at his (Rajapaksa's) son’s naval passing out parade at Dartmount, an event replete with colonial trappings so repugnant to Rajapaksa’s indigenous tastes.

One also recalls the former President's aborted bid to deliver a lecture at the Oxford Union, of course at the invitation of the world renowned university. Why undertake such a venture at the very institution that produced a long line of Sri Lankan leaders from the UNP which he described as kalu suddhas. True, his own founder leader S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, was also a product of Oxford and so was Felix. But can MR honestly say that they did not have the attributes and lead lifestyles of the kalu suddhas, he so abhors?

It is time the former President sheds his hypocrisy and admit to himself that he was not honest when he labeled the UNP kalu suddhas while leading a similar lifestyle or at least following in the same vein, out of the public eye. The UNP had won landslide electoral victories despite such labels being attached to the Grand Old Party.

True, the UNP had this handicap of being identified as a party catering only to the privileged class in the past. But it has long shed this veneer. The party had undergone significant reforms, especially under the late President Premadasa that has made it a truly people oriented entity today. The UNP under Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has a wide acceptance among the larger electorate which may be a worrisome prospect for Mahinda Rajapaksa. The former President has already lost the minority vote by his rabid nationalist stance and now stands to lose the not inconsiderable vote of the English educated minority through his kalu suddha remark.