If the peaceful protests were not enough for course correction, violent flare-ups of public anger seemed to have done the trick. So much so, the main witness of the Malwana mansion, over which Basil and Thirukumar Nadesan are charged under the anti-Money Laundering Act, recanted his statement given to a lower court.īut, now even the Rajapaksa holdouts in the judiciary and the bureaucracy are feeling the winds of change. Attorney General had withdrawn a litany of cases against the Rajapaksas and their acolytes. Servile judges have so far given him a leeway.
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A free reign provided to the government would see fast tracked investigations and legal action against many allegations of corruption that Basil is accused of. As the last man standing of the Rajapaksa family, President Gotabaya appeared to have decided to sacrifice the long nursed dynastic ambitions of the family in exchange for a few more months in the office and thereafter a face-saving way out.īasil Rajapaksa, the most controversial member of all Rajapaksas may be the one who would lose the most if the status quo is changed. As it appears, not only Ranil, the president himself is at the receiving end. He won the contest, obtaining 109 votes against 78 by Kaviratne.īasil’s salvo shattered any notion that his brother Gotabaya is comfortably in control of the SLPP. However, Basil Rajapaksa had different calculations: Under his orchestration, the SLPP nominated Ajith Rajapaksa, an SLPP MP as the party’s nominee for the post of deputy speaker. Her appointment would also have signalled a semblance of unity within the parties in Parliament. Kaviratne’s name received the endorsement of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and Dinesh Gunawardene, SLPP stalwart informed the party meeting that the president wished Rohini Kaviratne be the consensus candidate for the post. If appointed, she would have been the first female MP to hold the office, a historic feat that would also have been a face-saving for the SLPP to concur. Last week, Basil showed his hand and aborted Ranil’s plans to appoint Rohini Kaviratne, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SBJ) MP as the deputy speaker through a multi-party consensus. Now, it appears that the real puppet master is brother Basil, who probably has more reasons to keep Ranil guessing than any other member of the old guard. The irony of this arrangement is that after Mahinda Rajapaksa was forced to resign as prime minister due to mass protests, he and the siblings would still rule by proxy. SLPP is now a discredited and spent force, yet still wields the overwhelming Parliamentary majority. Last week, I wrote that the fate of the Ranil Wickremesinghe government would be placed at the mercy of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), a Rajapaksa fiefdom and a grotesque caricature of the old Sri Lankan politics before the ‘Aragalaya’.