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Thursday, January 18, 2018

Dear Mr. President,




Cartoon by Awantha Artigala
 
I do not have to touch my husband’s feet every morning to prove my loyalty to him. What you have not understood is the fact that this is not about liquor. It is about the equal status that this country ought to be ensuring its women – the country that produced a female prime minister, president and a chief justice, with the former two being part of your own political party. If the respective majorities proved with their suffrage that they were fit enough to rule, perhaps you are of the opinion that buying liquor is even more serious than governing a country.


Your notion of ideal wife or ideal woman is not the ideal notion. If a woman can have an employment and can earn a salary, what disclaimer in democracy prevents her from spending her money? One would not be surprised if your next move would be to station cops at liquor stores to monitor whether women buy liquor. What is your good governance if it discriminates a person due to his/her gender?


For God’s sake this is not about buying liquor. I don’t even drink.


If you wanted to show your cabinet that you are still the boss, you should have resorted to a more assertive tactic. Drinking or not drinking is a personal choice. If you thought that by resorting to such theatrics-- something one would expect from your dramatic predecessor not from you-- that you would retain the favor of the Buddhist clergy and the Sinhala Buddhist nationalistic people- you never had it, to begin with.


This is not about liquor.


Increasing female political representation or the look of it alone cannot address the fundament loopholes in the empowerment of women in this country. How can you let justice take its due course when justice is not made fierce enough to punish the perpetrators? A teenage rape-victim had to hang herself and the rapists would only have to serve a jail term and come out to plunder another innocent from her future and here you are, only worried about women buying liquor.


Where is your hunger to do right by the people when the more pressing issues are brought to the table?


You do not have to harp on how Buddhist you are or quote all the ‘pitakas’ you seem to know when you cannot practice what you have been preaching. What does ‘thanha’ mean to you when you who abjured the supreme powers of the executive presidency and brought in the 19th amendment as one of the first pieces of legislation with you at the helm, expected others to follow the laws brought in by you and needed another party to clarify whether it applies to you?


What were you thinking?


Hypocrisy has marred good statesmen and now you are in the muck. You need to appease the disgruntled party members threatening to break-free. You need to pacify the angry cabinet who reports to someone else. Safeguard thieves and drape criminals in white. When you work for that pat on the back from all of them, you forget those ought not to be forgotten. The people—those who voted or not voted for you. When a citizenry adopts you, you become their president—this you have forgotten too soon.


When you were appointed, people thought you were a breath of fresh air and now they deny in the open that they voted for you.


How can you get away with the hackneyed excuse of not knowing until reading it on the following day’s paper? For a head of state your information research teams should be shown the nearest door. It goes without saying that the country has had better-informed heads of state, far better informed that they knew where the injuries were even before the crime was committed.


No, we do not forget that era that easily. And it shouldn’t be your black backdrop to prove how very white you are.


Like the regimes before you, you walked over coffins and cadavers to reach the helm. Disentombed and reburied, their skeletons are in your election-time spooky-house, displayed as reminders and still shamelessly buying time to do justice to the dead.


Perhaps, when all is said and done, you will apologize from the nation for this betrayal—not like a cry baby who often forgets that he is the executive president of the country—but like a mature human being, for not delivering what was promised, for yielding to pressure and for being too distracted by bras and liquor to see your country marching to its ruin.


And, no Mr. President, this is not about liquor.

 

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