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| 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.
