This right royal election BY NEVILLE DE SILVA

Don’t get me wrong. This is no reference to those I used to call the messy types who emerged from various nooks and crannies to collect their precious ministerial certificates and other types of authoritative ‘parchment’ papers that elevated them to positions of importance.

Several of them came from a school by the Race Course in Colombo which gave rise to a joke that had the letters FRCS to distinguish them from the hoi polloi who held minor or secondary ministerial posts in the government.

The FRCS ( Former Royal College Students, not some medical degree) was supposed to instil in the Yahapalana Government such intellectual worth that Maithripala Sirisena could not keep track of all the shenanigans that went on under his nose.

With this right royal mess -- as I used to say for convenience not to mention accuracy -- going on inside and outside such holy and sometimes unholy places as the cabinet, Sirisena smelled a rat -well rats, if one may be excused for resorting to the plural.

Now that was not too difficult, I mean smelling a rat. There were thousands upon thousands of political and other rats scurrying around gnawing at every tender and tugging at every alma mater to cut corners and prosper. The infestation was so widespread that one could not escape the smell.

So Sirisena began a struggle to win back all those presidential powers that he unwittingly surrendered to parliament and premier thinking that he will go down in history as a benevolent ruler.

Despite the best of presidential intentions it did not turn out that way. If he intended to retire to Polonnaruwa it misfired. Royal College (Polonnaruwa) and Royal College ( Colombo) were engaged in pitched political battle that eventually devoured each other.

The roads in Colombo and to Polonnaruwa are littered with the remnants of Royalists of both sides. Maybe someday there will be monuments erected to those who fell in political battle, heroes in the war to preserve Sri Lanka’s democracy, though it was hardly the issue which brought them face to face like the armies of Brutus/ Cassius and Mark Anthony in the field at Philippi.

Within days the parliamentary election will be upon us. With all the cacophony over medical regulations, social distancing, violations of electoral laws and PHIs going on strike continue, this election lacks public flavour.

So much so that some veteran battlefield heroes like Achilles are sulking in their tents nursing their political wounds.

But what makes Election 2020 interesting is not the manifestos belatedly waved before the people, promises that this country will be turned on its head and all the corruption, bribery and social ills will be eliminated with one fell swoop when the new legislature replaces the old with perhaps some of the same old faces.

If yahapalana government was characterised by an overwhelming Royal presence in governing circles at the expense of the Polonnaruwa lot that was fighting a defensive battle to keep its powers alive, it is all different today.

If the yahapalana Royals were so by name, those who have come to the fore in the last couple of weeks or so, are Royal by lineage, if one might describe it as that.

Suddenly and without any prior notice, the Civil Aviation Authority and the Tourism Authority decided to seek all available information relating to King Ravana.

What still remains unexplained is why this inordinate hurry to announce a research project to put King Ravana, who the Indians call Sri Lanka’s “demon king” and Sri Lankans almost deify as an highly educated and benevolent ruler, in the public eye a couple of weeks before the parliamentary election.

I can understand if in the name of Ravana, who Sri Lankan’s believe is a great and respected ruler, some government scholarships were offered to young aeronautical students to complete their studies in Pakistan or some other South Asian country.

That might anger our Indian neighbours who dismiss King Ranava as an abductor for flying away with Indian King Rama’s wife. Such things did happen even several millennia ago and things apparently have got worse now, what with forces of law and order too getting in to the act of abduction.

Okay, so as the Indians say Ravana had the audacity to cross into India, steal Sita and hurry back to wherever he parks his dandu monara it was indeed a dirty trick.

After been galvanised into action by Sri Lankan authorities urgently calling us poor chaps not to sell our waste paper to the bothal karaya, one was determined to do some good for King and Country -- I mean our high flying monarch and the elected rulers.

It seems to me that the Indians waited patiently all these millennia to get their own back at their tiny neighbour who insulted them by stealing their Queen Sita without even a by-your-leave.

It might have been more courteous I would think if the two kings had a brief conversation over taking Sita for a holiday to Sri Lanka where some enterprising tour operators have now launched a tourist trail called “Ramayana Trail” or some such enterprising tour.

But that is not what concerns me. There are thousands of students at Indian universities and elsewhere making a deep study of Indo- Sri Lankan affairs, This is especially so since various regional and global powers have started stirring the waters of the Indian Ocean and shaking the moorings of our little island.

I would venture most humbly to say that many of our experts in geopolitics seem to have missed a point. India has waited 5000 years or more to get its own back on Lanka.

They waited till 1987 to drop plane loads of parippu in Sri Lanka’s north to humiliate the island- nation for abducting an Indian princess. I have no idea whether Queen Sita ate chick peas or parippu.

But I understand from very reliable sources that the local populace enjoyed it immensely and waved every time an Indian air force plane passed overhead even if it was a fighter jet accompanying a parippu- dropping aircraft.

But this is not the only Royal issue suddenly raised at this election. More recently in Kurunegala there was a ruckus about the supposed demolition of a building that had been erected in the time of King Buvenakabahu 11.

All this goes back some years and now this election has come up with two separate issues that concern royalty. First there is this sudden interest in Ravana and what kind of a king he was depends on whether he is being looked at from a Sri Lankan or Indian perspective. Was he a good and benevolent ruler as the Sri Lankans describe him or a “demon king” as Indians call him?

The more recent squabble over the Buvenakabahu building in Kurunegala is small change ( as they say) compared to what the archaeological search into King Ravana will dig up in the years to come though the study is limited to five years.

But why on earth was this considered a priority so shortly before the elections? Is there a new Ravana due to emerge? When would be the Second Coming?

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard from where he moved to London and worked for the Gemini News Service. Later he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism).

All this goes back some years and now this election has come up with two separate issues that concern royalty. First there is this sudden interest in Ravana and what kind of a king he was depends on whether he is being looked at from a Sri Lankan or Indian perspective. Was he a good and benevolent ruler as the Sri Lankans describe him or a “demon king” as Indians call him?