The Rajpal Abeynayake Column:

Ranil's bugle call to the nation is with a siren

In Greek mythology, Scylla and Charybdis were two temptresses that lured seafarers to their deaths by their singing. Hence, the derivation of the word siren.

When he holds onto a siren, Ranil Wickremesinghe thinks he is a tempter, or better still a temptress in the manner of the original two sirens. When he bends his body like Beckham, and holds onto that siren, he can hardly conceal the hope that these sirens will toot until they burst, heralding LTTE orgies of bloodletting on Sinhala civilians.

Ranil wants to spell suzerainty with a siren. He wants Mulathivu to have some sirens to save the LTTE from the army.

As long as he plays siren-aid, he should have posed for those photographs in a sylph mermaid suit. Won't do for a temptress to be dressed in a pair of loose fitting trousers? Wickremesinghe's sirens are symbolic of the regime he never had.

To the large mass who never voted for him he says "you guys should have voted for me and we would never have had to distribute these sirens." But the Tigers kyboshed the election in the Wanni, for Ranil, which is the main reason he has to put on his temptress face today. He was kyboshed, because the Tigers did not want a man who was typecast as a man for peace as opposed to Rajapaksa, the other candidate, who was typecast as a man for war.

Why didn't the Tigers want the man of peace?? Elementary logic would have it that they wanted to declare war. They thought it was easier to declare war with a man of war Rajapaksa than a man of peace, because they could blame the war on him.

Rajapaksa turned out a man of peace, as Ranil would have been if he won. Yet, the Tigers declared war on him, which only means by simple logic that if Ranil, the man of peace was declared elected, he would have still been distributing sirens anyway.

The Colombo elite to some extent heeds Ranil's siren call, which is basically to tempt them to say "if Ranil was elected, this would not have happened." Prabhakaran kyboshed the election and wished that he would be able to blame the war on Rajapaksa. When that couldn't be done as Rajapaksa turned out to be a man of peace, they declared war on him anyway. But the Colombo elite goes one better than Prabhakaran. They continue to blame the war on Rajapaksa, because they despise the man who deprived them of the Ranil induced capitalist orgy.

Ranil's loudest siren however, should have gone to the UNP headquarters. From there, every UNPer could be given fair warning, that if Ranil Wickremesinghe leads the UNP, this script of Ranil having to sound his own siren after being mauled at each election will have to be repeated. Ranil never distributed sirens to intelligence cadres who were preyed upon by the LTTE after he signed the ceasefire agreement with Prabhakaran.

These cadres were systematically tortured to death, but in place of a siren he had silence. So when he now distributes sirens, a little trawl through Ranil's history would prove that he is not doing so with the hope of saving Sinhala civilians, but with the hope of saying "I told you so" to Sinhala civilians, in order to save whatever is left of his political career.

Ranil is a nihilistic mountaineer. He tosses about with sirens, with the idea that somehow the system that sees him correctly as a political pouf, will destroy itself, after which he could eventually climb that political peak that has been eluding him now for centuries.

Essentially, Ranil's siren give-away was a symbolic exercise, and a shambolic exercise because he never had the interests of the border village Sinhalese at stake, because if he did he wouldn't have sent so many intelligence cadres to their deaths at the hands of the LTTE without a murmur leave alone a siren call.

But his own symbolism is placing him, wittingly or otherwise, at odds with those who are most unlike him in this country. Ranil is a political pouf, they are politically virile. Ranil is elite and supercilious in manner, they do their politics in the barracks and in the back alleys.

Ranil is a neo-liberal, they are economic purists. Ranil now distributes sirens for symbolism and in short order might replace the elephant as the UNP symbol with the siren - they have the bell as the symbol.

The 'Ranil siren' is the ultimate silencer, he thinks, of the JVP's pealing bells. Quite apart from the fact that Wickremesinghe succeeds in looking like an absolute kook doling out sirens he runs the danger of dissolving the opposition into irrelevance with his kind of posturing. If the opposition becomes irrelevant, the government may be poised to become more assertive for its own good that's only natural.

Some feared that with Ranil Wickremesinghe, they would get the worst kind of dictatorial President in power if he was elected, because he had that kind of past.

Then he wasn't elected. Ranil Wickremesighe may in time produce a dictatorial administration but only because he lost the presidential election, and installed the other man in power.

Then he enfeebled himself so much, and became a siren-aid man who postured himself into a position of irrelevance. By having done so, he might write the opposition eventually into irrelevance just as he almost wrote the Sri Lankan state into irrelevance with the lopsided ceasefire agreement. (At this point, refer the statistics on the crossovers.) That may be the script.

With no viable opposition, we have to depend almost entirely on the good offices of a President to keep himself from being dictatorial. How the script will ultimately be written only history will tell, but definitely there is no contribution from Ranil Wickremesinghe to determine the way it emerges, even though he might qualify for the award of best actor in a comedy role when that script is finally acted out...