Bomb politics

Chief Government Whip and Minister of Highways Johnston Fernando, a devout Catholic himself, has called upon President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to find out whether there is a conspiracy behind what he calls ‘bombs in churches’. He has made this call following the recent detection of an unexploded grenade inside All Saints Church, Colombo 08. The government seems to be carrying out a counterattack on the political and propaganda fronts.

Immediately after the commencement of police investigations into the grenade incident, the government drew a great deal of flak. The police were accused of having examined only part of the CCTV footage obtained from the church, and arrested the wrong person—a worker at the shrine. A group of Catholic priests led by Archbishop of Colombo His Eminence Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith revealed, at a media briefing, that a person carrying a shopping bag had entered the church in the afternoon, put something on the floor near a table and left, but the police had not cared to trace him. They released the full CCTV footage to the media much to the embarrassment of the police and the government.

The Opposition moved in, pledged solidarity with the Church leaders, frowned on the manner in which the investigations were being carried out.

And, then, something unexpected happened.

The police hit pay dirt, in a manner of speaking. Investigations led them to a suspect in the Panamure area. He was arrested and interrogations revealed something astonishing. He said he had planted the bomb at the behest of a retired Medical Officer of Health Dr. Shirley Herath from Piliyandala. The doctor, 75, was arrested, and he has made a statement to the Magistrate in camera besides what the government calls a confession to the police. This has emboldened the government to go on the offensive, as can be seen from its Chief Whip’s above-mentioned call.

Minister Fernando has demanded to know why those who are asking the government to trace the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday attacks have chosen to remain silent on the mastermind behind the recent grenade incident. He is craftily trying to use the All Saints Church incident to silence their critics on a campaign to have the Easter Sunday bombing mastermind/s brought to justice.

Bombs and political upheavals

The government has got hold of something to beat the Opposition with, in retaliation for the latter’s efforts to use the All Saints Church incident to wrong-foot the ruling SLPP politically. The SJB has also been making a lot of political mileage by cranking up pressure on the government to find out Easter Sunday bombing mastermind.

The SLPP capitalized on the Easter Sunday attacks to turn the tables on the Yahapalana government, and the SJB is determined to pay the government back in the same coin by turning public opinion against the SLPP over the latter’s failure to conduct a thorough probe into the attacks on churches and hotels in 2019.

There is hardly anything that does not get politicized in this country, where bombs and politics have been intertwined during the last several decades. In fact, bombs have even caused regime changes. What marked the beginning of the end of the UNP’s 17-year-long rule in 1994 was also a bomb blast.

The assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa by an LTTE suicide bomber at Armour Street, Colombo, on May 01, 1993, sealed the then UNP government’s fate, and made the rise of the SLFP possible. Gamini Dissanayake, who had left the UNP to form the DUNF returned to the UNP’s fold, after Lalith Athulathmudali’s assassination, which was blamed on the Premadasa government, but there was hardly anything he could do to prevent the UNP’s downfall. His return also led to a bitter internal dispute with the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe clashing with him.

The SLFP as the main constituent of the People’s Alliance (PA) coalition, under the leadership of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (CBK) recovered lost ground fast. CBK became the Chief Minister of the Western Province in 1993, and there was no stopping her thereafter. She became the Prime Minister in August the following year and President two months later.

It was also a bomb blast that helped the PA consolidate its power in the parliament. An LTTE suicide bomber killed the UNP presidential candidate and Opposition Leader Gamini Dissanayake and several key UNP seniors in 1994. Odds were against Dissanayake in the race, but he would certainly have given President CBK a good run for her money if he had not been assassinated, for he was a seasoned political dealmaker, and the PA had only a wafer-thin majority in the parliament. Even Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was nowhere near as skilled or popular as Dissanayake, succeeded in toppling the PA government in 2001. There is reason to believe that if not for his untimely death, Dissanayake would have achieved that goal much earlier, and CBK would not have been able to obtain 62% of votes at the 1994 presidential election. Dissanayake’s assassination led the UNP to field his widow, Srima, as its presidential candidate, and she was no match for Prime Minister CBK.

The PA’s popularity was on the wane towards 1999, when CBK advanced the presidential election. UNP presidential candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe was campaigning hard, and the election was a closely contested one. And, then, an LTTE suicide bomber targeted CBK in front of the Colombo Town Hall after her final campaign rally; she survived the blast but received serious injuries and lost vision in one eye. The incident triggered a huge sympathy vote for CBK, who won a second term.

Bombs again, but unexploded

It was thought that bombs would cease to be a determining factor in Sri Lankan politics after the end of the war. The killing of Prabhakaran on the battlefield and the elimination of the LTTE’s military muscle helped rid the country of bomb attacks on civilian targets for about a decade. Complacency is said to kill, and Sri Lanka realized the validity of this truism in April 2019, when a group of Islamic terrorists blew themselves up at three churches, three hotels and an inn. These attacks propelled national security to the forefront much to the advantage of the SLPP, whose leaders had given political leadership to the country’s successful war against the LTTE. They had already weakened the Yahapalana government by sweeping the Local Government polls in April 2018, but the political fallout of the Easter Sunday bombings gave a tremendous boost to the SLPP’s presidential campaign with people overwhelmingly supporting the war-winning Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the fray.

One of the main election pledges of the SLPP was to bring all those responsible for the Easter Sunday attacks to justice, and everybody expected it to dig deeper and trace the masterminds behind the heinous crime. But it has not been able to make good on that promise so far, and hence the consternation of the Catholic community, especially the church leaders, who are on the warpath. The detection of a grenade at one of the most popular Catholic shrines made them feel threatened again, and it is only natural that they became panicky, demanded a thorough probe into the incident and took on the police and the government when they felt investigations were not heading in the right direction. It is a pity that the government and the police failed to act in such a manner as to make the Catholics feel secure.

If investigators had cared to examine the entire CCTV footage obtained from All Saints Church, and initiate a thorough probe with the church leaders being kept informed of its progress, the political blowback of the incident could have been averted.

The Opposition cannot be faulted for taking up the grenade incident and ratcheting up pressure on the government to get to the bottom of it, but the involvement of politicians in a campaign that should have been best left to the church leaders has led to the politicization of the issue to a considerable extent with the government being able to use the breakthrough in the investigations into the All Saints Church incident to score political points and muddy the water where its failure to find out the masterminds of the Easter Sunday tragedy is concerned. After all, this is Sri Lanka, where there is hardly anything devoid of politics—religion included.