Real dimensions of Hindu terror

By now it is clear there had been at least three acts of terrorism by extreme fringe elements of Hindus. It is evident that the ruling Congress Party led by Mrs Sonia Gandhi has decided to focus on this issue to demonise the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Singh (RSS) - the ideological source of the opposition  Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). At the recently concluded 83rd plenary session of the Congress party the RSS was compared to the Nazis. The timing of this 'discovery' to coincide with the opposition campaign to bring the Manmohan Singh government to book for the 2G scam is interesting. The Manmohan Singh government has been in a log jam over the 2G issue which came as the 'Mother of all Scams' after a series of scams have been unearthed. 

Is the Congress Party using the Hindu terror issue in a diversionary tactic to shift the public focus from the scam tainted rule of the Congress Paty led coalition? What are the true dimensions of Hindu terrorism? Of course, if we put these acts of fringe Hindu elements in the same terror basket of Jihadi terrorism, which is a world wide phenomenon, it would be a grave mistake. So the 'silent majority' - mostly made up of Hindus and other religions including Muslims should ponder over this question. Whatever be the provocation, Terrorism should not be used as a tool of political expendiency. So if the Congress Party is indulging in it, as it seems, it would weaken the fight against the scourge of terrorism not only in India but in other countries also; after all India has a population mix of Hindu majority and the second largest number of Muslims living anywhere in the world.

In this respect, Mr B Raman's article on the subject is reproduced here for a better understanding.

CONGRESS (I): DEMONISATION OF THE RSS

B.RAMAN

The exercise initiated by Mrs.Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress (I), and her cohorts at the just concluded 83rd plenary of the Congress (I) to have the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) projected and demonised as a Hindu terrorist organisation comparable to the Nazi groups of World War II vintage and the more recent Islamic terrorist organisations speaks of the mental confusion that prevails at the senior levels of her party. It also highlights the total bankruptcy of thinking and the total indifference to sensitive issues that have become the defining characteristics of the party under her leadership in recent months.

2. It is a fact that some members of the Hindu community had during the last three or four years taken to acts of reprisal terrorism against the Muslim community at Malegaon, Hyderabad and Ajmer. It also seems to be a fact that the Hindus suspected to have been involved in these acts of reprisal terrorism were ideologically close to some of the Hindutva groups, including the RSS. The suspected role of some regional office-bearers of the RSS in motivating those Hindus, who had taken to anti-Muslim terrorism, is presently under investigation.

3. But there has been no evidence so far that the RSS as an organisation had any role in encouraging acts of reprisal against the Muslims or in motivating those who had taken to terrorism. The RSS and its leaders seem to have been as much surprised and embarrassed by the activities of these Hindu elements as other sections of the Hindu society.In the past, there had been instances of some Hindus indulging in acts of sporadic violence against Muslims in moments of public anger, but there were no instances of any Hindu or group of Hindus taking to deliberately planned acts of anti-Muslim terrorism.

4.Such deliberate and pre-planned acts of terrorism by elements in the Hindu community, including one or two officers of the armed forces, have been a recent phenomenon triggered off by a growing anger in sections of the Hindu community over what they perceived as inaction or inadequate action of the Congress (I) controlled Governments in dealing with acts of terrorism by some members of the Indian Muslim community and by Pakistani jihadi organisations sponsored by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

5. These acts of reprisal terrorism by some members of the Hindu community called for two pronged action by the Government. Firstly, the arrest and prosecution of those involved. Secondly, action to address the causes of anger in the Hindu community . Instead of doing so, the Congress (I), by launching an unwise and virulent campaign against the RSS, is going to add to the anger in the Hindu community, large sections of which look upon the RSS as an organisation which has been serving the cause of Hinduism in the land of its origin through its religious, social, cultural and humanitarian work.

6. The Hindus are in an overwhelming majority in this country and they have a right to have organisations such as the RSS to preserve the heritage of their religion and to protect and nourish their religious roots. By demonising the RSS as a terrorist and Nazi-like organisation, the Congress (I) under the leadership of Mrs.Sonia Gandhi seeks to insult millions of Hindus in this country who serve the cause of the RSS and discredit their heritage in the eyes of the rest of the world.

7. The anti-RSS campaign of the Congress (I) will not only add to the already existing anger in sections of the Hindu community,but will also play into the hands of the jihadi terrorists by facilitating their objective of aggravating the divide between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Before this campaign starts further damaging the relations between the two communities, the Congress (I) should stop its demonisation of the RSS, which would prove counter-productive. ( 22-12-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

Time Armed Forces cleaned up their act

The Rediff News last week carried an article titled "The worrying rot in Indian armed forces" by Ajai Shukla which takes a hard look at the deteriorating standards of armed forces leadership in recent years. All armed forces officers and men, both serving and retired, should take a hard look at the article.

There is an urgent need to make the traditional 'holy cows of army' - the generals at the top - more accountable. I totally agree with the views of attributed to General Afsar Karim in the article. The functioning and accountability of two army welfare organisations the AWWA (Army Wives Welfare Organisation) and the AWHO (Army Welfare Housing Organisation) have come under strong criticism in recent years from serving and retired servicemen. They have refused to share their basic information under the cloak they are not a government body but independent societies.

Armed forces have a culture of not airing their dirty linen in public. So servicemen and veterans generally keep mum despite knowing the truth. I think it is time we moved away from the 18th century mindset. It is essential we start introspecting on the reasons for the rot that is setting in within the armed forces. The increasing cases of corruption, 
insubordination, cronyism, violation of laws, and scams in defence procurement need to be ruthlessly handled regardless of the rank of the culprits. Otherwise the quality of leadership will be irrepairably damaged and armed forces will be reduced to the level of a paramilitary or police. And they would lose the esteem they enjoy among the public forever.

Ajai Shukla's hardhitting article of December 14 is reproduced here, courtesy Rediffnews.

The worrying rot in Indian armed forces

On April 27, 2007, while a dazed United States military was being battered by the resurgent insurgency in Iraq, a mid-ranking US Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, published a brutally frank assessment of the failures in American generalship that had led to the bloodying of the world's most powerful military machine.

Writing in the Armed Forces Journal, a private magazine focused on defence, Yingling urged the US Congress to fix accountability for the debacle in Iraq, lamenting that, "As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."

Yingling's article raced across army chat rooms, combat bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military seminar halls. Hard-hitting, incisive, and loaded with statements like, "The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship," the analysis pushed America's senior military leadership towards acknowledging, confronting and acting to fix the problem.
India's armed forces, alas, have neither a Paul Yingling nor a culture of interrogating and addressing serious internal problems.

With revelation after damaging revelation -- including financial misappropriation, sexual misconduct, fake encounters and influence-peddling -- placing troubling question marks over the internal health of India's best-respected institution, not a single serving officer has thrown out a Yingling-style challenge.

Rot at the top?
This silence has endured even through the recent revelations about the improper allocation of multi-crore apartments in Mumbai's tony Colaba area to a bevy of generals and admirals.

The Adarsh Housing Society affair, which has riveted the country's attention, is not just about the apparent abandonment of ethics by three service chiefs and five officers of three-star rank.

Worse, it is about the alleged subversion of army postings to keep Major General Tej Kishen Kaul in Mumbai so that he could keep the file moving while a succession of key military commanders in Mumbai and Pune were handed out flats, allegedly in exchange for their silence.
"Corruption exists mainly within the senior ranks," avers Major General Afsir Karim, a retired paratrooper with a reputation for probity.

"Bad apples manage to get into the organisation after all, the (military's) selection system has no psychological check for integrity. As the officers rise and start getting opportunities to make money, they surround themselves with a coterie of staff officers and subordinates who are quickly subverted the corrupt pull each other up within the system. And from them the rot spreads to other parts of the military."

Echoing this assessment is a former army commander, well-known for his honesty, who ran afoul of his boss after instituting an inquiry into evidently corrupt purchases of equipment.

He describes the insidious disillusionment of idealistic young officers who gradually realise that the values that were catechised during their training are hardly reflected in day-to-day unit life.

In their training academies, officer cadets are indoctrinated with Field Marshal Chetwode's motto: "The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time. The honour, welfare and comfort of the men you command come next. Your own ease, comfort and safety come last, always and every time."
On being commissioned into their units, however, these young lieutenants often encounter a different reality.

An increasing number of units in peace stations focus less on training than on "career-enhancing" activities like officers' mess parties and ladies' club functions, which commanding officers believe would please their bosses or, even better, their bosses' wives.

Meanwhile, youngsters who are posted to the field, or to counter-insurgency operations, come up against a pressure-cooker insistence on success at all costs; after all, the promotions of bosses all the way up the line hinge on operational accomplishment.

With so much at stake, fake encounters and false reports are desperate options for creating an illusory world of success.

'Five-star' culture
Old-school generals say that this new environment of flexible morals and professional dishonesty has inevitably spilled over into the handling of money. Traditionally indifferent, even disdainful, towards money, senior officers are now developing a yen for what the military has always disparaged as the "five-star culture".
"The military had a culture of its own and never felt the need to imitate civilian lifestyles," says General Karim.

"You met civilians, even socialised with them, but you always came back to your mess life. Today, many senior officers want a lifestyle that cannot be supported by military pay and allowances."

Rising alongside the appetite for money, has been the opportunity to gather it illegally.

"The money that an officer handles rises exponentially as he is promoted up the chain," explains a former army commander who prefers to remain unnamed.

"With defence budgets boosted by a growing economy, each of the six field army commanders oversees budgets today that are in the hundreds of crores.
Take the example of the Udhampur-headquartered Northern Command, where the commander, a lieutenant general, controls an annual budget of Rs 2,500-2,700 crore.

Large chunks of this are spent at his sole discretion, including "special financial powers" for Rs 100 crore, and another Rs 15-16 crore for obtaining intelligence about militants.

"I could simply order my staff to give me Rs 20 lakh to pay a political source for important intelligence," says the former army commander. "I wouldn't need to provide proof that I had handed over the money to anyone. I could justify the expenditure simply by stating that I needed a political perspective."

Such opportunities for corruption abound. Northern Command's budget for rations is about Rs 700 crore per year, with another Rs 100 crore allocated for hiring civil transport.

The budget for operational works, constructing bunkers, lighting and temporary housing, is over Rs 250 crore.

And, inexplicably, Northern Command has retained with itself -- despite several attempts to transfer this responsibility to New Delhi -- the job of buying rations for troops deployed on the Siachen Glacier, an annual expenditure of some Rs 40 crore.
Other formations handle smaller budgets. But all these contracts come loaded with the potential to explode into public scandals.

Lieutenant General R K Nanavatty, who headed Northern Command at the start of this decade and was feared and respected for his unwavering rectitude, says that he could see the current crisis coming: "I have always said that the biggest danger for our army was the gradual degradation of moral values. I could see morality eroding and this worried me because trust is the basis of military functioning."

Time for action
A key concern among soldiers, serving and retired, has been the military's lame defence in the face of credible allegations of wrongdoing like those around the Sukhna land scam and the Adarsh scam.

Many believe that frankly acknowledging the problem and taking exemplary action against corruption would protect, perhaps even enhance, the military's public image.
"Why should we wait for the civilian agencies to prove criminal guilt?" asks former army deputy chief, Lieutenant General G D Singh, widely respected for his integrity.

"We have our own code of conduct, which does not rest on court orders or judgements. When an officer is clearly corrupt, we should ostracise him from our community; none of his peers should even speak to him; he should be treated as a pariah."

Considering that officers who were commissioned in the mid-1970s are generals, admirals and air marshals today, it is a paradox that the military often blames the changed background of those who now join as officers for the decline in values and standards.

Far more likely, say the more discerning observers, is the "osmosis of values" that stems from increased interaction -- across all ranks -- with society in general. This takes place in many ways: cantonments, earlier located well outside towns and cities, are now almost indistinguishable from the rapidly expanding civilian colonies that have surrounded them.

The army's growing counter-insurgency commitments bring soldiers into close contact with civilians, and with the institutions of governance.
Meanwhile, the growing reach and intensity of the electronic media beams the civilian world into the remotest military outposts.

Most officers today are keenly aware of the world outside the barracks and are deeply cynical about the declining mores of civilian institutions.

Officers, and even soldiers, ask: With the political class, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police and even the media deeply compromised, how can they point a finger at the military, an institution synonymous with honour and sacrifice? But underlying that question is a more troubling one: With corruption everywhere, is it possible for the military to remain unaffected?

The current army chief, General V K Singh, publicly declared while assuming office last April that restoring the army's "internal health" would be his focus. The general has his task cut out for him.

Sri Lanka Perspectives - November 2010

 By Col R Hariharan (Retd.)

POLITICAL

Swearing of the President

Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa was sworn in as President for a second term on Nov 19, 2010. In a marked departure from the austere swearing-ins of the past, this time it had all the trappings of a coronation. After the swearing-in, colourful celebrations included a military parade with a fly-past of air force jets, a special display by Navy and a cultural display.  The pompous nationwide celebrations with huge cut outs of Rajapaksa showed that orchestration of  Rajapaksa personality cult is well under way and is likely to gather momentum.

Notable foreign representatives on the occasion included Bhutanese Prime Minister Lyonchhen Jigmi Thinley, Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Sang Giuowei and Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Hu Zhengyue, and Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed. India was represented by Minister of State for External Affairs Ms Parmit Kaur. In a clear departure from past practices, the ceremony started with only Buddhist religious observance instead of multi-faith prayers. The main opposition United National Party boycotted the ceremony.

Jumbo cabinet

President Rajapaksa’s new cabinet has been shaped on the basis of constitutional amendments. DM Jayaratne was made be the Prime Minister setting aside media speculations that President’s brother Basil Rajapaksa would be the choice. Basil will now be handling  planning and development portfolio. For the first time a new category of 'senior ministers' with 11 members has been introduced. They included trusted members of his earlier team. In addition to this 61 cabinet ministers and 31 deputy ministers have also been inducted.

Thus in all 104 members out of 161 members of the President’s United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) have been included in the cabinet! He appears to have accommodated as many members as possible in the cabinet to prevent any defection from the ruling coalition. Apparently, political expedience appears to be the priority rather than efficiency of governance.

In spite of such large number of ministers, the President has retained the vital portfolios of defence, finance and planning, ports and aviation and highways under him. The senior ministers have been given other important portfolios indicating though their attendance at cabinet meetings was optional! The President’s strategy appears to be to keep coalition flock together and allow ministers and deputy ministers to perform only nominally. It indicated Rajapaksa’s lack of faith in retaining of the loyalties of the members of his coalition despite his mass popularity and lack of effective opposition.

Tamil politics

Heroes Day celebration: The deafening silence that greeted November 26, the birthday of Velupillai Prabhakaran, which used to be celebrated by the LTTE and its supporters as Maveerar Naal (Heroes Day) in Tamil areas of Sri Lanka showed the extent of disillusionment with the ideal of a separate Tamil Eelam. A former LTTE leader Athavan, now settled in Vanni, in a poignant statement issued on the occasion castigated the Tamil Diaspora for using the name of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers for selfish reasons unmindful of the plight of former cadres and their families in Sri Lanka.

The Tamil Political Parties Forum (TPPF): All Tamil political parties excluding the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) have formed the TPPF to take up issues affecting Tamils in one voice. A TPPF delegation met President Rajapaksa on Nov 26 and handed over a letter expressing their concerns. The TPPF asked the President to find a political solution to the ethnic question within a united Sri Lanka so that Tamil people can fully participate in the governance in the North and East. “The implementation of the 13th amendment in full will be a positive beginning of the political process in this regard,” the TPPF said. The TNA is also said to be in informal touch with the TPPF so that they can come to a political understanding. Presumably this is in preparation of the Northern Provincial Council elections which are likely to be scheduled in March 2011.

DEFENCE

Joint exercise: Sri Lanka army, navy and air force carried out the first ever joint exercise in the last week of Nov 2010. Around 2500 armed forces personnel participated in the exercise code-named 'Cormorant Strike’ carried out along the coast in area Silawaturai, Mannar in Northern Province. According to defence sources Commando Regiment and Special Forces made amphibious landing during the exercise and participated ground operations. The objective of the exercise was to train leaders at different levels in planning, command and decision making . The selection of the Mannar coast for the regiment-group sized exercise across India’s Rameswaram coast is interesting. Probably the exercise was also to send a warning to LTTE’s international elements trying to revise the Eelam separatist movement among the Diaspora.

LTTE massacre of military prisoners: The army has opened a mass grave in Viswamadu jungle in Mullaitivu district where 26 armed forces personnel who were taken prisoner were shot dead by the LTTE were buried. The prisoners included 18 SLN sailors (including two naval officers) and eight army personnel. The naval prisoners were survivors of a LTTE Sea Tiger attack in 2007 in which Navy lost three Dvora craft. The security forces are in the process of identifying the dead. 

Army de-mining program:  The U.S. has donated US$500,000 worth of items including several vehicles, trucks, ambulances and equipment to Sri Lanka Army providing further assistance of de-mining operations underway in the North. India, Japan, Australia and the U.S. are among the countries assisting de-mining operations. While so far 856,203,415 square meters have been de-mined, parts of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu districts still remain to be de-mined.   

FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

Hambantota port inauguration 

President Rajapaksa fresh from a visit to China, formally inaugurated the Hambantota Port on November 18. The just completed Phase-I of the Chinese assisted project was launched in January 2008. The $360 million Phase-I includes a bunker terminal. The Chinese government provided 85% of the funding while the remaining 15% was to be met by the Sri Lanka Ports Authority.  The launch of the second phase of the development of the port is said to have commenced on the same day.

Around 29 companies a majority of them Chinese are reported to have expressed interest in investing in various industries in the Hambantota Port. The Chinese companies have shown interest in manufacture and assembling of automobiles. At present Sri Lanka automobile market is dominated by India and the Chinese entry is likely to pose a stiff competition to the Indians. 

India 

Not to be outdone by China, India is also trying to increase its visibility in Sri Lanka. India’s External Affairs Minister S M Krishna paid a three day visit to Sri Lanka from November 25. He attended the 7^th India-Sri Lanka Joint Commission meeting on November 26 with his Sri Lankan counterpart Prof GL Peiris. According to Indian press note Joint Commission discussions covered all areas of bilateral relevance, including trade, services and investment, development cooperation, science and technology, culture and education. 

Krishna in a media briefing on arrival reminded Sri Lanka on the need for a structured dialogue mechanism with a mutual understanding of both parties in finding a political solution to the ethnic issue. He also said India would continue to assist Sri Lanka on various issues such as resettlement, rehabilitation, de-mining and agriculture development.

He alos inaugurated Indian consulates in Jaffna and Hambantota. While the Jaffna consulate would lessen the hardship of Tamil travellers to India, the Hambantota consulate would facilitate greater trade and investment from India likely when the area around the port develops and marine traffic increases.

Krishna also inaugurated the pilot project to construct 1000 houses for internally displaced people in Vanni. This is a part of India-aided project to construct 50,000 houses. He also flagged off the work on the Medawachchiya-Madhu railway line being constructed by Indian engineers with India’s assistance. Work will also begin simultaneously on the Madhu-Talaimannar and Omanthai-Pallai railway lines, which are being revived with Indian assistance. 

Pakistan President Zardari’s visit

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari paid a four-day state visit to Sri Lanka at the invitation of President Rajapaksa from November 26. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, and Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar and a business delegation accompanied the Pak President.

Following bilateral talks between the two presidents, four agreements relating to visa abolition of diplomatic and official passports, agricultural cooperation, and assistance in Customs matters and agreement on the fields on arts and creative studies were signed on November 28.

November 30, 2010

Reproduced from South Asia Security Trends Vol 4 No 11

Copyright: www.security-risks.com

A China Expert Passes Away

With great regret I am reproducing Mr B Raman's  piece on the sudden death of Mr R Swaminathan at New Delhi today. It is personal loss for me as I benefitted from his immense knowledge and experience in intelligence assessment at the macro level and its impact on national decisionmaking.

We will all miss him and his wise counsel.
R Hariharan
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
A FORMER LEADING CHINA EXPERT OF R&AW PASSES AWAY
 
B.RAMAN

Shri R.Swaminathan, a former leading China expert of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), passed away in a New Delhi hospital in the early hours of the morning of December 8,2010, after suffering a heart attack. He was 78. He was the President and Director-General of the New Delhi based International Institute of Security & Safety Management and Vice-President of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. He had gone to Delhi from Chennai where he was living to attend a meeting of the Institute.

2. Shri Swaminathan joined the Indian Police Service ( IPS) in 1954. After his training in the Central Police Training College (CPTC), Mount Abu, he was allotted to the cadre of the then undivided Madras State. He was transferred to the Andhra Pradesh cadre when Madras was divided and Andhra Pradesh was formed.

3. After spending a few years in the State, he joined the Intelligence Bureau (IB) of the Ministry of Home Affairs of the Government of India under the IB's earmarking scheme. Under this scheme, officers who had done exceptionally well during the training at the CPTC were taken permanently into the IB after they had done their district training in their State of allotment. He joined the R&AW  after its formation in September,1968.

4. In the IB, he belonged to a small hard core of  officers  under the leadership of the late R.N.Kao set up by B.N.Mallick, the then Director of the IB (DIB), after the Sino-Indian war of 1962 to revamp the capability of the IB for the collection and analysis of China-related intelligence. He continued to specialise on China after joining the R&AW. Even though he was a generalist officer from the IPS, he acquired a remarkable capability for the collection and analysis  of human and technical intelligence relating to China. Technical intelligence was his forte. Kao used him for setting up and supervising the China-related monitoring set-up of the R&AW.

5. There is hardly any specialsed set-up of the R&AW and the Directorate-General of Security (DGS) in which he had not served. He was a highly-regarded expert in the collection of technical intelligence from ground stations as well as aerial platforms. He did the spade work for the visit of Kao to China in October,1984 and subsequently served as the Principal Staff Officer to Shri G.C.Saxena when he headed the R&AW. In 1985-1986, he played a very active and highly-commended role in the negotiations of the Government of India with the Mizo National Front, which ultimately brought peace to Mizoram.

6.He reited in December,1990, as Special Secretary, DG (Security), Cabinet Secretariat,  Government of India.  After his retirement, he settled down in Bangalore for some years and then shifted to Chennai. He was living alone in Chennai after the death of his wife four years ago.

7. He played an active role in organising the activities of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. The Centre greatly profited from his knowledge of China. He was also associated with other non-governmental organisations based in Chennai such as the Catalyst, focusing on improving governance, the Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation in which he was a frequent speaker on national security related issues and the Centre For Asian Studies. (8-12-10)

Sri Lanka: False Notes in Rajapaksa's Second Symphony

By Col R Hariharan

 

President Mahinda Rajapaksa started his second innings as President when he was sworn in at an auspicious hour on November 19, 2010 with all the pomp and ceremony associated with the coronation of royalty. “It Is fitting in a way” thousands of his supporters would say because President Rajapaksa is now “monarch of all he surveys.” Not only his United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) has bagged two thirds majority in parliament but also dutifully amended the Constitutional two-term restriction imposed on presidents. With that the President’s second tenure that would have been his swan song, has now been turned into an orchestration for a second symphony, with options open for him to compose more.

Though the beaming President Rajapaksa looked supremely confident as he watched a military parade and the screaming fly past of air force jets on the occasion, there were a few false notes within few days of the second term.

• The first came when 104 members out of 161 members of the UPFA coalition were ushered into a jumbo cabinet. It included the prime minister, the new class of 11 senior ministers, 61 ministers and 31 deputy ministers. In his first term Rajapaksa’s coalition did not enjoy the advantage of two-thirds majority and his adoption of the ‘jumbo cabinet’ strategy to strengthen his coalition in parliament had some validity. But why has he fallen to the same ‘jumbo’ tactic? Does it mean he has doubts about retaining the loyalties of his coalition members? With his mass popularity, does the President really feel politically insecure? This doubt is further reinforced when we see the senior ministers - trusted lieutenants of earlier years - have been given the option of attending cabinet meetings when they chose, despite holding high sounding portfolios! Have they been put to pasture? Does it mean the President wants to keep them at arms length in his decision making process?

• The second jarring note is the way portfolios have been allotted to the ministers. In spite of such large number of ministers, the President has retained the vital portfolios of defence, finance and planning, ports and aviation and highways under him. President’s brother Basil Rajapaksa will be handling planning and development as before. The portfolios allocated to other ministers and deputy ministers are confusing. They also appear apportioned from cohesive entities, and we can expect the ministers to trample upon each others territory. Does this mean the President has little confidence in his cabinet members in delivering his development agenda of which he has been speaking at length? Or is it for more mundane reasons of keeping the ministers on the leash as they look for small pickings?

 Of course, there was also the President’s ill-timed, if not ill-advised, visit to the U.K. to address the Oxford Union. The President’s 100-strong entourage  marked a big occasion in his calculus. The organisers aborted the meeting the day before it was scheduled for reasons of security after a well orchestrated protest march of Sri Lankan Tamil expatriates, largely peppered with Tamil Tiger acolytes, threatened to converge on Oxford to disrupt the meeting. The Tamil protest had a well-timed added provocation when Channel 4 TV beamed an old but more detailed version of the gruesome slaughter of Tamil women captives allegedly by Sri Lankan army soldiers in uniform. The British government kept the legendary stiff upper lip and had nothing to say Oxford SNAFU as Rajapaksa’s visit was ‘unofficial.’ Wikileaks also added its pennyworth up loading cables on how the US ambassador Ms Patricia Butenis felt the President and his team had collective responsibility for war crimes.

The President bravely weathered the cold rebuff in Oxford in the icy British winter and went home to a thundering reception by an adulatory crowd. Regardless of the Tamil Tigers colouring of the war crimes issue, the Oxford experience should be a moment of truth for the President. He has to face the issue squarely at the international level and clean up, if not erase, his and Sri Lanka’s image blurred by war crimes allegation. No locally compounded formulation of the Lesson Learnt Commission-kind will can do this. Solutions like the one proposed by his irrepressible minister Mervyn Silva to educate all Englishmen from the highest officers to the lowest on Mahinda Chinthanaya can only provide comic relief. Sri Lanka has a credibility deficit in this respect. And this has to be overcome.

The President in a recent interview given to N Ram, the Editor in chief of the Hindu, had explained the rationale behind getting the constitutional two-term bar on the president lifted. He said he had found in the past, presidents were effective only in the first year of their second term after which they became lame ducks. As per this reasoning, the lifting of the constitutional limitation would enable him to use the second term fully for “development of the people.” If that was his idea, neither his cabinet nor its structuring gives confidence of fulfilling Rajapaksa’s hopes.

Moreover, with the abolishing of the two-term limitation for the President, Sri Lanka may end up with a life time president, though Rajapaksa had disclaimed any such intention in his Hindu interview. Going by his demonstrated political acumen, President Rajapaksa is probably shrewder than other ‘life term’ presidents of the world to make such a mistake. Some of the ‘life termers’ who rose to pinnacle of fame ultimately ended up in the dust bin of history. [Of course, there is a modern day precedence of a president who became an emperor! Jean Bèdel Bokassa, President of Central African Republic, declared himself President for Life in 1972 and crowned himself as emperor in 1976! Of course, he was overthrown later and died in custody is a matter of inconvenient detail.]    

As Oliver Goldsmith wrote “Popular glory is a perfect coquette; her lovers must toil, feel every inquietitude, indulge every caprice, and perhaps at last jilted in the bargain.” President Rajapaksa needs to rewrite his opening of the second symphony lest it fails at the altar of popular glory. He needs it to get his development agenda succeed.