A Reply That Insulted A Nation !

A mindset that still rules

- Roger Srivasan -

When the startling revelation emerged that Mahinda Rajapaksa, Basil Rajapaksa, and Namal Rajapaksa had allegedly visited the prison cell where Pilliyan was being held barely a week after the Easter Sunday carnage, the public expected a measured and intelligent response befitting the gravity of such a disclosure.

Instead, Namal Rajapaksa reacted like a rabbit caught in the headlights, blurting out:

“Yes, well… we didn’t scale down the wall, but used the main entrance.”

For a man relentlessly marketed by loyalists as a “President-in-waiting,” the remark was breathtakingly vacuous — a juvenile quip utterly devoid of statesmanship, seriousness, or intellectual depth. At a moment demanding clarity and political maturity, the nation was treated instead to the verbal equivalent of a nervous schoolboy fumbling for an escape line.

One shudders to imagine the caliber of leadership on offer if this is the level of gravitas expected from the next heir to the Rajapaksa political dynasty. The remark did not merely stretch the elastic of credulity — it exposed, in one fleeting instant, the alarming poverty of judgment lurking behind the carefully manufactured image.