In his review of ‘The Iron Lady,’ which won Meryl Streep her third Oscar, Roger Ebert wrote that the film “required an opinion of its subject”. One could say the same of Mehdi Hasan’s interview of Ranil Wickremesinghe, which took place at Conway Hall, London in February and was aired last Thursday (6) – to the minute, almost exactly when the Royal-Thomian wrapped up on its first day.
I suggested to a friend, half in jest, that the SSC could have aired the interview after the match – though among the players and spectators, as with the rest of the country, it would have drawn polarising responses.
It is difficult to say who won. To answer that question would be like trying to figure out who won the David Frost and Richard Nixon interviews. Yet, with the Frost-Nixon interviews, the disgraced former President at least used Frost to achieve a personal catharsis. Even with the weight of Watergate above him, Nixon managed to address criticisms and at least partially rehabilitate himself.
The Hasan-Wickremesinghe interview went off differently, and not in Wickremesinghe’s favour – there was enough and more in Hasan’s style of questioning that caught the former Sri Lankan President off-guard.
The interview broadly addressed three themes: Wickremesinghe’s presidency after the fall of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his interventions in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks and during the 30-year civil war, and his actions during the second Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection.
From the word go, Wickremesinghe tried to play hardball with Hasan. But Hasan refused to let go: at each and every corner, he boxed the former Lankan President to a corner and kept on repeating his questions. He seemed determined, ruthless, and to both supporters and critics of Wickremesinghe in Sri Lanka, too persistent.
Frost got ruthless with Nixon only at the end, when he began talking about Watergate. Hasan got ruthless with his subject from the beginning, cutting him midway, making light of his replies – and thus, to cut a long story short, make him look bad in front of his audience.
The villain of the piece
For many Sri Lankans, Wickremesinghe is the villain of the piece, ruthless and ambitious. His more persistent critics charge him with having hijacked the reformist moment of 2022 and using the trust that was reposed in him to break the protests and protect those responsible for the economic crisis we are still recovering from.
One frequent theme that emerged in the interview, in fact, was Wickremesinghe’s ties to the former ruling family: at one point, Hasan grilled him for attending Mahinda Rajapaksa’s birthday celebration barely a year after he was kicked out as Prime Minister.
Wickremesinghe’s response, that political differences do not preclude friendships and personal ties, did not go well with Hasan or the audience, although it did reinforce the image Hasan built up of him as ‘a part of the establishment’ – a sentiment the panellists and much of the audience echoed in their interventions.
On social media and in conversations, there is now a lot of debate about Hasan’s interview. Some say Hasan won, while others say Wickremesinghe won. Some said Hasan was wrong in how he questioned Wickremesinghe, accusing the panel of double standards. Others more or less agreed, but pointed out that Wickremesinghe should have been better prepped to deflect Hasan’s style.
A supporter of Wickremesinghe pointed out to this writer that Hasan’s style was absurd and not in keeping with the norms of good journalism. A radical progressive activist known for her criticisms of Wickremesinghe agreed, but then asked if one could sympathise with a man known for his brand of politics and his attitude towards dissent, especially after he became President.
Some points made in the interview were, I felt, a little off the mark. There was, for instance, the insinuation that people demanded a system change to include accountability for war crimes and that Wickremesinghe stepped in to block such requests.
One can accuse Wickremesinghe of many things, including mobilising the military against protesters. Yet nowhere after 2022 did he intervene to stop conversations on the ethnic question.
As Rathindra Kuruwita noted in an insightful article to The Diplomat at the time, Wickremesinghe kept negotiations with Tamil political parties going – partially, as Kuruwita contended, to offset the Government’s loss of support among Sinhala Buddhist electorates, a consequence of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s policy misadventures.
A man of two faces
This is not to say that Wickremesinghe deserves empathy or that he was the underdog in this encounter. There was enough and more in his past that was bound to emerge in an interview like this.
Since its airing, Wickremesinghe has complained that the interview was edited to make him look bad, that he had gone on the understanding that certain people would be on the panel, and that he was unprepared for what he had to confront.
One could almost say that one saw Wickremesinghe in the raw next to Hasan: lacking the ease and sense of conviviality that distinguishes him in all his other interviews. Yet, if anyone should answer for the sin of not being prepped enough for what was bound to be a tough, kill-’em-or-miss-’em confrontation, it should be his team.
For as long as he lives – and we live – Wickremesinghe will remain a man of two faces. Some see him as a saviour, Sri Lanka’s last liberal hope – the person who rescued the country from crisis and put it on the path to recovery. Others cast him as the antagonist in the wider dramaturgy, a cynical old politician who did everything to become President and leave in the most disgraceful circumstances.
I am not sure who is more correct, but I do realise that it is easier, far easier, to excoriate the leaders of the Global South for their political failures and their sins of omission and commission, than those of the Global North, who spend every single day and hour bending the rules of the game, violating them when they deem it fit, and, for some reason, enjoy impunity.
It should be possible to acknowledge this while critiquing the legacies of the likes of Wickremesinghe.
(The writer is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific-focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk)