By Raju prabath lankaloka
These days a comedy is being staged. It is about selecting the Adani Group of Companies of India for a power generation project without any competitive bidding process.
On June 10, at the Parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprises, the then Chairman of the CEB, M. M. C. Ferdinando stated: ” The President spoke to me personally on 24 November 2021 and told me to give the tender to the Adani Group because he was being pressured by Indian Prime Minister Modi. I told him that this was an issue for the Board of Investment and not for me or the Ceylon Electricity Board. Then he wanted me to take care of it. So I wrote a letter to the Ministry of Finance saying that the President has requested me to do this and that it was not a matter for the Ceylon Electricity Board.”
It was immediately televised on many media channels. The next day, the President issued a statement saying that he categorically denies the statement made by the CEB chairman and that he had not given such authorisation. Shortly afterwards, the CEB chairman withdrew his statement. At the same time, he had to resign from the post of the Chairman of Electricity Board.
Although he withdrew the statement, the media has now published the letter he sent to the Secretary to the Treasury, which is in line with the statement he made to the committee. The letter also states that the letter was sent on the instructions of the President. Accordingly, the statement made by him to the Parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprises is confirmed to be correct and he has lied at the time of the withdrawal of that statement.
The drama illustrates the extent to which Sri Lanka has become a victim of regional geopolitical powers and how submissive the current ruler of the country has been to those regional political powers. In addition, it gives a very good explanation of the present system and the role played by the State in maintaining that system.
It exposed the blatant misconception that the state is an independent and impartial institution. Despite the poverty and destitution is widespread in India, it has become more important for the Prime Minister of India to satisfy the whims of millionaire businessman Adani. He had no qualms about pressuring the president of a neighbouring country for that. This is the nature of the state of any capitalist country. The state always stands for the interests of the bourgeoisie. But this system has always maintained constitutional governance in order to conceal that shameless truth from workers and the rest of the people. It pretends to workers and other people that it is acting independently and impartially in accordance with the Constitution. But it always stands for the interests of the bourgeoisie.
The Gotabhaya regime is not second to the Modi regime. As soon as Gota came to power in 2019, he reduced the personal income tax and corporate taxes, not to provide relief to the people but to increase the income of the largest companies and the richest people. But the government treated the workers contrary to the way it treated the capitalists. From 2020, under the guise of the corona pandemic, the government has remained silent, allowing capitalists to reduce the wages of working people and to reduce the number of workers.
Due to the tax concessions given to the capitalists by the government in 2019, the government have lost its revenue by about Rs. 600-800 billion in the following year. Because of this loss of government revenue, the government had to print large sums of money required for their recurrent expenses, which pave the way for present hyperinflation. Workers and the general public are the ones paying the price for that hyperinflation. Therefore, the hyperinflation, that country is experiencing at present is a direct result of the tax concessions given by the present government to please the capitalists. But so far, the government has been urging workers and ordinary people to bear the brunt of inflation.
What the Chairman of the CEB said in the Parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprises clearly shows the real needs and nature of the states of both sides. This state structure is by no means created to address the needs of the people. From its foundation, it has been built to address the needs of the bourgeoisie. The needs of the people cannot be addressed while maintaining this state structure. The future of workers and ordinary people depends on their ability to change this system in a revolutionary way. The time has come for working people and other oppressed masses to come forward for that task.
