Al Jazeera last week released, after some delay, an interview with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, conducted in London some weeks ago. It is now on You Tube and is bound to go viral especially here in Sri Lanka. Both friend and foe must admit that the Al Jazeera interviewer, Mehdi Hasan, was most unfair to Wickremesinghe in this Head to Head interrogation duplicating the well known BBC Hard Talk show. Why the former president chose to expose himself to the grilling is anybody’s guess. We in this island are very familiar with the pithy Sinhala saying illagena parippu kanawa (literally asking for and eating parippu) meaning knowingly walking into a trap. This is exactly what Wickremesinghe did.

Given his very long political experience, having first entered parliament in 1977 at age 28 as one of the youngest MPs ever, he had served as prime minister on no less that five occasions and as leader of the opposition as many times before finally ascending the presidency in 2022. Though he was elected by parliament to serve out the balance of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s term and not the people, nobody would have expected him to have willingly submitted himself to this ordeal in the presence of a clearly hostile audience. Hasan, sharply dressed, suave, incisive and an obvious believer in a no-holds-barred interview style reveled in roasting Wickremesinghe as presenters do at such interviews as Hard Talk has shown over the years over BBC. True, Ranil was able to fire some of his own shots (“I was in politics before you were born”) but they proved to be of little use before an obviously partisan audience.

Talk shows such as Al Jazeera’s are structured in a format that all the dice is loaded on the interviewer’s side. The respondents, unless they are specially skilled debaters who can stand up bravely to an unfair adversary, are too often cannon fodder. The questions are fired machine gun-style and the respondents given little opportunity to have their their say, the interviewer interupting before the victim, and we use that word advisedly, have the opportunity to get a few words edgewise. We remember one occasion when Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar acquitted himself excellently in a Hard Talk interview with BBC. But he was an exceptionally gifted debater having served Oxford Union as its president before launching on his legal and political careers. Wickremesinghe is himself not a spring chicken. There were occasional flashes of his parliamentary debating style during the show but these were lost on the hostile audience who frequently applauded Hasan.

Given the treatment respondents receive in these high pressure talk shows, why do politicians, both serving and retired, and others who would obviously anticipate a hard time in an unequal encounter subject themselves to such indignities? The answers to this question may be many, one being over confidence in oneself to withstanding a grilling however daunting. Another may be that most politicians believe that bad publicity is better than no publicity. Politics being art of the possible, there will be those who delude themselves that they can give as good as they get as as Kadirgmar demonstrated so many years ago. Another possibility could be the fees such appearances command. Many global leaders, post-retirement, have entered the international lecture circuit at high fees as President Obama has done while others have written international best-sellers.

Whatever it was in Ranil Wickremesinghe’s case, he certainly did not emerge unscathed from the Al Jazeera program. This was equally true when he appeared in an interview some months ago with the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. However bad a battering respondents in such programs receive, there is no dearth of participants in these talk shows as their frequent telecasting and rankings show. They will, no doubt, continue to be part of the entertainment scene for many years to come. Like audiences at boxing matches show, there is no lack of people to enjoy watching the inflicting of pain upon fellow human beings. Blood lust, after all, is part of human nature.

Post-retirement plums for judges

Justice for All, an organization of senior lawyers, academics and public interest activists including several respected and well known names a few days ago raised a matter that has for many years agitated the public mind. This relates to the appointment of retired superior court judges to various positions, particularly diplomatic, that we have seen in recent years. The trigger that sparked the instant discussion was the naming of the recently-retired Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya, PC, as Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. He succeeds Mohan Peiris, also a former chief justice.

That justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, however threadbare a cliché, nevertheless remains as true as it always was. Thus the question is that will the public be convinced that plum appointments are not rewards for favours from the bench granted to the appointing political authority by serving judges? Also, would such favours be done with an eye on a post-retirement appointment? Apart from the two appointments to the UN in New York of two former chief justices, there was also a retired supreme court judge who was posted to London as Sri Lanka’s high commissioner. He raised many diplomatic and other eyebrows by calling himself Justice so and so in his visiting cards. There was also a retired chief justice who became the governor or the western province and others who became chairmen of banks who functioned with great acceptance.

Nobody can say that all such appointments of retired judges, and there have been many over the years, were bad. Judges of the highest integrity like Justice T.S. Fernando many years ago served this country well as high commissioner in Australia. The Justice for All statement widely publicized in the media covered most aspects of the problem which are many. Hopefully what has been said there will register where it matters and necessary action taken as soon as possible on an undoubtedly urgent matter.