බොරුව හා රැවටිල්ල ජාතික ලක්ෂණයක්ද?
Ivan asks whether deceit is a national habit, and finds it at every turn of modern history: D.S. Senanayake’s staged ‘farmers’ and the governor-generalship promised to Lord Soulbury, the 1962 ‘gin-and-tonic’ coup plot, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only opportunism, and John D’Oyly’s bloodless capture of Kandy in 1815, whose native helpers’ descendants became the independence elite. Drawing on Marshall Singer, Henpitagedara Gnanaseeha and Robert Knox, he argues that leaders and people have deceived each other on language and religion until the country fell into an abyss.
ගාන්ධි නූතන ශ්රී ලංකාවට කැඳවාගෙන ඒම (4)
The British took the Kandyan kingdom in 1815 not by battle but by a crafty programme, and Sir John D’Oyly admitted as much in a long conversation, describing the programme he had run and naming several of the natives who acted as its chief pawns. It succeeded because of the support the Kandyan chiefs gave, in the expectation that the power to rule under British authority would come to them.