Quote of the day by Chandrika Kumaratunga: 'Power is a joke, but it gives me the authority to do what I think I need to do for the country'
Quote of the day by former Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga. Daughter of two PMs who claimed to have disliked power Chandrika Kumaratunga 's political
Quote of the day by former Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga. Daughter of two PMs who claimed to have disliked power Chandrika Kumaratunga 's political journey When Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga sat down with Australian journalist Michael Maher in July 2005 for an interview on the ABC program Foreign Correspondent, her presidency was drawing to a close. Asked about the allure of supreme political office, Sri Lanka’s first female president brushed aside the notion that she was captivated by high status. It's always mesmerizing to study how powerful people of the world perceive power. And Kumaratunga said: "I'm a workaholic, I like to work. And I'm in this, not to fill my pockets like lots of others, or because the idea of power thrills me - I find it a joke.""Yes. I find power a joke - I laugh or I get very angry with it," she doubled down.Michael Maher was surprised and called the president a rare politician who does not like power and called it a joke. "I don't like it at all. The only thing that attracts me in power is that it gives me the authority and the possibility of doing what I think should be done for this country," Kumaratunga said.To evaluate this statement, one must look at the extraordinary personal tragedy and political inheritance that shaped her worldview.Born into Sri Lanka’s ultimate political dynasty, she was the daughter of two prime ministers: Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, who was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first female prime minister.Political power was not an abstract concept or a distant goal for her; it was the atmosphere of her childhood home.
Yet it was also the primary source of immense personal loss. Her life was repeatedly upended by political violence. After her father’s assassination, she studied in Paris, absorbing political science and left-leaning intellectual traditions away from the intense glare of Colombo politics.Upon returning to Sri Lanka, she allied herself with Vijaya Kumaratunga, a charismatic actor-turned-radical politician who broke away from the traditional establishment to champion ethnic reconciliation. In 1988, Vijaya, also Chandrika's husband, was brutally assassinated on their doorstep by political extremists.Eleven years later, while serving as president, Chandrika herself was targeted by a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during an election rally, surviving the blast but losing vision in her right eye.When someone whose father and husband were both murdered by political violence says that power is a joke, the sentiment carries a distinct, cynical weight.From her perspective, political authority was an absurd, dangerous theater that brought immense personal suffering rather than genuine fulfillment. It was an instrument to be endured rather than celebrated, useful only for the structural authority it granted to implement policy. Yet this insistence on being a reluctant steward of power stands in sharp tension with the political reality of her governance.In the same 2005 television feature, her sister, Sunethra Bandaranaike, offered a starkly different portrait, suggesting that despite her claims of disliking authority, Chandrika loved power, thrived on it, and treated it like an addictive drug.
The BriefWire