By: Roger Srivasan
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s recent visit to Jaffna to mark the Thai Pongal celebrations will be remembered as a defining moment — a watershed not merely in contemporary politics, but in the moral and psychological history of the nation. This was no perfunctory ceremonial appearance, nor a carefully choreographed display of seasonal goodwill. It was an act of statesmanship infused with courage, empathy, and historical awareness.
Where once there lingered the smouldering cinders of a fractured civilisation — residues of mistrust shaped by decades of alienation and neglect — the President has begun to construct robust bridges. These bridges are not built of hollow rhetoric or transactional politics, but of sturdier materials: humanity, trust, and inclusivity. In both temperament and conduct, he stands revealed as a President par excellence.
What lends this moment its rare gravity is not pageantry, but moral daring. Eschewing pomp and pretence, the President chose to walk the streets of Jaffna at dawn — freely, naturally, and without artifice. He mingled openly with residents, engaging them with warmth and respect, listening as much as he spoke, offering presence rather than performance. What began as a simple early-morning walk has become the talk of the town — and, in time, the talk of the world.
It is worth recording, plainly and without hyperbole, a truth that history itself confirms: no living President of this nation’s past would have dared — nor possessed the moral courage — to walk the backstreets of Jaffna in such an unguarded and unassuming manner. Where others relied on distance, barricades, and scripted encounters, he relied on trust. In that singular choice lay a quiet yet seismic break from the politics of fear.
Such authenticity does not go unnoticed. His meteoric rise in public esteem has unsettled entrenched political interests — those long accustomed to recycling themselves back into relevance, repeatedly ploughing the same furrows of power while clinging to strategic positions as though they were hereditary rights. Today, those reveries are visibly dissolving, reduced to what can only be described as a no-hope-in-hell reckoning.
Carried forward by a tidal wave of popular support, the President has left traditional power brokers — including long-dominant Tamil political figures — distinctly jittery. Increasingly, they sense that their grip on the North is loosening, that northern parliamentary seats once treated as secure possessions may soon fall to the NPP in forthcoming elections. As trust realigns and hope finds a new anchor, their support among the people of the North continues to ebb away.
This shift has not been engineered through coercion or spectacle, but through something far more potent: belief renewed. What is unfolding in Jaffna is not merely a change of allegiance, but an awakening — a quiet recalibration of political faith.
In walking where history once trembled, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has done more than traverse streets; he has crossed thresholds long deemed impassable. And in doing so, he has reminded the nation of a simple, enduring truth: reconciliation is not proclaimed from podiums — it is earned, step by deliberate step, among the people themselves.
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