by Namini Wijedasa
Anura Bandaranaike claimed last week that his sister had only been "letting off steam" at her more recent public meetings and that her bribery allegation against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had been an off-the-cuff response to endless needling by certain government elements.

However, Bandaranaike refused to comment on the veracity of the allegation, avoiding the question by saying that Chandrika and he had not been on talking terms at the time the bribe was alleged to have been solicited through a third party.

He also admitted that he, and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, had advised his sister to confine her speeches to matters of state as "it’s bad for her stature, people don’t expect it from her and she should rise above that sort of thing."

"I think that was an off-the-cuff response to a lot of allegations that he is making against her for corruption... that the CID is going to question her and all that kind of rubbish," Bandaranaike said in an interview with the Sunday Island. "She bottles up all this, she has no chance to say it in public. So when she goes to meetings, she lets off all the steam."

"Naturally, she lets her emotions get the better of her."

"I don’t think she really meant that Ranil was privy to the bribe," he added. "She probably got carried away, or whatever. I don’t want to comment on whether he had taken a bribe because I don’t know. I don’t think so."

Asked specifically whether he knew that a bribe had been solicited — and that Wickremesinghe had, in fact, blocked his nephew’s entry into Royal College — Bandaranaike said: "I honestly don’t know."

"That time, Chandrika and I were not on talking terms," he observed. "That’s the time we had fallen out. I know that she was trying to get the boy into Royal. And that it didn’t work. As to what role Ranil had to play, I don’t know."

"Our advice to her was to confine herself to matters of state, on national issues," he said, when asked what the SLFP had told Kumaratunga. "I think she basically feels pushed against the wall. I think anybody would have reacted. We have parliament to go and shout in, no? We can let off steam in parliament. She can’t do that."

"So, when she gets onto a stage in front of a very vocal audience support..."

Bandaranaike also accused Wickremesinghe of encouraging ministers like Rajitha Senaratne and Ravi Karunayake to needle the president.

"In the case of these two or three ministers... it is really very difficult to imagine how they can fit into the UNP because their philosophy is so different," he commented. "They are being used by the leadership of the UNP to go on at the president."

"Ranil can stop them very easily," he pointed out. "I think the prime minister is, in fact, encouraging them to needle the president because she doesn’t stop them. He gets them to do it. That’s what everybody feels."

This, he said, was turning cohabitation into a disaster.