Mr. Chitta Ranjan de Silva, Sri Lanka's new
Attorney General, reputed for his independence and sense of
justice, was named after the famous Indian lawyer, Chitta Ranjan
Das, by his father, Justice K.D. de Silva.
De Silva was sworn as the country's 28th
Attorney General by President Mahinda Rajapakse at Temple Trees
last morning in the presence of members of his family.
C.R., best known as ``Bulla'' in his rugger
playing school days at Royal College, was a late arrival. The
youngest of Justice and Mrs. K. D. de Silva's seven children,
there was a gap of eight to 10 years between himself and the
sibling elder to him.
Family lore has it that his father took some
time in choosing a name for his youngest son and ultimately
opted for Chitta Ranjan after the famous Indian lawyer about
whom Justice de Silva had been reading.
Three of K.D. de Silva's four sons are lawyers,
the eldest J.A.D. practising in Kandy and the younger I.S.
enjoying a lucrative practice in Colombo. C.R., the youngest,
has now been named Attorney General.
The new Attorney General qualified at the Ceylon
Law College and took his oaths in December 1974. He devilled
under Mr. Bunty de Zoysa and Eric Amarasinghe and also served as
a junior to Mr. Daya Perera before he joined the Attorney
General's Department in 1975.
He moved steadily up the ladder in the
department moving up from state Counsel to Senior State Counsel
in 1983, Deputy Solicitor General in 1991 and Additional
Solicitor General in 1996. He took Silk in 1997 before he became
Solicitor General in 2000.
Though widely credited for the criminal work he
had done and supervised in the department, de Silva has also
appeared in some landmark civil cases including successfully
defending the Election Commissioner's decision to reject the
UNP's list of nominations at the last Colombo Municipal Council
elections.
De Silva won his rugby colours at Royal College
in 1966 captaining the Royal College team in 1968 and had played
for the Combined Colleges and the CR&FC.
He has spent a year at the University of
Illinois doing a course in criminal justice.
His wife, Kamalini, the daughter of the late Dr.
W.D.L. Fernando, who retired as JMO, Colombo, is also a lawyer
who is Additional Secretary at the Justice Ministry.
