By
Vishnuguptha
“If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.”
~Aung San Suu Kyi
Chandrasiri is a retired electrician. He obtained employment with the advent of the J R Jayewardene Government in 1977. Born and bred in an isolated village located in the middle of nowhere in the Maha Nuwara district, he was among the first to be a recipient of a job-bank application and his life-long wish came true when he approached the President of the United National Party branch in his village. The UNP branch President, having recognized Chandrasiri, in his mid-twenties at the time, paid due consideration for the tireless work contributed by him during the just-concluded election campaign and included Chandrasiri’s name in the list to be approved by the MP of his electorate.
After joining the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) in 1977 and completing almost forty years of unbroken service, first as a casual laborer and then climbing the ladder of the CEB techno-hierarchy all the way up to be a senior electrician attached to the Laxapana Power House situated in the Nuwara Eliya district, Chandrasiri retired from service last year.
This morning, the election day for three Provincial Councils, North, Wayamba and Central, Chandrasiri woke up to a gloomy sky, pregnant with dark clouds being a harbinger of torrential rains that have been crashing on the brand new asbestos roof of his home, a monument to his forty years of slogging and dedicated work to the national grid of the land of his birth. And he was proud of it. Yet a moment of indulgence in reminiscences of the olden days could be undertaken, the days in which he was hopeful about his political leanings and his political commitment which was never taken for granted either by the MP of his electorate or by the Party as a whole, remained intact, unshaken and without being relinquished. But he also remembered that all that attention that he received from the Party was during ‘the time of power’ and could not help but be unreservedly sad that the fever-frenzy that the UNP could pitch just prior to an election has left his party and it looks like forever.
The ride that the UNP had for seventeen unbroken years, the benefits and assistance that accrued to his family, not as a quid pro quo but as a matter of fact, the benefits that poured towards all and sundry, irrespective of party affiliations, were a bunch of evidence of abundance and well-being of an economy and a result of reasonable governance based on far-sighted policies. The hullabaloo of Colombo and other big cities did not touch his remote village; television that was a direct product of the ’77 revolution that Chandrasiri’s leader, J R Jayewardene brought about, occupied all the free time of him and his family. His ambitions were limited in scale and his expectations were even more meager that those of city-dwellers.
His only daughter, now an undergraduate in the Sabaragamuwa University does not have the sophistication of high heels and IPhones or Androids. She does have a cheap cellular phone operated on a reload card, merely to answer calls from her family and relatives and occasionally to originate a call to her mother who also owns a cellular phone on a reload basis. Life altogether is not uncomfortable for Chandrasiri’s family, thanks mainly to his affiliations to the UNP and he is also mindful of the cruel fact that the same affiliation that his father had during the ’70-’77 period could not secure a meanest of jobs, even to tar a road or clear the overgrowth on either side of the gravel road leading to his humble home.
His loyalty to the UNP never forsook him, despite the departure of the then giants, Gamini Dissanayake, Lalith Athulathmudali and G M Premachandra. He never left the ‘friendly confines’ of the United National Party. Chandrasiri’s commitment to the color Green and the symbol Elephant could not be shaken nor could be questioned. But it was all then. After the 1994 debacle, with the untimely demise of the trio of UNP-titans, Premadasa, Lalith and Gamini, the Party took a nose-dive; Chandrasiri’s saga began with the ascension of the UNP in 1977 and although some of his closest relatives and friends thought that it died with the death of the ‘titans’, it did not happen like that. It’s still continuing.
The Party ended one colorful chapter in 1994 but managed to retain its cream of the cream at the village level only barely. With the coming onslaught of the UPFA-led juggernaut the strength of the village UNPers started dwindling, their day-to-day needs overtook political leanings and the corruption and nepotism that was running rampage at the national level seemed to have seeped down to the bottom, not sparing the docile hamlet located far away from the hustle and bustle of the city centers.
His Party went to deep slumber, more as an intrinsic quality rather than a rest after heavy toll. With the war escalating in the North, an ethnic conflict that had been a distant phenomenon to Chandrasiri came home in the form of body bags and maimed soldiers; when his Party Parliamentarians, including his beloved leader ridiculed these soldiers in Parliament itself and when the effort to free the land of this cruel menace of terrorism was subjected to verbal shame and dishonor, Chandrasiri thought twice. Yet he did not waiver. His commitment to the color Green was so complete and unreserved.
When some disgruntled elements of the Party started revolting against the Leader of the Party, Chandrasiri did not have any time for those dissidents. The UNP has been a ‘united’ party right throughout its existence. Non-conformists should have behaved better, Chandrasiri contended, within himself. He did not engage any party stalwart in political discussion; he did not have time for such mundane stuff.
But this morning when he woke up, the usual ‘kiribath’ (milk rice) was not on his breakfast table. The green colored ‘Lanka-lime’, the Elephant House soda-drink, was absent and the general feel was as lazy-looking as the overhead skies were. Not a single UNP candidate visited his home, no posters, no announcing and no advertising on television. The entire village that voted en-bloc for the United National Party in 1977 and continued to do like that until 1994 has now turned blue.
What kind of campaign did his party run? What are the new policies they announced? How many new faces did appear on the platform? How many rallies did the leader address? What political-literature was circulated among the voters? Why did they abandon the house-to-house canvassing? These questions kept occupying his mind last night and they had not gone away when he woke up. His optimism had disappeared. His transition from a ‘Party of Victory’ to ‘Party of Defeat and Defeatism’ is almost complete. The Party that existed from 1973 to 1994 was a different one from the one that is existing today. They are two different entities.
Yet he simply cannot let his Party down. For Chandrasiri, the UNP is not just a political structure; it’s not a set of policies nor is it its leaders. It’s the combination of all and above all else, for Chandrasiri as for millions of other UNP grassroot-supporters, the United National Party is an idea, an idea that making money- although some might call it ‘capitalism’- is alright if it is done within the confines of legality and decency, it is an idea that while making money, it is perfectly acceptable that his neighbor too can make money; it’s an idea that governance is not politics and politics is not governance, it’s an idea that democracy works, despite its shortcomings, it’s an idea that democracy is bad but it still is the best of all bad forms of governance. UNP is an idea that the premise ‘live and let live’ is the prime mover of society and recognition of minority rights is as essential to our country as the supreme teachings of Siddhartha Gautama.
On this morning Chandrasiri realized that this idea deserves another chance. It may well be its last chance. So he walked to the polling booth and put a cross against the elephant and left the preferential slots blank.
Chandrasiri voted for the idea.