by

Vishnuguptha

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.”
~Hermann Hesse

Analysis and dissecting is not necessary. I am not going to indulge in that paralyzing exercise anymore. Why and how did the United National Party lose? The simple answer is: the people didn’t vote for the UNP.

The verdict is clear. The people have spoken. And those voters who cast their ballots on Saturday, September 21 in the three provinces, North, Wayamba and Central made it clearer than usual. Firstly, in the Northern Province where in the Kankasanturai electorate in 1952, the United National Party candidate defeated S J V Chelvanayagam, the United National Party mustered less that 1% whereas the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) received slightly more than 18% of the Tamil votes.

Thus in the North, the UNP has become an irrelevancy. It was only last year that in an effort to bolster the Party’s image as one of all-embracing national entities, the leader of the Party decided to hold its May Day rally in Jaffna in combination with the Tamil National Alliance (TNA). The expected result did not materialize. On the contrary, the voters in the North have discarded the UNP as morning spit. It is cruel to say it but truth cannot be articulated in a relatively more acceptable way.

But the rejection of the UNP by the Wayamba and Central province voters could not have been more emphatic. The pent-up feelings of the UNP voters, the agonizing mornings, afternoons and nights that they spent hoping against all hopes, bucketful of sweat that they perspired, dozens of miles they trekked, countless numbers of potential converts they spoke to have all come to naught. The agitation against the leader, the clarion calls for change, yearning for justice and fair-play have all produced zero results and the Party hierarchy seems to be willfully oblivious to the emerging realities of post-war politics in Sri Lanka. The Party Leader is primarily responsible and accountable for this latest electoral debacle but the Working Committee, the main decision-making body of the Party and its high-flying office-bearers are equally culpable.

The guilty are many; but they should not be allowed to go scot-free. Those who aid and abet are as guilty as the original sinners. In actual fact, the entire Working Committee is guilty of this sin!

Dayasiri Jayasekera is the sixty third parliamentarian to cross over from the UNP to the Government ranks. The erosion continued but the main decision-makers stood as mere spectators, not knowing what to do or say except perhaps nodding their willing or unwilling approval to the maniacal decisions of the leader. When the top is rotten, what would happen to the bottom?

The nauseating atmosphere that’s prevailing around Siri Kotha, the UNP headquarters, seems to have enveloped the incompetent and insensitive minds and hearts of all those who thought that they knew better than the voters. Their lack of depth, their superficial thinking, their laughable statements and their gross inadequacies were exposed to the fullest possible level at the recently-concluded elections in the Wayamba, Central and the Northern Provinces.

Statistics don’t seem to have any effect on these self-appointed leaders. When the UNP suffered a similar electoral disaster in 1970, J R Jayewardene, the then Leader of the Opposition and the then ‘unofficial’ Deputy Leader of the UNP went back to the proverbial ‘drawing board’. He studied the statistics pertaining to the ’70 election catastrophe. He detected a pattern; he foresaw the coming revolt of ’71, he spent days and nights studying how the voter behaved in each electorate, in each district and each province and he came to one conclusion.

The UNP had to change, period. It had to change its character, it had to change its structure, it had to change its national policies and last but not the least, it had to change its image. In politics, as in any marketing enterprise, ‘image’ is everything. How people perceive politicians does matter and it does to a very critical degree. Archaic theories along with their heavy baggage have to be thrown out the window; fossilized personalities must be kicked upstairs, the inefficient office-bearers have to be shown the door, new faces must be brought in, new ideas must be allowed to circulate, new life has to be pumped in.

But J R Jayewardene had to wait until the passing away of Dudley Senanayake, the then UNP Leader. After the demise of Dudley in 1973, the UNP became a totally new Party, a party with a purpose, a party with vigor and vitality, a party with new faces but which still paid respect to the old diehards. The United National Party became a party rejuvenated, a party active and hale and hearty, a party with a head as steady as a rock and a body and feet as sturdy as steel and flexible and supple as the wind. That Party went from one electorate to another; from one district to another, from one voter to another. It spared no individual; it spared no man or woman, government servant or the self-employed village lad.

Above all else, the United National Party of the ’73 to ’77 era controlled the national political conversation, it controlled the national political agenda and it gave no room whatsoever for the Government to control it. In other words, J R Jayewardene and his UNP wrested the national political discourse away from the then Sirimavo Bandaranaike-Government. Instead of reacting, the UNP became pro-active; not only in Parliament with a meager seventeen MPs but out in the countryside, in town centers, in street corners, in Temples, Churches and Kovils, in five-star hotel lobbies and ordinary wayside boutiques. The buzzword was J R and his new UNP.

And all that was not done in one day, month or year. It took the blood, sweat and tears of many hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women. It took four full years, forty eight months or one thousand four hundred and sixty grueling days and nights to accomplish. It also took dozens of Satyagrahas, tens of boycotts, hundreds of meetings and the will and determination of a grateful people who rallied around one man who they thought had a head above shoulders and a heart as soft as it is mystical. But they trusted him, one single quality that the present UNP leader sadly lacks.

Ranil Wickremesinghe is playing a game. Now it is being rumored that he is trying to float another trial balloon by suggesting that Shirani Bandaranayake, the former Chief Justice should contest as the common candidate at the forthcoming Presidential Elections, scheduled any time after 2014. For Ranil, any ploy to sustain himself as the Leader of the United National Party and the Opposition is supreme. He has no existence outside that orbit. And with him as the leader of the Party, the UNP has no existence in any orbit.

Ranil must go. He must go now, not tomorrow, not next week or month but now. He is the cancer in the United National Party. The cancer must be removed for the patient to survive. It must be done not only for the sake of the United National Party and its supporters. It must be done for the sake of the ordinary men, women and children who claim citizenship in this country. They are the ones who are silently suffering at the hands of an insensitive, corrupt and incompetent set of rulers. With Ranil out, those ordinary people would stand a chance; with Ranil in as leader of the strongest opposition party, they won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.