by
C.A.Chandraprema
Ranil Wickremesinghe
The present controversy within the UNP over the choice of a presidential candidate is not what one would expect given the electoral gains they made so recently. Less than eight weeks ago, the UNP was riding high in the wake of the Uva Provincial Council elections. They had got no less than 40% of the votes in the province and actually won the Badulla, Hali Ela and Welimada electorates and come within a hair’s breadth of winning the Uva-Paranagama and Bandarawela electorates as well.
This was the best showing that the UNP had been able to put up at any election since 2005 and it undoubtedly gave the government the fright of their lives. This result, combined with the reports of the burning of opposition ‘election offices’ in the Moneragala district had conveyed the impression to the country that the government was fighting a desperate rear guard action to retain the Uva province.
The burning of those structures of polythene and sticks that appear by the roadside at election time by pro-government thugs trying to curry favour with the Rajapaksa family conveyed the impression to the rest of the country that the government was compelled to resort to thuggery to retain their hold over Uva. So all in all the Uva PC election ended with the government appearing weakened and the UNP more upbeat that it had been in over a decade. Of course once people began to realize that Badulla is a very pro-UNP district and that since 1994, the UNP had always won in the Badulla district while losing in the rest of the country, that mood may have dissipated to some extent.
Despite this, after the Uva elections, the UNP was ideally poised to go on the offensive and consolidate their position further in the country making good use of the confusion and disarray in the government ranks. The fact that doing badly or losing in the Badulla district does not mean losing in the rest of the country offered little consolation to members of the UPFA. They had so got used to percentages over 55 to 60% at elections after 2005 that getting only 51% at the Uva PC elections appeared to them like a defeat, not a victory. Telling them that 51% was a luxury even for J.R.Jayewardene, R.Premadasa and Chandrika Kumaratunga would have been no consolation because what they had come to take for granted over the past several years was something much more!
The UNP could have used that defeatist mood within the government ranks to consolidate their position. But what happened the moment a presidential election was mooted was exactly the opposite. Very early on the UNP establishment gave out clear signs that the candidate this time would be the party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe who would make a bid for victory with 35-40% of the Sinhala vote and the vast majority of the minority community vote. Sajith Premadasa was made deputy leader of the party in a bid to unify the party before the election. Indeed, had the entire UNP and the combined opposition rallied as one behind the UNP leader, there was the possibility of demoralizing the UPFA support base, galvanizing the opposition voters, mobilizing the minority vote and giving Mahinda a good run for his money. But this was not to be.
One section of the party clearly did not want Ranil Wickremesinghe to contest. Some genuinely feel that a common candidate who can unite the entire opposition including the TNA, SLMC, JHU, JVP and the others will have a better chance than Wickremesinghe contesting as the UNP candidate with the support of most but not all opposition parties. Others seem to be labouring under the apprehension that if Wickremesinghe contests and loses, there will be another internal rebellion and he will be ousted and Sajith Premadasa will take over and these individuals who had supported RW against all challengers in the past will be left high and dry and therefore they want RW to skip this election as well and field someone else. Almost all those who do not want RW to contest think that leaving out even one potential opposition partner may mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Harin and the Uva spring forgotten
However there is another school of thought within the UNP which holds the view that it may not be possible to win this time whether the candidate is Wickremesinghe or another person and that all that can be done this time is consolidating the position of the UNP and protecting and enhancing the gains made in Uva. For this fielding a UNP candidate who can carry the entire party with him is absolutely vital and the only candidate who can do that is Ranil Wickremesinghe backed by Sajith Premadasa. Those of this school of thought feel that Karu Jayasuriya may be acceptable to organizations like the JVP and the JHU in a way that Wickremesinghe wouldn’t, but Jayasuriya cannot carry the entire UNP with him as he is mistrusted by both the Sajith and Ranil factions in the party. He once had much acceptance within the party but this has dwindled today. As various groupings in the party pull in different directions, Harin Fernando and the great gains made in Uva have been forgotten.
The UNP is now in complete disarray as in the days before Uva when the percentage that the party gets was hovering just above the 25% mark. Before Uva, all blame could be attached to Ranil Wickremesinghe for the woes of the party. But for the present confusion with regard to selecting a presidential candidate, he cannot be blamed in any way. For the first time since 1994, Ranil did the correct thing by making Sajith Premadasa the deputy leader of the party and making it known that he was going to contest the presidential election against Mahinda Rajapaksa. He did all that was required to consolidate and take forward the gains made in Uva. Today, if those gains are now lying in tatters on the ground, no blame whatsoever attaches to Ranil.
To be fair to the other side, in a way those who are pessimistic about Ranil Wickremesinghe’s chances against MR do have a point. Most UNPers are aware that doing well in the Badulla district will not translate into a surge of support for the UNP in the country as a whole because Badulla has always been a UNP district where since 1989, the UNP always had five MPs in parliament as against only three for the UPFA. This pattern changed only in 2010 with Sarath Fonseka’s candidacy. Anyone looking at the recent Uva PC election results will see that in the Moneragala district where the UNP has been weak, they have got a more familiar percentage of about 30%. Informed people know that once the results from districts that have been traditionally UNP are tallied off against the results of the districts that are traditionally pro-UPFA, the end result will be a defeat for the UNP.
So they feel that by uniting the entire opposition behind the challenger to Mahinda Rajapaksa, they stand a better chance of winning. There is undeniable logic to this line of thinking. But the point they seem to be missing is the all important question of the quality of the candidate who will be fielded against MR. You can’t mobilize votes by fielding a weak candidate. Above all the candidate who will be contesting will have to be able to mobilize the entire UNP vote and that can be done only by the Ranil-Sajith combination. Before the presidential elections in 2010, this writer made the seemingly risky prediction that the war hero Sarath Fonseka contesting as the candidate of the entire joint opposition will not get the number of votes that the ‘unpatriotic’ Ranil Wickremesinghe got as the UNP candidate in 2005. That prediction turned out to be correct.
The reason for this was that when the UNP asks their voters to vote for the common opposition candidate, the bulk of the UNP voters would do as the party instructed but a significant number of UNP voters would stay away from the polling booth due to indifference. For most UNPers what matters is a UNP government. If power was not going to come directly to the UNP and it was going to go to someone else surrounded by non-UNP outsiders, the average UNPer is simply not interested. In fact the only reason why Sarath Fonseka got as many votes as he did was only because of his war hero status. Many UNP voters would have gone to the polling booth out of regard for that and also to redeem themselves by voting for a war hero. Any lesser outsider would never have got that many UNP votes. This is the crucial point that those are opposed to RW contesting as the UNP candidate are missing.
As of this moment, there is no one outside the UNP who can even think of contesting against Mahinda Rajapaksa. Only three potential candidates come to mind and they are Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sajith Premadasa and Karu Jayasuriya, all leaders of the UNP. Of these three individuals, Ranil and Sajith are now acting as one at least as far as the presidential election is concerned. Sajith Premadasa has said that he will back Wickremesinghe to the hilt if the latter contests and there is no doubt that he will do so. Sajith obviously sees here an opportunity to do what Vijaya Kumaratunga did at the 1982 presidential elections.
In 1982, it was Vijaya Kumaratunga who led the presidential election campaign for Hector Kobbekaduwa and even though Kobbekaduwa lost, the SLFP gained more than 600,000 completely new votes countrywide representing an improvement of over 33% over the number of votes the SLFP got at the 1977 general elections. It was that election campaign that made Vijaya Kumaratunga a colossus in opposition politics. By spearheading Ranil’s campaign regardless of whether the election is won or lost, Sajith will be able to consolidate his support among all sections of the UNP, and become what his father became during the election campaign of 1977. So there is little doubt that Sajith will throw everything into the campaign for Wickremesinghe despite past misunderstandings and mistrust.
Karu Jayasuriya is well liked by the smaller parties like the JVP, JHU, the NGO circuit and the Western embassies because he is pliable and open to manipulation. They stand to wield much greater influence if Karu becomes president than if either Ranil or Sajith gets into that seat. These external elements that are feeding off the UNP dislike Ranil because he has a mind of his own and is not easily manipulated by others. Ranil would be a fellow traveler of the Western embassies and the NGOs only to the extent that he too shares their views. It would be nearly impossible to browbeat or pressurize RW into doing something that he does not want to do. He is arrogant and headstrong and the foreign embassies and the NGO circuit would like someone more pliable. As one UNP veteran told this writer, even though some people think Ranil is dancing to the tune of cronies like Malik Samarawickrema and Charitha Ratwatte, it is actually the other way about with Ratwatte and Samarawickrema doing what Ranil wants them to do. Ranil dances to no tune other than his own. Anyone who really knows Ranil knows that there is no point in blaming any of his ‘advisors’ for anything he does. The blame or credit attaches to Ranil and to Ranil alone. Ranil has also been known to completely disregard the political cost of not bending to the will of those who seek to control him.
In Sajith’s case, the smaller parties, the NGOs and the foreign embassies would like him even less because he differs from them in terms of ideology and outlook and that is made doubly obnoxious because he too like Ranil has a mind of his own. Sajith positions himself in the patriotic camp, which in part accounts for his popularity among the UNP rank and file. All these elements outside the UNP who are trying to manipulate the grand old party intensely dislike Sajith because they know that Sajith can strengthen the UNP to the extent where all of them would become redundant. He is the one individual in the UNP who has the potential of being able to get the allies of the UNP to bow to the UNPs terms instead of the present day practice of the UNP bowing to their terms. If Sajith takes over the UNP, the parasitical forces that see the UNP as their meal ticket will be out of business for good. So he is intensely disliked. The UNP candidate of choice of these forces would be Karu, who his pliable, politically clueless and open to manipulation. Karu has also displayed an opportunistic streak in his dealings at various times with Ranil, Sajith and his erstwhile leader Mahinda Rajapaksa and these outsiders who are out to bend the UNP to their will probably feel that Karu is a man they can do business with.
An unprecedented scenario
What is of concern in this whole scenario is the ease with which small marginalized forces outside the UNP seem to have been able to confuse matters within the UNP with the help of a few collaborators within the party. Instead of the whole party rallying around Ranil Wickremesinghe, we see that his candidacy has been placed in doubt. This situation that we are now witnessing within the UNP is something never seen before in Sri Lankan politics. The SLFP was even weaker than the present day UNP back in the 1980s when they were in the opposition. They then had far fewer people’s representatives than the present day UNP. But even in that debilitated state, the SLFP never abdicated their position as the premier opposition party. In the 1980s, the leader of the SLFP Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike did not have her civic rights and the party was beset with multiple splits. Vijaya and Chandrika Kumaratunga broke away from the SLFP in 1984 to form the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party.
Thus in the 1980s, there were various political parties seeking to work together with the SLFP. Among them were the LSSP, CP, MEP, the Tamil Congress, the Democratic Workers Congress, Chanaka Amaratunga’s Liberal Party, the newly formed SLMP, the NSSP and Rukman Senanayake’s party the ELJP. Yet none of these political parties would have dared try to dictate terms to the SLFP. They followed the SLFP, not the other way about. In 1987, there were moves to form a joint opposition and all these parties gathered around the SLFP. By the late 1980s the JVP had begun its second insurrection which was to rage on for two and a half years. By the time the presidential election of 1988 came around, the JVP was a major player on the scene as they had a terror campaign in full swing. The JVP tried to browbeat the SLFP into boycotting the presidential election of 1988 unless the president (J.R.Jayewardene) vacates office and appoints retired Supreme Court judge as a caretaker president while parliament would be dissolved and a temporary government formed.
At that time, the SLFP had only 17 members of parliament yet they never gave into the JVP demands despite the latter’s capacity to launch terrorist against them. So we see that even the most ruthless terrorists were not able to get the SLFP to abdicate their position as the principle opposition party which makes the decisions on behalf of the joint opposition. But today, a motley band of fly by night political parties with a few collaborators from inside the party have been able to pressurize the UNP leader to taking a step backwards on the question of the opposition candidate. The UNP has been hijacked by a conspiratorial cabal both within as well as outside the party. We never saw such a situation within the SLFP when they were in the opposition. Even in 1994, in the final push for power, the SLFP collected other opposition parties around itself on its own terms instead of the terms being set by the smaller parties that were in alliance with it.
The last time, when Sarath Fonseka was made the common opposition candidate, the UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe himself obviously wanted to avoid taking on Mahinda and suffering a crushing defeat. Some may wonder whether Ranil Wickremesinghe wants to avoid contesting Mahinda this time as well and whether the initial willingness to contest was just a feint to mislead the public after which he will allow a common candidate to be fielded conveying the impression to the public that he stood down only due to the need to unite all potential allies. That however does not appear to be likely. RW has already lost presidential elections twice in 1999 and 2005. He has stood down once in 2010. If he stands down again it is unlikely that he will ever be able to put himself forward as a candidate the next time. Besides by the time the next presidential election comes around RW will be in his 70s.
With age and his record of having lost twice and avoided contesting twice, his goose will be cooked as far as presidential ambitions are concerned. If however he contests this election and manages to rally support for the party and narrow the gap between the UNP and the UPFA, he too would have done at a national level what Harin did in Badulla and that will be the springboard for him to make it over the winning line at the next presidential election. If he is able to get more votes than what Sarath Fonseka got in 2010 in terms of absolute numbers or percentages, RW will be well qualified to contest the next presidential election as well. And indeed there is a good chance that Ranil may be able to achieve that if he contests this time.
Ironically, what is eating away at his potential with each passing day is this uncertainty and prevarication with regard to who the UNP candidate is going to be. Already this pulling in various directions has dissipated the euphoria that followed the Uva PC election. It looks as if this uncertainty and pulling in various directions will persist until the president declares a presidential election. By that time the uncertainty, hesitation and lack of confidence and unity within the UNP would have queered the pitch for whoever is finally selected as the UNP’s candidate.
Courtesy: Sunday Island