By

C. A. Chandraprema

To say that last week was full of tension would be an understatement. Political futures and fates of individuals were being decided on the run. A day, an hour or even a minute was becoming a long time in politics. The weekend will see frantic last minute horse trading and the nomination lists on both sides of the political divide may be different on Monday. The mere fact that Mahinda Rajapaksa has signed the UPFA nomination papers had stood the entire political system on its head.

Supporters of the yahapalana coalition are literally incandescent with rage at the fact that MR had finally been granted UPFA nominations. The pro-UNP website Lanka e News even accused Sirisena of having accepted a bribe running into millions of USD to give nominations to Mahinda and they have pledged to publish evidence to this effect. Street demonstrations have been held by NGO activists to express displeasure at President Maithripala Sirisena for having given Mahinda Rajapaksa nominations.

There is nothing surprising in MS caving in to pressure from within the SLFP and the UPFA to field Mahinda as a candidate at this election as the same kind of pressure was applied by a group within the UNP to force Ranil Wickremesinghe to stand down and allow a common candidate to contest against Mahinda Rajapaksa. If RW could not withstand pressure coming from a minority within just one political party, how was Sirisena expected to withstand pressure coming from the vast majority of a whole coalition of political parties? Besides, nobody was accusing RW of wanting to create a split in the UNP, but Sirisena had to face that kind of blackmail as well and it’s not surprising that he finally gave in.

The pro-UNP website Lanka e News was right in saying that it was Sirisena who placed himself in this position by taking over the SLFP leadership. That certainly was not a part of the yahapalana agenda. Those who are now blaming MS for giving nominations to Mahinda should have registered their protest at the outset when MS became SLFP leader without so much as a by your leave from the people who brought him into power. Instead of confronting him at that stage, RW was laughing and poking fun at the cowed and intimidated UPFA members in parliament saying that if they do not behave, he will ‘report’ them to the president and have them given knocks on the head (toku) if they do not fall in line with the yahapalana government. Well it’s the UNP that has ended up receiving ‘toku’ in the end.

The UNP did obtain some benefits through MS wresting control of the SLFP/UPFA. Around 136 UPFA parliamentarians meekly stood aside and allowed a party with just 47 MPs to form a government. That would not have been possible if anyone else other than Sirisena had been the leader of the SLFP/UPFA. If the SLFP leadership had been given even to Chandrika as was originally planned, she would have almost certainly kicked the UNP out and formed an SLFP government with the MPs she had under her command. In that respect, the UNP perhaps has to be grateful to Sirisena for having kept the SLFP on a leash and allowed them to rule the country for six months. Sirisena would never have been president if not for the UNP and the UNP would not have ruled the country for as long as six months if not for MS in the context of the overwhelming majority that the UPFA had in parliament.

SLFP ‘rescues’ Sirisena from self-inflicted captivity

In hindsight, this was a not a situation that could have been sustained for long. Yet the UNP seemed to be actually relying on this situation to continue through the next elections and beyond. It seemed as if they were expecting MS to ensure that the SLFP/UPFA loses the parliamentary election so that the UNP will be able to form the next government with a minority of cowed and intimidated SLFP members playing a supporting role in a UNP led government. Sirisena himself may not have been totally averse to this idea. But his party was not willing to tolerate it.

Deep down, Sirisena himself would have entertained misgivings about causing the defeat of the SLFP and turning it into a tail of the UNP. As Dr Rajitha Senaratne explained, MS had been a member of the SLFP for 47 years and he was unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for having split the party and brought about the defeat of the SLFP. What is interesting is that MS knew that if he gives nominations to MR, he will be reviled by the UNP and all the minority parties who voted for him to become president. But if he does not give nominations to MR, he will be reviled by the SLFP and the UPFA. Either way he ends up antagonizing one or the other party. He preferred to antagonize the UNP led forces rather than the SLFP/UPFA forces. That says something about the man and his inclinations. People like Dinesh Gunawardene were in fact banking on Sirisena’s SLFP instincts to finally reassert themselves.

Sirisena may also have been been acutely aware that he has not yet really been attacked or criticized by anybody in the Mahinda Rajapaksa camp as yet. Even though the MR faction has been agitating for the return of Mahinda to politics, they have never spoken out publicly against Sirisena. On the contrary, even Wimal Weerawansa has couched his campaign as an effort to ‘bring Mahinda and Maithri together’. The reason why they were so polite to him was because they were trying to coax Sirisena into agreeing to field Mahinda as the prime ministerial candidate of the SLFP and the UPFA. But if this did not going to happen, the gloves would have been off. Sirisena knew that once the attack on him started from within the SLFP, he would have no answer or justification for what he did. He would have been reviled by the SLFP for the following acts of commission or omission.

1. That it was Sirisena who split the SLFP and then teamed up with the UNP and the TNA to topple what would otherwise have been an undefeatable SLFP led government.

2. Though Sirisena fought the presidential election claiming to be the legitimate general secretary of the SLFP, the first thing he did after winning was to sack the SLFP prime minister and cabinet and appoint a UNP led government. How can any SLFP general secretary turned party president justify that?

3. Though the SLFP could command up to 136 members of parliament he forced all of them to give way to the UNP which had only 47 MPs.

4. After MS became president of the country and the SLFP, members of the party he led were subject to relentless persecution by the UNP led government and the SLFP president did nothing to stop it.

5. The SLFP president instead of postponing the local government elections and allowing the UPFA controlled LG institutions to function until after the parliamentary election was over, decided instead to dissolve the LG institutions and place them under special commissioners thereby deliberately depriving the SLFP of a natural advantage they had.

6. MS turned the SLFP into an appendage of the UNP government by giving about two dozen members of the SLFP some second rate ministerial positions in the UNP led government where UNPers held all the plum positions.

If Mahinda and his supporters were not given SLFP/UPFA nominations, and they were forced to contest separately, what Sirisena did to the SLFP after becoming its leader would have become the main topic on Mahinda’s election platform. This was obviously a situation that Sirisena wanted to avoid at any costs. The latter’s readiness to be reviled by the UNP rather than the SLFP could also be due to the fact that he sensed that the mood in the country had decisively shifted in favour of the Mahinda camp. With Sirisena’s political experience he knew that nobody can fabricate a groundswell of support. He knew that neither his faction of the SLFP or the UNP which both had access to governmental power could organize the kind of public rallies held to invite Mahinda back into politics.

What threw the plans of the yahapalana group into complete disarray was the revolt in the SLFP where ordinary voters, party activists, local government representatives, provincial councilors and parliamentarians all stood up as one demanding that Mahinda be brought back. This was a situation that no one could have foreseen and a complete contrast to the manner in which the UNP rank and file behaved. When MS was made the common candidate, only Tissa Attanayake had the guts to speak out against it in the UNP. One would have thought that when Sirisena was brought before the UNP executive committee to be endorsed as the common candidate, there would be howls of protest from at least some of those present as the UNP’s birthright was being handed over on a platter to an outsider. But there were none.

The consequences of being gutless

The UNP rank and file meekly accepted Maithripala Sirisena as their candidate. The SLFP rank and file do not accept the decisions of their leaders in that fashion. When the SLFP’s executive committee met at the Ape Gama auditorium and the SLFP’s local government representatives rose up in revolt against the pirates that had taken over the ship (so to speak) many UNP and yahapalana types thought this was an orchestrated uprising. They failed to recognize that it was spontaneous because such things can never happen within the UNP. This writer has described how Chandrika Kumaratunga was hooted at the Hyde Park May Day rally when CBK and Sirisena were both present on stage. It’s difficult to see a UNP crowd doing the same thing. Today, the UNP is suffering the consequences of not standing up against the handing over their birthright to outsiders. Ultimately everything finally boils down to a lack of courage and convictions.

When Sirisena showed signs of deviating from the yahapalana agenda, the UNP once again should have had the guts to take the bull by the horns and make him stick to the agenda agreed on. As the largest party within the yahapalana coalition, the responsibility of keeping Sirisena on a leash was their responsibility. It may be the case that the UNP could not have prevented Sirisena from taking over the SLFP because he had apparently gone to see Mahinda Rajapaksa at the Speaker’s residence on the sly without informing either RW or CBK so by the time they got to know, it was too late. Though the UNP could not have prevented that, they could easily have stuck to their guns at least on the question of abolishing the executive presidency. They could have rallied the support of all the parties and organizations agitating for the abolishing the executive presidency and by bringing people to Colombo, created an uproar calling for the abolishing of the executive presidency.

But to the amazement of those observing events, the UNP did nothing of the sort. Instead they allowed themselves to be browbeaten and forced to retreat on point after point in the 19th Amendment until there was nothing left of the original promise to abolish the executive presidency. To add insult to injury, after the whittled down 19th Amendment was passed, members of the UNP hailed it as a great victory. Wijedasa Rajapaksa even compared the 19th Amendment to the Magna Carta. They did not tell the people the truth and say that they had achieved virtually nothing and that Sirisena had cheated them. Perhaps they thought that if they spoke out and told the people the truth, their position would be undermined even more. They would have been acutely aware that they were running a government merely on the sufferance of Sirisena and the SLFP. Talk of tying oneself up in knots.

So instead of criticizing Sirisena, they praised him as the very embodiment of all that was good. Only the pro-UNP website Lanka e News expressed some dissent but a website cannot take the place of the party. The UNP had no plan in place to protect their investment. As explained in this column last week, the UNP’s only hope is in retaining as much of the yahapalana vote as possible. But what happened last week was a disaster. In addition to the JVP going its own way which was inevitable, the UNP failed to prevent Sarath Fonseka from handing in nominations. In normal circumstances the UNP would not have been able to accommodate SF because of the latter’s ego problems, but he had said that he would be open to contesting through a coalition in case a ‘danger’ from Mahinda Rajapaksa emerges. Well the said danger did arise last week with MR signing the nomination papers. Yet on the same day, SF also gave in nominations to contest in the Colombo district.

The UNP has managed to retain the support of the SLMC and has managed to rope in (at least at the time of writing) Champika Ranawaka, Rajitha Senaratne and some members of the SLFP who were earlier supporting Sirisena. This will add some zest to the UNP’s campaign as these people are passionate about their opposition to Mahinda. By Saturday the story was floating around that even Fonseka who had handed in his nomination papers was thinking of withdrawing and contesting on the UNP list. Whether that is possible with nominations closing on Monday by noon, is another matter. The defection of SLFP members who supported Sirisena to the UNP would confirm the suspicious SLFP voter that their true loyalties were never with the SLFP anyway. In fact the defection of so many members of the Sirisena faction to the UNP just about seals the fate of the other Sirisena loyalists who have opted to remain in the UPFA.

Electoral arithmetic

The willingness of the UNP to accommodate even last minute defections from the SLFP indicates that they are keenly aware of the electoral arithmetic. In 2001, the UNP won the parliamentary election of December that year winning 15 of the 16 electoral districts outside the north and east. The PA was able to win only the Moneragala district at that election. Even though the PA lost that election ignominiously, the arithmetic of that election indicated that the votes of the PA and JVP together outnumbered the UNP’s vote. The UNP got 4,086,026 votes at that election while the PA got 3,330,815 votes and the JVP got 815,353 votes. The PA and JVP votes together come to 4,146,169 which is slightly more than what the UNP and its allies got. This is the calculation which led to the formation of the UPFA in 2004 with the PA and the JVP coming together to defeat the UNP. Barely 30 months after coming into power, the UNP was defeated yet again at the 2004 parliamentary election. The UNP is now facing the same arithmetical nightmare with the splits in the yahapalana vote. Even with no split in the yahapalana vote, the UNP would have been on the back foot in ten districts to begin with. With the JVP going its own way and the CWC entering the fray, the arithmetic indicates a defeat for the UNP in 15 of the 16 districts outside the north and east (with the arithmetic favouring a UNP victory only in the Kandy district.)

By Friday, it appeared that four former UPFA parliamentarians would be denied nominations. One could understand why Mervyn Silva and Sajin Vaas Gunawardene would be kept out. In the case of Sajin Vaas Gunawardene, his attack on Chris Nonis is sufficient reason for denying him nominations. As for Mervyn Silva, his public conduct over a number of years more than justifies his removal from the list. But in the case of Duminda Silva and Sarana Gunawardene things are not that clear. The only public incident that Duminda Silva was involved in was the confrontation that killed Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra. Everything in that case revolves around who fired the first shot and started the shootout. Exchanging fisticuffs is one thing, but opening fire is another matter altogether. If one side opens fire, the other side has to follow suit unless they want to get killed. So who used a firearm first? The case has not concluded yet and it would be unfair and indeed downright dangerous to declare people guilty before anything is proven.

There are ‘stories’ about the involvement of Duminda Silva in various nefarious businesses. But they are still only stories, with nothing proven. Quite apart from proving anything, there isn’t sufficient evidence even to justify a newspaper article about Duminda Silva’s alleged ‘business’. Newspapers can publish stories even if nothing has been proven in a court of law if there is sufficient evidence to back up what is said in a story. If even a newspaper cannot find anything to justify an article about Duminda Silva’s business activities, denying him nominations will be a bad precedent to set.

Courtesy:Sunday Island