by Tisaranee Gunasekara

“A morally blind politics…”
Thiery d’Holbach (Social Systems)

It was obviously a coincidence; but Maithripala Sirisena’s verbal blast against Mahinda Rajapaksa could not have been better timed. The President made his speech against the ancien régime’s comeback project on Bastille Day, the day the people of France took the momentous first step of a revolution which overthrew the Bourbons and upended a world.

In his speech President Sirisena used the word monarchy (rajanduwa) twice to identify the regime of his predecessor. Like the Bourbons, Mahinda Rajapaksa too has forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. He is surrounded by the same faces and he says the same things, two factors which contributed in no small measure to his January 8th defeat.

There is no virtue in Basil or Gotabhaya Rajapaksa not seeking nominations. Their absence does not indicate a dilution of the familial nature of the comeback project. Post-19th Amendment neither can contest without giving up his American citizenship; and both opted to keep their ties to Uncle Sam. Basil Rajapaksa remains his brother’s campaign manager. As Namal Rajapaksa said in his first post-defeat interview, “….the leader needs someone they (sic) can trust… We always trusted each other….”i

The aim of the Rajapaksa project is nothing less than a full-fledged power-grab, a return to the status quo ante January 8th. Prof. Nalin de Silva let the cat out of the bag when he told the media that the UPFA intends to gain a two-thirds majority, deprive President Sirisena of party leadership and impeach him. The plan, said the professor, is already in placeii.

The comeback story is easy to imagine. UPFA wins the election. A cowed President Sirisena appoints Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Prime Minister. PM Rajapaksa does in 2015 what President Rajapaksa did in 2010: use carrots and sticks to ensure a sufficient number of defections from a reeling opposition. A new amendment removes presidential term-limits. Maithripala Sirisena is impeached. Mahinda Rajapaksa becomes president. Paradise is regained.

It must have seemed so easy and so beguiling, during those late night discussions in various echo-chambers, especially with in-house electoral statisticians proclaiming that the UPFA will get 7.1 million votes this time!iii

By last week, the first part of the plot seemed complete. The SLFP and the UPFA had succumbed to pressure and the nomination process was almost completely under Rajapaksa control. President Sirisena’s inaction and silence created an image of complicity. For a few traumatic days it looked as if the country was back on the same cliff edge it was during the presidential election. When President Sirisena cancelled a statement scheduled for Monday, the despair of those who worked and voted to end the Rajapaksa raj was complete.

Then, on Bastille Day, Maithripala Sirisena made an unscripted speech, stating his complete opposition to the Rajapaksas and his determination to prevent the return of the ancien régime.

A Rajapaksa-made Crisis

Pictures, they say, are worth more than any number of words. Just such a photograph appeared on the internet the day after President Sirisena delivered his verbal blast. Members of the UPFA election steering committee sit around a table with Candidate Rajapaksa at the head. Anura Priyadarshana Yapa stands beside Candidate Rajapaksa’s chair, looking not like the powerful general secretary of the largest constituent party of the UPFA, but like a footman waiting for his lord’s commandsiv.

That submissive pose helps understand why it was so easy for Mahinda Rajapaksa to bend the SLFP to his will, even after he was decisively rejected by the electorate. The UNP was liberated from its feudal mindset by the Jayawardene-Premadasa revolution; no such politico-psychological transformation occurred within the SLFP. It remained a Bandaranaike party until 2005. During the next nine years the Rajapaksa brothers worked with systematic – and ruthless – thoroughness to turn the SLFP into a Rajapaksa party. The SLFP hierarchy, including the Central Committee, consists predominantly of Rajapaksa loyalists. Mr. Yapa was Mr. Rajapaksa’s choice as the General Secretary. It was this thraldom of the hierarchy, rather than any pressure from the grassroots, which enabled the Rajapaksa faction to win the nomination battle so decisively.

When Maithripala Sirisena inherited the SLFP on January 16th, the obvious course of action would have been to appoint a less disloyal general secretary and change the composition of the Central Committee. And President Sirisena did make a try, when he dismissed five prominent Rajapaksa-loyalists and appointed five of his own supporters to the CC in April (one of those appointees, Prasanna Solangaarachchi, filed the petition which prevented the Rajapaksa faction from summoning the CC to remove Mr. Sirisena from party leadership). But President Sirisena needed the support of the UPFA to implement his election promises (especially the 19th Amendment). That dependency may have prevented him from taking any further disciplinary action against errant party bosses. At least that is what he said in his speech, and it does have the ring of truth.

Post-dissolution, post-nomination, the situation has changed drastically. Maithripala Sirisena is no longer dependent on the toleration of a hostile faction. There is no internal democracy in the UNP and the SLFP. Both parties have constitutions which give dictatorial powers to the leader. The General Secretary’s authority is limited to election times. If Maithripala Sirisena decides to exercise his powers as party leader, there is little the party can do to stop him. In fact he is already doing so. He ordered the cancellation of the emergency Central Committee meeting and obtained a judicial order to buttress his authority. He also appointed four electorate organisers and two joint organisers – all in one day.

Had Mahinda Rajapaksa been satisfied with nominations for himself and a handful of loyalists, President Sirisena, who seems to prefer the middle ground, might have played along. He did come up with a compromise formula – blacklist 20 politicians with particularly noxious reputations and give nomination to Mr. Rajapaksa from his usual Hambantota district. Had the UPFA and the SLFP seen the sense of these proposals and persuaded Mahinda Rajapaksa to go along, they could have enjoyed the best of both worlds. But they lacked the guts to stand up to Mahinda Rajapaksa and Mahinda Rajapaksa wanted nothing less than a total victory. He threatened to contest separately if all his demands were not met, thereby breaking up the SLFP.

So the SLFP hierarchy succumbed. They lined up behind Mr. Rajapaksa and made clear that their allotted role for Mr. Sirisena was not even that of co-leader but Rajapaksa-appendage. Mr. Rajapaksa told his supporters that Mr. Sirisena is now isolated and needs their protection. Perhaps he did not understand how demeaning such condescension would be to the man who was elected the president of the republic by an absolute majority of Lankans just six months ago. Given no option other than utter humiliation and political hara-kiri, Mr. Sirisena, not unsurprisingly opted to fight back.

The Road Ahead

Sri Lanka has to pay Rs. 250 million, monthly as loan-servicing, for an airport which gets only a single flight a day (maintaining that airport costs another 250 million rupees)v. Starting this year, Sri Lanka has to pay another Rs. 7 billion annually, to service the loan (also Chinese) used to build an equally unnecessary port in Hambantota.

Perhaps it’s this undeniable reality which compelled the Mahanayake of the Malwatte Chapter to make an unusually forthright statement this week. He said that “….no proper development had tricked down to village…. People of Hambantota had pressing needs besides a port and an airport… As a result people virtually took to the streets to unseat the last government.”vi

The Rajapaksas and their acolytes still do not understand why they lost; and that their much vaunted development brought very few real, tangible benefits to ordinary voters.

Comeback attempts in democracies work, but they usually require a decent passage of time and a sufficient makeover, if not in terms of policies at least in terms of rhetoric. The Rajapaksas, blinded by their power-hunger and guided by their innate extremism, are attempting a comeback with neither condition fulfilled. The same rogues’ gallery; the same failed arguments; if Albert Einstein was right and doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is a sign of madness, there is a definite hint of political insanity in the Rajapaksa comeback attempt.

One of the key arguments Maithripala Sirisena made against a Rajapaksa comeback was that it would prevent the SLFP from getting a chunk of the minority vote. Given Mr. Sirisena’s enormous popularity among minority voters, had the SLFP and the UPFA accepted his policies and contested under his leadership, they could have gained a sizeable portion of the Tamil, Muslim and Christian votes. Instead the SLFP/UPFA seemed to have regressed totally into the anti-minority positions of the Rajapaksa era. Nothing reveals this retrogression more clearly than the UPFA list of candidates for the Kurunegala district. The district has a 7% Muslim populace; but the list, headed by Candidate Rajapaksa, does not have a single Muslim on itvii.

The race/religion card and supposed threats to national security are likely to play a major role in the UPFA propaganda. According to a media report, tellingly titled ‘UPFA banks on Genevaleaks’, the UPFA is hoping to use leaks about a possible UNHRC report targeting the Rajapaksa brothers (and a resultant Electric Chair drama) to gain Sinhala-Buddhist votes: “If the UPFA, by its contacts, especially in the international theatre, are able to get a whiff of what the international community’s agenda at Geneva would be in another two months’ time and if it has found that the island’s then leadership has been made culpable of alleged war crimes, then that may be to the UPFA’s advantage….. If, however, there are no leaks….then such a campaign among the Sinhala masses by the UPFA would be ineffective.”viii In the absence of actual leaks will the UPFA manufacture a fake Geneva report, like the Elephant-Tiger Pact it fabricated during presidential election?

According to Dharisha Bastians, Rajapaksa’s faction is indeed preparing a “fake draft of an OHCHR report, highlighting 42 names including that of Mahinda Rajapaksa and former Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa…. The fake ‘report’ could be released only a few days ahead of the election to mislead voters and whip up mass hysteria….”ix

So once again Sri Lanka is facing a make or break election. The political momentum, even in spite of such criminal disasters as the Central Bank Bond scam, is with the UNP. This is the UNP’s election to win or to lose. Ironically, without the threat of a Rajapaksa comeback, many floating voters and first time voters who played a key role in the January 8th victory might have stayed away on August 17th. With the Rajapaksas out of the way and democracy restored, there was nothing much to be excited about.

It was precisely the comeback project of the Rajapaksa raj which turned a standard, somewhat boring, democratic election into a do-or-die battle. The potential danger of every single democratic gain of the last six months being destroyed is likely to drive young voters, minority voters and floating voters to the polling booth in unusually large numbers. If there is such a surge, the UNP will be its main beneficiary.

The comeback plan of the Rajapaksas was based on their reading of Maithripala Sirisena and their reading of the national mood. This week Mr. Sirisena demonstrated how utterly wrong the Rajapaksas were when they believed him to be a weakling and a pushover. On August 17th, an absolutely majority of Lankans are likely to demonstrate that the Rajapaksas made a similar miscalculation in their assessment of the national mood.

Courtesy:Sunday Island