By

C. A. Chandraprema

Sarath Fonseka’s election campaign is being discussed for all the wrong reasons. The meetings that he has organized in various parts of the country have attracted public attention due to how poorly attended they are. Some meetings have been held with virtually no audience.

An acquaintance of this writer described one of the Field Marshall’s meetings in the Akuressa town where a huge stage had been constructed near the main bus stand and there weren’t even ten people in the audience.

Even the trishaw drivers in the vicinity had been looking away indifferently. But at the round of provincial council elections held in 2013 and 2014, his Democratic Party had emerged as the third political force in the country overtaking even the JVP.

Fonseka’s lack of political experience becomes painfully obvious when observing the manner in which he failed to consolidate his position.

His biggest failure was his inability to form a good team around himself. He expected to run a political party the same way he ran the army with those below him taking orders from him in a sphere where Fonseka was a neophyte. Little wonder that even the few prominent people who had joined his party soon left.

Ultimately he was the only prominent person who was left in his party – which is why we see his wife, former son- in-law and a daughter all contesting through his party. A party that got over 203,000 votes in the Western province alone last year has by now been reduced to nothing. Fonseka has only himself to blame for what has befallen him.

Due to his lack of political experience, he failed to understand that a political party cannot be kept going on antipathy towards some other politician. Fonseka was being driven by hate to oppose Mahinda Rajapaksa but then there were so many others who were doing the same and Fonseka became just one among many doing the same thing.

In such circumstances, what happens is that people tend to rally around the largest entity advocating that same point of view. Since the UNP was also offering antipathy towards the Rajapaksas and much more besides, the people who would otherwise have supported Fonseka have clearly gravitated to the UNP. Fonseka could easily have positioned himself as a patriotic alternative to the Rajapaksas.

He could have carved out an identity for himself by opposing the Rajapaksas and at the same time opposing the UNP’s politics. But in his anxiety to defeat the Rajapaksas, Fonseka joined up with the UNP and for fear of doing anything to weaken his side, he refrained from criticizing any political stand taken by the UNP because the common goal was to defeat Mahinda.

Those who voted for Fonseka took the cue from Fonseka himself that the UNP represents everything that Fonseka stands for and anybody voting for Fonseka would be better off working directly with the UNP which was bigger and had a better chance of capturing power.

So Fonseka basically donated his constituency to the UNP. Fonseka has done a great disservice to the title of Field Marshal by contesting this election. Pakistan has had only one Field Marshall and India two in the post independence history of those countries. A Field Marshal is a figure that is supposed to uphold the pride of his nation.

One thing that a Field Marshall does not do is to go around the country hurling invective at his opponents at public meetings. If a Field Marshall addresses a gathering it will be a formal gathering and not pocket meetings in villages attended by a few tipsy tree climbers and labourers and womenfolk in housecoats accompanied by their children.

Yet we saw a Field Marshall in a big black Mercedes Benz displaying the national flag and the five golden stars of a five star general turn up in a slum for pocket meetings. Fonseka has brought the title of Field Marshall so low that he is being referred to by some websites as the ‘Vel Vidane’.

Courtesy:Sunday Island