by N Sathiya Moorthy 12 November 2019
The battle lines are finally drawn – and not on unexpected lines. Barring the initial hiccup and surprise over the UNP-NDF non-selection of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as their presidential candidate, everything is moving along the tried and tested routes of Elections-2015 for full and the preceding one of 2010, in many parts. Barring the Muslim parties which had backed the Rajapaksas in 2010 and backed out five years later, it’s all in the script. It included the TNA going through motions of confusion, consultations and confused consultations, and announcing their long-known decision to vote against the Rajapaksas, this time war-time Defence Secretary Gotabaya R.
Put in demographic terms, if not on statistical terms, it means that the SLT and Muslim voters are not unlikely to back Premadasa, if they still went by the way their divided political leaderships (especially of the latter) guided and cajoled them, and the Upcountry Tamils would be divided. The majority Sinhala votes too are anyway divided, but this time, the Christian element may hold some surprise as it did in 2010 – but in a different direction between then and now. Or, so is a studied speculation.
On paper it would look as if it is a closed case, but in reality as is the case with most if not all elections across democracies, it is still an open and shut issue. If someone calculated that a majority of minority votes would tilt the scales, an undecided minority among the majority voters could till it still. In the case of the former, the indecisive decision was the key,. In the latter case, the decisive indecision of the undecided, or ‘swing voters’, still holds the key – and some residual excitement, which has been hard to come by in this election.
It is unfair to say that Premadasa lost valuable time because of the party’s indecision in naming him as the collective candidate of their multi-ethnic combine. Despite being named the presidential nominee of the SLPP-JO combine early on Gota’s candidacy became even more doubtful when his citizenship was challenged in the courts, leading not only to delays, but also to nervousness and avoidable embarrassment of an unprecedented kind. All of it would have been worse, and nothing like what Sajith might have ended up facing otherwise, if the court orders had gone against Gota.
Man proposes, but..,.
There is still indecision lurking against the Gota ticket, even if he were to be elected President. If not any of the other 34 losing candidates, including Gota, a stray voter here or a political leader there, could still challenge his election, deducing what he or she may present as ‘new and compelling evidence’ (?) on the citizenship issue. There of course are other pending cases against Gota and other Rajapaksas dating back to the previous regime, where either the investigators continued to go slow or the courts have granted adjournments, or both.
This by itself did not make any of the Rajapaksas, starting with President-elect Gota, if that were to become the case, a convict in any or all of the cases. It would however be a collateral reminder to the fact how the current Government of estranged dual leadership of President Maithirpala Sirisena and PM Wickremesinghe had manipulated the Constitution of all statutes, to deny a Rajapaksa of the ‘Family’s choice, a go at the presidential polls this time round. It was unprecedented and unparalleled in global democracy, so to say.
If 19-A restored the two-year upper-limit for an incumbent that Mahinda Rajapaksa had sought to circumvent through his personalised 18-A, the former also included two other provisions, both new and even more innovative. One of them denied the presidency for those with dual citizenship, and was obviously aimed at Gota and his brother Basil Rajapaksa, both of whom seemingly held American citizenships.
As it now it turns out through court proceedings, Gota had done the Houdini trick when brother Mahinda was holding all reins of all ministries as President, and none else seemed wiser. It is this procedure that may be taken to the courts, post-poll, and possibly to the Supreme Court as the Court of Appeals has already ruled in Gota’s favour.
The other of course is raising the minimum age-limit for presidential candidates, from 30 years to 35, obviously aimed at denying Namal Rajapaksa, a change in Elections-2019. The irony is that President Sirisena and PM Wickremesinghe who master-minded and/or mastered it all have not been able to fulfil their none-too-hidden ambitions of contesting and winning the presidency, even if it had occurred to them that they might still be facing each other. Whoever then thought that man can only propose and there are greater powers in a democracy (other than god) who disposes?
Different strokes
It is in this context, rival claims to policing duties and attached larger issues need to be viewed. Tweeting on the recent incident in which camp MP and former Minister S B Dissanayake’s security cops opened fire on a crowd of Gota supporters (whatever the reason), the candidate declared that no official would be allowed to misuse his powers. The focus is both on traditional policing as commonly understood, with the underlying war-time Rajapaksa concerns about ‘accountability’,
Against this, Premadasa is going hammer and tongs on political corruption, as that is a visible Achilles’ heel of challenger Gota. With little to show, by way of defending ‘national security’ as commonly understood, especially by the majority ‘Sinhala-Buddhists’ and so even by word, he is seeking to keep national attention on political corruption, instead. It has now come to a stage that Premadasa has ended up declaring that he would have a new Prime Minister, free of the ghost of corruption, if elected Prime Minister.
In a way, this could emerge as one of the multiple issues that the voters across the board might end up considering. While they may welcome a change of face, UNP cadres and traditional non-cadre supporters may not like the idea of a young and relatively inexperienced President, if Premadasa is elected, shunning incumbent Wickremesinghe wholesale.
If Wickremesinghe has no role in government, as implied, he would have no role in the party, as well. With that could go a whole lot of Wickremesinhe loyalists manning the party organisation, top to bottom and in the reverse, too. Some of the second-line leaders and fund-raisers for the party might even see it as an expression of Premadasa’s inexperience and self-centred approach to electoral politics, which otherwise has to be a team-work, especially if he were to come out victorious at this crucial hour.
Needless to point out that outside of the UNP and its majority Sinhala vote-bank, there are the minority parties and communities that have backed Premadasa, wholly and at times whole-heartedly. To them, however, Premadasa is still an unknown commodity. They know the UNP identified with Wickremesinghe, whatever be their contribution to UNP choosing him as their common candidate.
Independent of marketing minority political leaderships, their voters may be wary of getting into a mess where the post-poll UNP intra-party politics is going to be divided in multiple ways and directions. Caste would be a factor, yes, but it would only be one. This would be so, whether or not Premadasa became President. If elected, he could be burdened with the complexities of the ethnic issue for instance, where he has made no public commitment, nor is he known to have any specific view acceptable to both the majority and minority ethnicities (including Muslims),
This is the kind of different strokes’ game that the two candidates are caught up with, but with Premadasa burdened disproportionately more. Talk of national security, against this construct, especially after the Easter blasts, there is a new and old constituency from the LTTE era that readily identifies with the Rajapaksa, even more. This may be more so in urban centres, against which caste regrouping may be Premadasa’s answer from rural South – or, hopefully so, for his camp followers.
Outside view
All this leads to the inevitable question on the outsider-perception of contemporary Sri Lanka, which was a major factor in the nation voting out Mahinda R and electing outgoing President Maithripala Sirisena in the previous elections of 2015. They hate the Rajapaksas, so to say, but did not know Sirisena then, and Premadasa now. They knew, then and since, only Wiockremesinghe as an acceptable face of Sri Lankan polity.
Then as now and even during the post-war presidential polls of 2010, the international community (read: West) saw Sri Lanka only through their coloured anti-Rajapaksa glasses. Hence, war-time army commander Sarath Fonseka was fine by them, and also because of that, to the ‘victimised’ Tamil community and polity, too. Yet, the overweighing presence of Wickremesinghe is the background was unmistakable.
At the end of the day, the question is if the Sinhala majority is going to vote more on corruption or on their perception and sense of national security – with caste playing a definite second role, whichever way it may do. For the minorities, especially Tamils, the question is if the voter is ready to back the TNA’s call for backing Premadasa, especially after the un-kept promises of the past five years and in the absence of Wickremesinghe at the helm, now.
It all applies to Premadasa’s perceptions about China and Hambantota, the latter his own constituency and district as that of the Rajapaksas. If anything, Preamadasa is not known to have said anything for or against Hambantota (and by extension China), when the Rajapaksas first brought them in, or when his own party boss Wickremesinghe as PM pitched the Chinese tent for China in Hambantota. It is a question that would linger in the mind of Chinese, who too do not know the man and his missin, as much as any other in the international community – and even closer to home, be it foreign policy, security issues, or ethnic and administrative concerns.
Thus, the Rajapaksas are being weighed on what they are, and are seen as – and Preamadasa, for what his party purportedly stands for….In context, Premadasa may require the party more than the Rajapaksas, for whom they are also the party!
The article appeared in the Ceylon Today on 12 November 2019