By Vishwamithra –

“I mean this record does not sound like somebody’s maiden voyage.” ~ George Duke

AKD

Polls have been in abundance; but elections not. Opinions many and facts and reality are rare. Every national conversation has held within itself an assumption that, from time one cannot fathom, has had more disagreements than compatible statements. Traditional political architecture seems to be unsound and damaged. The base has become brittle and the pillars are unsteady. The surrounding structure is vulnerable; its lasting powers, in comparison with our age-old monuments, are astonishingly short and could be measured in a few years at worst and one or two decades at best. Most of the masters – whom they call themselves- instead of taking strong and steady strides, are just meandering in the wonderland of futility. Strength has been replaced with impotency; stoicism with vacillation and compassion with hate and wickedness. Consequently they cling on to the results of those polls and the deceptive numbers they spit out.

It certainly is no place for adolescents; their days would be numbered and the end of the road is as close as one could see without aid of a pair of spectacles. The political landscape, its contours, its bends and steeply curves have begun their timely claim on the lives of amateurs. Those few professionals left to stride the rest of the journey, barring less than the number of fingers on one hand, are now hallucinating about grand entry into the exclusive enclaves of power and prestige. Cocktail parties and evening whiskeys at the five-star hotels, hobnobbing with foreign embassy diplomats, offering what they assume that they possess as real are the cruel elements that they go to sleep with and wake up the following morning with fatigued eyes and dried up lips. The unkind ingredients of western culture are slowly and surely taking their toll. The macabre unwinding of daily routine of our leaders has not ceased, not yet.

It has not yet dawned on Sri Lankans that the real and authentic leader of a dynamic democracy is one who has won the acceptance of the majority at an election. The mandate so bestowed upon that leader and his party alone should declare policy and execute such policies. Ranil Wickremesinghe, the current President of the country has had no such mandate; he has had no such acceptance and endorsement of the people. On the contrary, he was an outright rejection of the election held last. Not only he, his party could not muster one single seat in Parliament, the ‘Temple of Democracy’ which legislates, defines and shapes the national policy of the country. The national discourse is devoid of such an endorsement; it lacks the depth and breadth of an intellectually rich and culturally affluent dialogue.

Our President is an illegitimate child of the collapse of our economic life and decadence of our cultural heritage. When such an inscrutability occurs, adjustments to that new reality does take time and requires more space than one would need in normal circumstances. That illegitimate child has misunderstood the glaring reality; instead of embracing the real and far-reaching decisions that he had to make, he resorted to the most malignant varieties of statecraft. Instead of opening a two-way dialogue with the nation’s youth, the country’s promise, he engineered the brutal suppression, the solitary way in which almost all power-hungry cruel dictators attempt in order, not to resolve the issues at hand, but to ensure perpetuity in power. Sajith Premadasa must be still sulking as to what happened to him when Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the last President who opted to call him before he called Ranil to become his Prime Minister. Lack of farsightedness, bereft of wisdom and profoundness to comprehend the nuanced terrain of power-politics, Sajith chose to reject Gotabaya’s appeal.

Sajith was not alone in reaching that historically idiotic political calculus. It has been reported that his close comrades-in-arms in the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) also insisted that adhering to a more obstinate and shortsighted policy of playing from outside would result in a more agreeable outcome for them. They not only misread Gotabaya’s need, but sadly paid the price for underestimating Ranil Wickremesinghe’s greed and ambition. At the time of the economic collapse, Ranil, despite the fact that the United National Party (UNP) had not secured even one single seat at the General Elections, was already in Parliament thanks to the allocation of seats based on number of votes received nationally. Political strategists make calculations wisely; they make fairly accurate reading of a country’s political trajectory and they usually base such forecasts on objective factors and balanced subjective judgments. The SJB is in search for such talent and skill sets.

Fundamentally, all politics is pursuit of power. When a political leader loses that focus, when he or she loses that uncomplicated and primary knowledge in political configuration, he or she loses it all. And that is what happened to Sajith and his SJB. It always happens when one, instead of understanding the simple and uncomplicated factors, ventures into looking beyond the obvious. Analysis has caused irreversible paralysis. This is where not only the SJB, all traditional politics has failed not only these traditional political parties, but have claimed the innocence of the country’s youth and caused untraceable deviation to the country’s path to cultural progress and economic advancement.

If all traditional political parties have failed and do not show any signs of rectifying their mistakes in order to engage in serious nation-building, what is left for the country to look forward to remains the National People’s Power (NPP) and its leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD). But AKD is no JR Jayewardene nor SWRD Bandaranaike. While JRJ could be classified as a ruthless yet calculating political animal, Bandaranaike was a insensitive hypocrite. Both had their chances and both let the nation down willy nilly. I have written extensively on both JRJ and SWRD hence no need to repeat the same over and over.

Nevertheless, for an objective mind and a keen student of history and its continuous flow, the subjective condition of a moving society is leadership under dire and increasingly unbearable national calamity. The economic collapse that occurred in the April/May 2022 in Sri Lanka might have a parallel yet no match in terms of the emptiness of the national coffers and dearth of talents and skills of those could handle such a catastrophic situation. The parallel is the era of the Sirimavo Bandaranaike regime in the ’70 to ’77 period. With all the bright brains of Felix Dias, NM, Colvin and Keuneman in her Cabinet, Sirimavo still managed to lead the country to the abyss of economic nothingness. Her sense of accountability and transparency was totally absent and both public and private conduct of her parliamentarians was fast-nearing perversion of political power. Nepotism reached a new high and a ‘Bandaranaike/Ratwatte Family Tree’ had begun its cruel blossoming to the fullest. With absolute lack of empathy for her countrymen and callous behavior towards her political opponents, Sirimavo and the then first family entered the 1977 General Election campaign with fake confidence and downright arrogance.

The macro picture of the country was totally unreadable for her unsophisticated mind; she failed to recognize the brute force of the prevailing social conditions. A pulverizing result at the hustings took care of her, at least for the next two terms of the political cycles. JRJ changed the direction of the country’s economy; but he too failed to take note of the cultural nuances of a developing nation whose age-old habits and inhibitions had been well entrenched in the Sinhaleseness of the electorate and exclusivity of a pseudo-elitist mindset of the majority ethnic group. What SWRD allowed to raise, the saffron-robed army of Buddhist Monks to indulge in the political machinations of the time, did not go away during the JR-era; It just went dormant. The Sirimavo regime, despite the presence of the Marxian and atheist-like minds such as NM, Colvin and Keuneman, cornered the Tamil population by the introduction of University quota system and standardization of University entrance. The Tamil community which regards education as its supreme aim in life suffered an irrevocable setback. The rest, as they is history. A thirty-year war ensued and the two communities were set apart, the gulf between them widening by the day.

Into this quagmire entered the Rajapaksas and for them political power became a handy tool for self-enrichment. 10%, 20% and 30% commissions from each and every government-funded projects ended up as the beginning and end of all deals. Concealed under the canopy of wicked state-spending schemes, these brothers of avarice and indulgence, made Sri Lanka look like a paradise for them and hell for its average citizen. How did Ranil Wickremasinghe, a son of Esmond Wickremasinghe, a celebrated strategist of yesteryear, fit into this milieu? A legitimate son of a legitimate father became an illegitimate creature of constitutional malignancy and economic chaos. In a strict sense, Ranil need not be answerable to the electorate, for he was not the elected leader of the country. Placed there by the force of constitutional circumstance, this man whose dream was to lead the nation by hook or by crook, is presiding over her destiny and is determined to stay there as long as it allows him to.

The primary challenge AKD and the NPP face today is from Ranil Wickremesinghe and his runaway kid Sajith Premadasa. Both belonging to the traditional way of politics, they would get together and make every conceivable attempt to safeguard what is traditionally called the status quo. AKD’s former leader, Rohana Wijeweera tried it twice, violently, first under the feudal Sirimavo and later under the autocratic JRJ. Both times he failed. AKD’s challenge is different in that his declared commitment to the democratic process has made the JVP and its successor NPP more acceptable to the majority of the current national mindset.

But he has to define his policies on the four major issues:

1. How to recover from the economic calamity

2. How to resolve the Northern Tamil Question with more equanimity

3. How to eradicate corruption, not only among politicians but also in the bureaucratic machinery and society at large.

4. How to establish public trust and empower a more equitable judiciary

Can AKD and the NPP handle these thorny and complicated national issues to the satisfaction of the country? That is the question the country is asking them. They have to deliver answers that are clear and uncomplicated. Then the poll numbers that I mentioned at the very outset of this column could be correct and accurate.

*The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com