By Kumar David –

Prof. Kumar David

For a longtime I argued that the presidential election was a two-horse race between Ranil Wickremesinghe and Anura Kumara Dissanayake and recently hinted that the advantage was slipping in Ranil’s favour. However, the political weather is squally and it would be slipshod not to give thought to other possibilities. In particular a full accounting needs to be made of the impact of the Sajith Premadasa candidacy.

Let me, however, first summarise the underlying logic of the above view before coming to the point of this essay which is: “Is it possible that Sajith Premadasa may upset Ranil’s well-laid strategies?” First some ethnic data. Gota’s infamous 69-lakhs is Lanka’s core Sinhala-Buddhist actuality plus five lakhs of Catholics/Christians. Stripped of the latter which has shifted to Ranil, it is 64-lakhs. The ethnic and religious composition of minorities in Lanka is Ceylon Tamils in the North, East and around Colombo, a little over 10-lakhs, Muslims a little less than 10-lakhs, up-country Tamils about 5-lakhs and the aforesaid 5-lakhs of Catholics. This adds up to 30-lakhs of minorities compared to 64-lakhs of Sinhala-Buddhists, that is 64:30 or 68% Sinhala-Buddhists to 32% all minorities which is what all statistical tables say. You can play around with the decimals but the end result will be much the same.

Ranil is the blue-eyed boy of the IMF which sits on a few billion dollars of funds earmarked for Lanka and influences the largesse of the World Bank and the ADB. The blue that the IMF espies in Ranil’s eyes also includes Sovereign Wealth Funds (international private capital). Ranil is likely to open-up the economy, privatise some public enterprises and float the rupee, all music to IMF ears.

In class terms the Ranil enjoys the backing of local upper and business classes, some SME-types and many who think “Ranil can Deliver”, meaning he can chaperon economic recovery. By manoeuvring with free-hold deeds in war affected Tamil areas, grants to the Jaffna hospitals and the Rs 1000/day wage to mostly Tamil plantation workers, Ranil seems to have stitched up a lions-share of the aforesaid 30-lakhs of ethnic and religious minority vote. He has however fouled up his reputation by protecting crooks like Arjuna Mahendran and others. The great unknown for him, however, to put it in Rumsfeld Speak, is the Known-Unknown; how many of the country’s radicalised youth of all communities, fed up with the system, will throw their support behind the NPP-JVP. This is still fluid but will become clear as October draws neigh.

Now let’s approach the numbers game from a different angle. When Gota polled 69-lakhs in 2019 Sajith, the principal opponent, polled 56-lakhs which represents the core UNP Sinhala-Buddhist national vote plus UNP voting Ceylon Tamils, up-country Tamils and Muslims, but not Catholics since at that time the silly Archbishop was taken for a stately ride by Gota. Can Sajith retain all of the 56-lakh core Sinhala-Buddhist UNP vote and the newly acquired 5 lakhs of Catholics in the October 2024 election and push Ranil into third place? This is the great-game, the great gamble, for both Sajith and Ranil. We are now therefore well into a cross-class, cross-ethnic and internationally weighted discourse.

Before I squeal my two-cents worth on this matter I need to mention one factor that can bugger the works for Sajith. It is about the opportunists and turn-coats who populate his-party’s top posts – Eran, Harsha, Marika etc. Harsha drools for a cabinet post, Eran like John the Baptist is a bleating voice in the wilderness and as for Marika, only Allah knows his innermost desires. If this bunch of good-for-nothings were to desert Sajith and hightail it back to the mother party, Sajith is kaput. On the other hand, if Sajith and Ranil reach a publicly declared deal (no matter who is PM and who President and for how long each) the combination, I reckon, is unbeatable for even a first-count majority.

The next issue is that we must give our minds to the possibility of a three-cornered tournament. This is not an easy one to judge and I am still working on it – who cares what I think anyway except my ever-forgiving readers? I have recently engaged in conversations with some Sinhala-Sinhala (if you get what I mean) friends. Their point is that Sajith’s hold on people like themselves in the rural areas must not the underestimated. Hela jathika abimane folk in rural areas identify with Sajith not with Ranil. They mentioned the Homagama to Gampaha to Kelani Valley belt and the Southern Province but they were not well informed on Uva, the up-country Sinhalese and Sinhalese in further out like the NCP. To what extent will rural Sinhala folk strike a chord with Sajith which they find absent in Ranil? If Ranil is pushed into third place in a three-cornered contest it is fairly certain that Anura will win, perhaps after a review of second preferences.

JR designed the still in place constitution with a certain point in mind. If the UNP does not come first it will at least come second as the major national party and when second preferences are counted most people will plonk for the UNP. The present is a case in point – how many second preferences of defeated candidates will be in favour the JVP/NPP over a traditional party? JR could not, and could not be expected to, anticipate wild swings like the two Chandrika effects, victory in the civil-war and the Mahinda phenomenon followed by the 2019 Gota phenomenon, and the consequences of Ranasinghe Premadasa’s assassination by the LTTE followed the serial assassination of Lalith and Gamini. The well laid schemes of mice and men, in time, all gang aft a flee.

The 2020 economic debacle, the billions of pending IMF dollars, what I called a “cross-class, cross-ethnic, internationally weighted discourse”, the web of uncivilized political thievery and the need to feed the 225 (Ali Baa baba and a mere forty thieves to tangle with) makes the present a unique conjuncture in our history. For these reasons I am calling for a half-time break before offering an evaluation of whether Sajith will succeed in pushing Ranil into third place in a three-cornered contest. In any case who the devil cares about what I write except a tiny number of English language readers?