By Vishwamithra –

“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” ~ Otto Von Bismarck

They have destroyed their beginnings; they have destroyed their path and they ultimately destroyed their end. Ceylon’s politic

al journey has had a lamentable history. At the dawn, or on its very eve, of Independence, in 1947, DS Senanayake formed the United National Party (UNP). Its stature was immense; its composition acceptable without much controversy and its strength amongst all walks of life beyond doubt. The so-called ‘Father of the Nation’ founded the party with his mercantile-class friends and even political foes with an announced intention of navigating the new nation in a politically uncertain and an economically stable setting.

Steeped in the dying British pukka sahib-traditions, DS did not waste any time gathering his forces and forming a politically savvy entity; his compadres stemmed from the same social milieu; they wined and dined at the same posh restaurants and social clubs. Their collective desire was to engage in politics, firstly as a matter of hobby and then as a service to their countrymen. Born with many a silver spoon in their mouths, these bourgeois comrades were either educated abroad or in first rate colleges in Colombo and other few big cities. Their parent generations had enough money to afford ayaas and appus for every minuscule deed in their respective households. Doctors, engineers, planters, landowners and civil servants, they were, but divorced from the greater majority (more than 70%) of the people in the land.

Hailing from this class, the leaders of all political parties at the time engaged in politics, as all other do, to seek power and then do whatever they thought was the right thing for the country. However, corruption and making money as an ambition was not with them as it is now; managing the national coffers and guiding the sociopolitical and cultural life of the country was not very far from their thought process. But their, especially the ruling United National Party’s Cabinet led by its Prime Minister DS, inherent but misguided beliefs in the superiority as Sinhalese Buddhists led them to enact parliamentary bills and legislations to buttress those views. Disenfranchisement of ‘Estate Tamils’ in the hill country was such a misguided enactment; although its primary aim was to make numbers of ‘Estate  Tamils’ less decisive in elections, relegating that segment of our population to a second or third class citizenry category was a gross abuse of majority power. What followed in the subsequent decades were a clear and evident cause of the ethnic chaos that resulted from that policy of disenfranchisement of ‘Estate Tamils’.

However, living beyond our means, on the economic side of governance did continue and it was basically caused by our left wing leaders at the time. When JR Jayewardene, the then Finance minister of the Dudley Senanayake government introduced the elimination of the free rice ration in his Budget Speech in 1953, the ‘Hartal‘ organized by NM Perera and the rest resulted not only in stomachaches for Dudley, it created havoc in the management of our debit and credit equation in the economy. An ‘entitlement syndrome’ was set in amongst our people and that mindset ruled the day for the following administrations.

That ‘entitlement syndrome’ is still very active and has eaten into our psyche aggressively; the resultant sequence of promises and pledges successive governments and opposing parties made during election times have taken their toll. Both the United National Party (UNP) and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) were engaged in  a maddening competition in order to secure a majority amongst the broad masses, especially in the nineteen sixties and and the seventies. Neither of the parties made any meaningful attempts to educate the people so that the ‘entitlement syndrome’  would be treated as an exceptional circumstance in the context of the organic development of the economy of a developing nation.

Ranil Wickremesinghe did not become the leader of the UNP as a deserving second tier leader in the Party. He happened to the only senior member left to live after the assassinations of R Premadasa, Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake. When the three were living, Ranil was just a tyro  in politics, especially in the context of hard-fought elections in opposition to seasoned politicians on the other side of the aisle. With Chandrika Kumaratunga Bandaranaike and Mahinda Rajapaksa as opposing politicians, Ranil felt puny and utterly inadequate in a brutal political war-front. Consequently he managed to lose election after election while the 30-year war was going on.

Ranil had no long term strategy to counter the onslaught on the political front; he did not have any crafty minds surrounding him. Instead his immediate advisers were his old-Royalist classmates whose know-how in political strategy was equal to near zero. On the side of elected parliamentarians, Ranil had one figure, Karu Jayasuriya, and Ranil managed to make enemies with him every step of the way. Instead of releasing Karu to the country as an acceptable surrogate, Ranil made every attempt  to bind him to a stationary post. Ranil is no good orator. Oratory and Ranil did not go together. And his inherent quality of being a loner did not help party, nor himself in a cruel field of competitive politics.

In other word, Ranil Wickremasinghe was always found to be a man at the wrong place at the wrong time. After being in power for seventeen consecutive years, the UNP second tier leaders had no alternative but to look for another leader who would lead them to the promised land, so to speak.  Karu Jayasuriya was the ideal person. But Karu had to battle with two; instead of one, Ranil. He also had a very impatient opponent in Sajith Premadasa. The same entitlement syndrome that had taken ahold of the country as a whole, Sajith too suffered from the same syndrome. He apparently thought that the leadership of the UNP belonged to him as a matter of entitlement because his father R Premadasa was the one-time leader of the Party.

It was not to be. What did he do? He and some of his bedfellows left the Grand Old Party and formed a new Party -Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB). The collapse of the UNP’s base was complete. Ranil could not get even one candidate into parliament in the last General Elections held in 2019. However, when the Presidential Elections were called for last October 14^th, Sajith’s expectations were sky-high. He had already allocated the Ministries and some key positions in the administration. As usual, Sajith Premadasa had already formed his government without parliamentarians. Such privileges do not belong to political novices like Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe. Only seasoned players like JR Jayewardene could boast about such privileges. Both Ranil and Sajith together destroyed, first the UNP and then the SJB.  A cruel comedy has played its last Act on public stage.

Then come the other destroyers- Mahinda Rajapaksa and Maithripala Sirisena. The demolishing crew of the SLFP. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party was founded by SWRD Bandaranaike. James Manor penned an excellent biography of SWRD- Expedient Utopian; apart from JRJ’s biography written by KM de Silva and Howard Wriggins, Expedient Utopian stands as the most in-depth study of the personality and his times. It is a well researched study of a leading political celebrity in Ceylon. SWRD was no alternative to the system that the UNP sustained for a coupe of decades in Ceylon. It was merely an alternative to the men and women who chose to rule the country at the time, within the boundaries of the same system.

Neo-liberalism as part of the country’s political genre, mindless nationalization of the commanding heights the economy, an all-encompassing cultural transformation in the rural Ceylon and finding a ‘place in the sun for the ‘common man’ were all part of the SLFP character. But its very core principles were destroyed by Bandaranaike’s widow Sirimavo and the Rajapaksa family in the context of nepotism and ruthless exploitation the nation’s assets. The end result was the country’s bankruptcy.

In addition to emptying the nation’s coffers, they enriched themselves beyond all limits. The Rajapaksas and thereafter Maithripala jointly saw their beloved party meeting a very regrettable anticlimax.

There was one man and one party that stood to gain from this twin-destruction of the UNP and SLFP- Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) and the National People’s Power (NPP). With the collapse of the economy and palpable decay in our sociopolitical and cultural milieu, the NPP offered themselves as an alternative whom the people accepted as a trustworthy band of men and women. Now the mantle is on them and on them alone.

The NPP cannot offer any excuses. They may not be able to offer immediate resolution to our nagging issue of rising cost of living; they may fail to secure much needed foreign currency that is needed for our essentials such as patrol, diesel and cooking gas. But a serious and resolute effort by them in clear and unambiguous terms would go some way towards quenching the thirst of a people who had been clamoring for a change. Now the responsibility is squarely on AKD’s shoulders. He will be judged in each and every step he intends to take. The proverbial egg was broken by the masses. Now it is up to AKD and his party make a savory omelet.

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