By Vishwamithra –

“I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.” ~ Boris Pasternak

Many an erudite pundit seems to have been rattled by the results of the recently concluded Local Government elections. Their tendency to measure the performance of the National People’s Power (NPP) exclusively on the basis of raw numbers has misdirected their analytical skills and scholarly reasoning beyond what is generally known to the average reader as common sense. When one takes numbers in isolation and crunches them in order to fit into their own prejudices and predetermined conclusions, scholarly men and women forget one significant factor: context.

All politics is context. Nothing occurs, nothing takes shape or form without context; nor do they happen in a vacuum. In such circumstances, it becomes rather effortless and casual to explain away some rudimentary episodes that, more often than not, evade the most educated and experienced intellect. Nevertheless, it is crucial to look at the numbers and ask why these numbers have happened? How did that happen and how did they manage to evade the most analytical minds of a leading political party, which is now heading the government? Such unpredictables are no more unpredictable in the current context of the social media and political sensitivities.

The NPP won the plurality in 266 out of 339 local bodies. They control those local government councils and will continue until the next elections are called.

(Please note that there has to be a correction in the above presentation table: Mis-placement of Ranil’s and Namal’s pictures in the Local Government Results column. It needs to be exchanged with one another.)

If one is interested in crunching numbers, here is the analysis: NPP has lost close to 2.3 million votes from what they scored in the parliamentary elections. Where has that 2.3 million votes gone? SJB has gained 289,764 more. UNP has gained 453.682 more. Namal has gained 137,977 and Dilith Jayaweera has gained 116,675. In total, the non-NPP votes have gained 998,098. If you round it off, close to one million 1,000,000 votes have gone back to the non-NPP bank from the NPP bank. What happened to the rest of the 1.3 million votes? Obviously, they stayed at home, without exercising their franchise. In the Parliamentary Elections, the total valid vote was 11,815,246 whereas the in the local government elections it was 10,616.087. A drop of 1,199,159 votes. Now one sees how close that number to the drop in the total valid vote from the Parliamentary elections to the local government elections.

Crunching numbers should not stop at the ascertainment of how much the NPP lost; it should go one step further and ask, where did it go? This is where the intangibles come to play. More than 50% of the votes that the NPP lost from the Parliamentary Elections, has stayed at home without voting. That is a significant number and one must be more careful and unbiased in rendering an opinion as to what happened to the loss and how it could have happened.

In making one’s arguments for or against a general disinterest or disillusionment with the government  is the primary cause. Even if one attempts to present such an argument, one must also be logical and reasonable with his or her contention as to the validity of such contentions.

Local Government Elections are a totally different animal from Presidential and Parliamentary Elections. At the Local Government Elections, there is not a single national figure contesting a ward or a local council domain. Treating Local Government Elections as a referendum on the government could be partly valid yet, taken in the total context of the present situation in the country, more than 50% of the difference between the parliamentary registered voting bank and Local Government registered voting bank refusing to go the the polling booth on election day is also an intangible for which many an observation and conclusion is possible and reasonable, provided such conclusions and observations are backed by objective evidence, facts and figures.

The writer is privileged and fortunate to have had many a discussion with those IMF officials who have been observing and monitoring the country’s economy, its varying trajectory and its projected destination. All of those pundits have agreed that AKD as Finance Minister and the NPP’s Cabinet of Ministers as a responsible government are doing more than a fair job in managing an economy which was once nearing total collapse. They also agree that, despite the fact that the NPP, as a successor to the left-leaning JVP, has come to embrace the modern mechanics of running an economy with a very fair sense of balance and care which the previous governments did not care to display.

However, corruption and bribery has ceased to be a label that the government Ministers and parliamentarians wear today; however, it is still prevalent amongst the lower rungs of the bureaucracy. These are the intangibles statisticians do not see; nor would they be eager to see such unseen and unobservable nuances of governance.

All in all, the trust and faith the people reposed both in AKD as President and the NPP as an overwhelming majority of the government still seems to be sustaining itself. By not turning a majority of local government councils to the Opposition, they have shown in the most unequivocal fashion that their trust and confidence is still with the NPP and AKD.  J R Jayewardene introduced the proportional representative (PR) system with the singular idea of retaining at least some kind of voter percentage for his Grand Old Party, UNP. And it has proven beyond any shade of doubt that J R succeeded in that venture. Albeit the fact that the UNP and its main alternative branch SJB have succeeded in keeping their heads above water mainly thanks to the PR system in parliamentary and other elections. If it were the ‘first past post’ system in existence at the time of these elections, one wonders whether even the SJB would have withstood the onslaught by the NPP.

One other intangible is the great trust the people have placed in AKD as the Chief Executive of the country as a whole. However, this is a double-edged knife. So long as that trust lasts, it would be celebrated by the NPP and its supporters as some sort of magic wand. In the event that trust goes below the water level, the oncoming waves would not only submerge the NPP with all its leaders, it might end up as a cataclysmic  event for the country.

In 2024, the country voted AKD as its President with an enormous amount of trust and confidence. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was dethroned by a non-violent uprising of the people. It is the writer’s view that if AKD and the NPP fail to fulfill their collective promise of affordable living for the people and clean and fair governance as a whole, the next uprising will not be non-violent; nor would it be forgiving and forgetting. Blood-shedding and unruly riots will be the order of the, should that day dawn upon this breathtakingly beautiful island.

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