By Vishwamithra –

‘Then came a moment of renaissance, I looked up – you again are there, A fleeting vision, the quintessence, Of all that’s beautiful and rare’ ~ Alexander Pushkin

Those who clamor for change do not demand a substitute. They categorically demand an alternative. Replacing a rotten system of governance, an ailing economy that does not seem to show any recovery on the horizon, a culture that is more stagnant and decaying rather than moving forward with fresh additions of fresh vistas, is no mean task. The choice before the country today is as clear as crystal. In such a dynamic circumstance, those who appear before the people promising heaven and earth must be evaluated very prudently and diligently. Seventy six years of lamenting and wailing history cannot be allowed to repeat itself.

Sajith Premadasa is by no means an alternative. Who is Sajith and what social values and cultural measurements he represents? How does he differ from a rotting system that has taken the country and her people to the abyss of economic disaster and sociopolitical calamity? Whom does he talk for and who are his own substitutes when he is absent from the chair? These are very valid and legitimate questions one should ask on the eve of the most era-defining election. Are we really demanding an end to an era that witnessed a cataclysmic downfall of all the values and social measurements that define us as a cultured people?

Election after election, ever since 1947, Ceylon then and Sri Lanka now has been indulging in a  tragicomedy of musical chairs. The Senanayakes, Bandaranaikes, Jayewardenes, Premadasas and Rajapaksas have played pandu with the local electorate. Never ever planning for the next twenty five to fifty years, they planned for the next election. From mercantilism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Ceylon’s graduation to quasi-capitalism and socialist capitalism has produced an obscene and ugly tapestry. Its multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious make up is being sustained by a crude sense of suspicions and transactional exercise of political power amongst its leaders.

Any critique of those who have let the country down over the last seventy six years, in the face of the fast approaching Presidential Elections, is now redundant. Let us discuss who is before us today, now: Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sajith Premadasa, Namal Rajapaksa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Any more conversation about Ranil and Namal could be foreclosed. The real battle is between Sajith Premadasa and AKD.

Against a challenging backdrop of deep economic crisis and sociopolitical upheaval, a national discussion about the two front-runners, the candidates, that are in the arena is pertinent even at this eleventh hour.

As for Sajith, this Presidential Election campaign has so far been, at best, a very mediocre exercise. Within his own party, Sajith is tangled in an avoidance of unspoken clashes of personalities. He seems to be ready to accommodate anybody, anybody whether he or she has been tarred with the corruption-brush  or not, merely to enhance the optics of the moves. An insubstantial mind seeks indulges in such shallow and shortsighted exchange of power definitions. Sajith’s is such a shallow mind.

The power-trip Sajith has been journeying is unremarkable in one sense and has produced some embarrassing moments while on the other has been like a story one does not want to hear. But elections cannot be taken for granted. Although the context is unmistakably different and way too long ago, Sri Lankan voter has time and time again shown an utterly dismissive mindset. Once being quite susceptible to the vagaries of empty promises thrown at him by his leaders, the voter has displayed singular emptiness of intelligence and common sense. Sometimes he has shown unmitigated shrewdness in understanding the prevailing schools of thought and political winds and placed at the switch of power the most deserving leaders, later to be discovered as undeserving and mediocre.

However, lack of consistency on the part of the voter has lent to the gradual and sure decline in the country’s sociopolitical culture and economic collapse. Both AKD and Sajith are confronted with these inconsistencies that have been the hallmark of the previous generations of voters. Yet as the most recent chapters of history indicate, Aragalaya-22 had an immeasurable effect on the collective psyche of the electorate. It opened the eyes and ears of the public to such an alarming width and breadth, it dawned upon the country at large that there is another way out of this classic mess.

The gross waste of time, energy and will of the voter and his families became a measure of successive defeats; generations that have betrayed their own offspring generations were subjected to a fresh and unspoiled reality; they began to think outside the proverbial box. Instead of pursuing a mirage that had no relevance nor validity in the context of sociopolitical goals, it occurred to him to go after a total change; a change that is completely new and untested. The meteoric rise of AKD and the National People’s Power is chiefly owing to that phenomenon: A need for a total change.

When it occurred to the ordinary man and woman that the grass could be greener outside the existing parched dry land, they decided to pursue that meadow with all earnestness. This pursuit  was essentially alien to the minds of Sajith and his status quo-laden group. They are being weighed down by their own outdated ideologies and hackneyed strategies and tactics. The people chose to look another way. The nasty treatment Sajith received when he visited the Aragalaya-22 ground on that fateful day has not taught Sajith a lesson. To say that he was humiliated is an understatement.

Sajith simply has not realized that his father, the Senior Premadasa is no more a popular figure  amongst the current generations. On the one hand, Ranasinghe Premadasa’s name is not even known to the present generation; his policies may have been relevant and even acceptable to  the country three decades ago; but his governance principles were no less draconian than the ones followed by the Rajapaksas. But as a credit to Senior Premadasa, he never involved his kith and kin in his own political journey as power-sharing partners.

Sajith Premadasa has decided to the contrary. His nagging suspicion about his own party-men, has made him seek solace in sharing that political power with his own spouse and sibling. The country is already sick with the Rajapaksa-nepotism. She was battered and sickened by the cruel hands of one first family of the twenty first century. She won’t tolerate another one, in fact, a rerun of the Premadasas in the third decade of the century. Nevertheless, blinded by his own megalomania , Sajith has resorted to this maddening journey of self-seeking. His irrational pursuit of power politics founded on nepotistic principles has taken him to a place where even his own second-in-command lieutenants are talking behind his back about the obscene arrangements Sajith has put in place in the party.

‘All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. That is precisely what’s happening to Sajith Premadasa and his SJB. If nothing else makes Sajith and the SJB an integral part of the status quo, this nepotism he is trying to establish in his own party makes them so. Even though Sajith does not hail from the elite of Sri Lanka, his very association with a traditional elitist Party such as the United National Party (UNP), makes him to be identified with the elite lot. Today’s political warfare is a clash of two diametrically opposed classes: elite and the non-elite, privileged and the non/under privileged, haves and have-nots. One cannot escape from that glaring reality. The misfortune of Sajith and the SJB is that their lot has been with the first part of each category- elite, privileged and haves.

A great majority that voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa belonged to the second part of the categories- non-elite, non/under privileged and have-nots. It is that voter who is hell-bent on voting for AKD and against Sajith. Being driven to sheer desperation at this late hour of the elections, Sajith has once again resorted to telling ‘Donald Trumpian’ kind of falsehoods on public platform. When Sajith tells the audience that there is a secret pact between Ranil Wickremesinghe and AKD, no soul in the country would believe it. But Sajith keeps repeating it believing in the Goebbels’s theory of repetition of a falsehood makes it a truth. His gross underestimation of the intelligence of the average man could not be more glaringly misplaced.                                                   

However, defeating Sajith at the ballot is not easy. The base at which he begins his campaign cannot be underestimated. Yet, what makes the contest more exciting is the DNA Sajith is credited with- status quo. So long as the average voter holds the view that he is part and parcel of the forces that refuse to embrace wholesale change, his chances of success fade with each passing day, just five days to be precise. Victor Hugo said: ‘Virtue has a veil, vice a mask’. Sajith won’t take off his mask, the people will do it for him, on September 21^st. Sri Lanka does not need a substitute, she needs an alternative!

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