Minorities Taking The Revenge: Reading Sri Lanka Election Results 2015
Sumanasiri Liyanage
It is natural to interpret phenomena in the way the interpreter like it.Maithripala Sirisena’s victory at the presidential election held on January 8, 2015 has been subjected to multiple interpretations. Most pronounced one is that it was a victory for democracy. My friend Prof Jayadeva Uyangoda who has a better understanding of democracy, thinks the election result was a victory for good governance. Some have even interpreted it as a victory for women. Of course, in social science one may not definitely propose that these multiple interpretations are incorrect even though they are sometime contradictory. Let me briefly state my own reading of the election results.
In the early morning of May 19, 2009, the most revered and feared leader of the Sri Lankan Tamils, Velupillai Prabhakaran together with almost all his close associates were killed by the security forces of Sri Lanka marking the end of over 25 years of internal armed conflict that ravaged the island nation. In spite of Prabhakaran’s ruthless handling of the Tamil population, Tamils in the North and East of the island recognized him as an icon of the Tamils’s fight back against the Sinhala Buddhist dominated state in Sri Lanka. Hence a physical elimination of him was widely read by the Tamils in Sri Lanka and elsewhere as a serious blow against their pride and identity. Mahinda Rajapaksa won the election in 2005 with a thin majority primarily because of the boycott of the election imposed by the LTTE on Tamil people. The LTTE had to pay a heavy price for this decision in 2009. Hence, Tamils sought to take a revenge against Rajapaksa whenever they get a chance to do so. When the ex-Army Commander, Sarath Fonseka who conducted the war on the ground contested Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010 Presidential Election, Tamils were hesitant to vote for him although Tamil National Alliance wanted them to do so. Voter turnout was just 25 per cent in Jaffna in 2010. So voters in the Sinhala South who gathered around Rajapaksa voted for him outweighing the protest votes of the Tamils. Waiting hurts, but Tamills in Sri Lanka patiently waited, not having faith in bullets but in ballots till the right time comes. President Rajapaksa, in the face of his dwindling popularity and placing enormous faith on his astrologers’ advice, called an early election with the hope that he could remain in power for another 6 years. Opposition was in disarray so that he predicted an easy victory. Machiavellian move by the ex-President,Chandrika Bandaranaike and the leader of the opposition Ranil Wickremesinghe completely changed the game plan as they brought in Rajapaksa’s Minister of Health and the General Secretary of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party as the common candidate to face the incumbent president. Maithripala Sirisena won the election held on January 8, 2014 by a majority of 449,072 votes. A back of the envelope calculation shows that Maithripala Sirisena was given a majority of 654,521 by the peoples of Northern and Eastern provinces that are predominantly Tamil and Muslim areas. This huge majority was in fact reduced substantially to 450,000 because of the majority given to Mahinda Rajapaksa by the Sinhala voters in the south. The irony of this is that Mahinda Rajapaksa actually got the majority of Sinhala votes in the south notwithstanding the fact that Sinhala voters were also disappointed of the regime for different reasons.
