UNP chickens coming home to roost
By N Sathiya Moorthy-March 5, 2018, 8:28 pm
It is a unwritten rule of ‘coalition democracies’ the world over that whenever there is a political crisis for a ruling combine, it would be from within. Infighting often renders the real Opposition irrelevant, though not entirely irreverent. If anything, such infighting ends up making the real Opposition more relevant in the end, and the voter more reverent about the Opposition than any or all of the ruling combine’s partners, big and small. Until the initiative goes back to the voter, it is a merry-go-round within the ruling alliance, rendering themselves open to more ridicule than already.
Present-day Sri Lanka is a classic example of this syndrome, experienced and catalogued in such other democratic nations such as the UK and India for decades now. It is thus that even after the rest of the nation though the ‘unity’ (?) Government’s post-LG poll problems had been resolved with a minor Cabinet reshuffle, it is not to be. The poll results have also exposed the wrong done to the Joint Opposition identified with former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who were denied the position of the ‘Official Opposition’ in Parliament, if only because it would have otherwise contested the contribution of the official SLFP under incumbent Maithripala Sirisena to the coalition’s strength and stability of the past three years.
That way, even the ‘Maithri rebellion’ was only an extension of this maxim, when Mahinda Rajapaksa was all powerful and the political Opposition in the UNP and all non-SLFP partners in the UPFA Government had been dwarfed by the post-war poll victories since 2010. If the Rajapaksa camp had known the maxim, they took it only in the literal sense, if at all.
They may have visualised the urban-rural, rich-poor and even caste divisions in the Sri Lankan society and polity, cutting across ethnicities, but they did not provide for the ‘hurt ego’ of the ‘eternal number 2’ under the Rajapaksa regime, or he who had thought that he was only the eternal number 2, and nothing more, not when the Rajapaksa clan was trooping in to replace loyalists out of recognition and leadership race. Maithri fitted the bill, and they who knew the democracy game better, played better.
Irony but true
Yet, the unspoken story of the past three years belongs to the UNP, which is now breaking out into a predictable past pattern that has been forgotten. To the ‘Maithri magic’ should go the credit for keeping the Rajapaksas out of the power-centre at least up to now. Irony but true, to the very same ‘Maithri magic’ should to the credit of keeping the traditional rival UNP ‘united’, too, once again at least up to now.
But like everything else ‘magical’, the Maithri magic is also time-bound. When one spell of the same falls apart, so should the rest of it. With the LG poll results, the ‘magic-span’ and ‘magic-spell’ has come to an end. If the span and spell had continued thus far, it also owned to the magician team’s earlier successes in delaying the LG polls. It was not because of the magic, but despite the magic!
Truth be acknowledged, the nation needs the UNP more than any other party, if comparisons were to be made. If the very same comparisons were to be extended to a larger scale and format, it need not flow that the nation needs the UNP in power, and always in power. It is as true of individual leaders in the party, now or earlier, as it is of other parties and outfits like the JVP and LTTE, too.
Organic, both
If political parties have had an organic growth and leadership, including changes in both, militant outfits like the JVP and the LTTE also face organic extinction, owing to over-centralised style of functioning. Not only their existence owe(d) to the individual, so does/did their extinction.
It is thus that in the contemporary Sri Lankan context, the staying-power of a party like the UNP needs to be congratulated and celebrated. The first and possibly the only major political shock that occurred in the country also belonged there, when the late S W R D Bandaranaike split away to form the SLFP, even as the ‘unified’ UNP at the helm was seeking to ‘stabilise’ post-Independence Sri Lanka, then Ceylon.
It is here that the UNP may have differed from the rival SLFP, which is the single largest political rival since then, and up to the day. It is ideology, or say, political philosophy that continues to attract many a youth to the UNP than to the SLFP, for instance.
In the latter case, it is personalities that have attracted youth, whoever they are. It was thus that when a more forceful and relatively youthful leader in Rohana Wijeweera appeared on the scene, the generation’s youth who had otherwise belonged to the SLFP and other left-of-centre political parties took to arms. Ditto with the Tamil polity a decade later and the emergence of the LTTE and Prabhakaran. So did their exit, too.
Never before, never after
If political philosophy of the liberal democracy way, and market-economy, among others, are UNP’s scoring-points of all time, the party is also not devoid of personality cult. If anything, there is still a perception that it was JRJ who retrieved the party from the SLFP clutches in the Sirimavo Bandaranaike era. So did his full-time successor Ranil Wickremesinghe, now Prime Minister, in his time.
The truth is that Sirimavo and the SLFP lost, and lost so very badly, that the UNP ended up sweeping the poll then. Instinctively understanding the clout of leaderships to brand-valuation and continuity for political parties in the country, JRJ got Sirimavo disenfranchised, and thus the UNP could continue on without challenge, but only up to the time when a new-generation Sinhala voter had had enough of the UNP, whoever it, to swing in favour of rival SLFP under CBK – as never before, never after, at least thus far.
Again, CBK’s unprecedented presidential poll victory owed to the performance or non-performance of the UNP Government(s) of the past years and decades – and certainly not to her contested popularity when she won, and/or more to her contestable political past. CBK had by then left the SLFP, with slain husband Vijaya Kumaranatunga, only to return to the parental-fold.
This happened again when people had had enough of the Rajapaksas, at least for then, five years and one presidential poll after the war. Granting the ethnic-divide, where the Tamils, Muslim and even Sinhala-Catholics were purportedly aligned against him, the majority Sinhala-Buddhist voters would have voted even more than they did in the 47 per cent vote-share that Mahinda R got while losing the presidential polls of 2015.
The binding lesson of all this is a one-liner, or is it a two-liner? The one-liner is for the nation’s polity. The voters are much more level-headed than they are credited with. They do their job, forget it until the divided and divisive polity bring them back to the ‘national discourse’, and make them as relevant as democracy deems but often not acknowledged by the polity.
Missing a heart-beat
It is all this that the UNP to a greater extent, and the SLFP and lesser political parties at all levels and all ethnicities, should remember. When deciding to rebel against the party leadership or quell that rebellion through side-stepping them where possible and striking temporary deals, where found feasible, that people were silently watching all of it through and through, without missing a heart-beat or a day’s sleep.
Common to all political parties in the country is that the founders of those parties and their successors/heirs have kept the respective party constitutions so individual-centric. Every holder of those offices has been such a self-centred megalomaniac. They talk about abolishing the ‘Executive Presidency’ (but only when not in power).
At the party-level, not one of them wants to leave the top slot. It is more so in the UNP, that is all to it. By doing so, and letting an entrenched ruling party and leader to grow so arrogant that when the voter decided that he had had enough, they would be left with little choice.
This story has been repeated ad nauseam until the ‘Maithri rebellion’ of 2015. It was an acknowledgement that though Ranil was keeping the party leadership all to himself, he could not win against Mahinda, both as a leader and as a party. That was a missed opportunity, not only for Ranil the man, but the UNP as a party. Those chickens are now coming home to roost, having shed the shock that ‘Mahinda’s defeat’ inflicted in them, even more!
(The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the Indian multi-disciplinary public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: sathiyam54@gmail.com)
