Rajpal's Column

15th October 2000

Continuity is not the right word

By Rajpal Abeynayake
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The familiar cliches of continuity over change would be trotted out with reference to the 2000 election, but wouldn't quite ring true. What will continue will be the doubts about the legitimacy of the polls, and the apprehensions on the ability of the two main political parties to maintain a semblance of their old selves.

President Kumaratunga will rue the day she decided to postpone the polls after her December Presidential election victory. Her emasculated 3 seat lead now will now be the legacy of that prevarication. The President has been unable to maintain the peace in the South, which doesn't portend well for her government's second term. Remember that President Jayewardene's bubble burst in his second outing. Jayawardene was fairly consumed by the forces of violence and anarchy that were rearing around him.

But, it will be unfair at the outset to draw a Cassandra's image of the prospects of the second PA parliament. Kumaratunga has been here before, with one seat, and with a similarly lackadaisical opposition. There is every reason she can continue to have her party in parliament for another six years. But, those are aged realities. The electorate doesn't usually elect a second term government for a honeymoon, and there are many brittle areas in the PA bubble which are conspicuous.

The PA doesn't seem to be able to substantially maintain its support without unleashing the goons. This simple fact results in the source of the main danger that the second PA/Kumaratunga parliament will have to face, which is latent instability in the South.

The angry forces of the South will probably stay contained, as long as the President and her dependent parliament can keep the threat from the North reasonably contained.

But if the UNP is spent, the LTTE is potent. As Jayewardene was unable to do before her, the President doesn't seem likely to be able to contain the forces unleashed from Prabhakaran's lair in the Wanni thicket. But there have been second term Cassandra's before, and they haven't always been regularly right.

A sanguine aspect is the JVP showing and therefore the fact that some potentially troublesome forces in the South have been "internalized.''

But, the so –called forces of Sinhala nationalism as opposed to the President's so-called forces of pluralism have not been similarly internalized. Adding to their woe, only one Sinhala Urumaya member has managed to get into parliament, and that too with the foot in the door, but through the dice of the national list.

These forces seem more inclined than the UNP or the JVP to question the legitimacy of the second PA parliament. In that way, the security that the President was familiar with in her first term, even with a one seat majority no longer obtains. The portend is also for change more than continuity considering that the familiar landscape of the first term no longer exists.

The President's mother is dead. Not that it counts for anything in the hard bargain of local realpolitik, but it means the era is definitely over. Of course the President governed on her own in the first term, but now she is for most purposes alone in the political thicket.

She is being helped more by the Central Province goon squads than by the promising men by her side in the first innings.

Most of them already need to repair their own gig, such as Mahinda Rajapakse from Southside, before they get into the snake - pit of governance. In an odd way, the sense of foreboding that patently irregular election should have created is not quite a reality because the opposition is weak and unassertive.

But will that be enough to contain the spark that could ignite the latent sense of frustration among all the loose cannon "externalized'' elements? These could be the Sangha and cohorts ("election was a fraud'' says the Mahanayake), the possibly disenchanted armed forces and the more aggressive rump of the UNP which could be waiting to join any upsurge of these forces?

The death of Sirimavo Bandaranaike has been predictably received in the former non- aligned world with wistful poignance.

An Indian paper got it wrong but seemed to have its sentiments in the right place. The paper quoted a Lankan daily referring to Mrs Bandaranaike as "the only man in the Cabinet.'' (The credits should have been attributed to a former Prime Minister, who said it in the sixties, when Mrs Bandaranaike was at her insouciant best pasting the "rapacious west'' and all their assorted "running dogs''.)

In many ways, she was the only Sri Lankan political figure of the seventies, if simply because of the fact that others pale in comparison, or were like Felix Bandarnaike in the long run still only her lieutenants. She consumed the left, and was seven times more dynamic than a jaded right. Hers is an era that cannot be re-visited.

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