What Ranil has in common with Scotland isn't Scotch
"I never understand what goes on in the minds of the Sri Lankan voter before he casts his vote at every election" Esmond Wickremesinghe is said to have quipped. Decades later, the voters have a comeback line on that one. It's something Mr. Wickremesinghe should have lived to hear. "We never understand,'' say the Sri Lankan voters "…what goes on in Mr. Wickremesinghe's mind before we vote at every election.''
Almost each time they voted, they rejected him.

They don't understand Esmond's son who leads the United National party. A man who in his fondness for quoting history, especially British history, should lend his mind to the tale of Robert the Bruce. Robert Bruce (1274 to 1329), was Earl of Carrick, one of the seven Celtic earldoms of Scotland.

The legend of Bruce's spider is his most famous tale. Bruce saw a spider in a cave trying to spin its web - failing always. But on its seventh try, the spider succeeded. This encouraged Bruce to continue his campaign against the English when his fortunes were at a low ebb. Finally, at the battle of Bannockburn, he routed the huge English forces, and established Scottish independence.

Wickremesinghe, if he takes after Bruce, has oodles of bruises from past electoral battles. But, he has licked all these wounds with mind-numbing patience, and set his eyes for 11th time lucky.

This goes far better than the legend of Robert's Bruce's spider, sufficient reason for the UNP perhaps to change its symbol from elephant to tarantula?

What goes on in Mr. Wickremesinghe's mind before the voters cast their ballot at every election? That he will be dumped, or that he will be redeemed to fight another day, and have many more years of quoting English history and Erskine May to the masses?

He imagines himself to be from anything other than the Sri Lankan tradition. But his talent has been that he has kept hard on message. What's the message?

It's that Sri Lanka should mimic everything that is foreign, as there is nothing successful that this country can brag of at this current moment.

So, he has town meetings and bus tours -- shades of Bill Clinton -- and he has his dark suits or blazers, and pow-wows with the lawyerly, at locations as swank as the Water's Edge - - shades of Tony Blair, or the conservative party's annual conventions. His only nod of acceptance of anything Sri Lankan is not from the present, but from the past. He acknowledges that there was something or someone good in Sri Lanka - - but that was over thousand years ago -- and he was called Parakramabahu.

Wickremesinghe has been refusing to ditch his belief that the only good recent Sri Lankan idea, is his idea to borrow every foreign idea.
He lost eleven elections and counting, or an approximation of that anyway, with this paradigm. But, to his credit, he failed to ditch his theories. Or his theories failed to ditch him.

Either way, he faces another election in a political career of almost interminable lost elections, but is smug in the knowledge that this is his battle of Banockburn. He is Ranil the Bruce?

In a clumsy way he has achieved the nearest thing to consistency in the Sri Lankan electorate in the past two decades. He has taken a dog-eared image of Parakramabahu, however, and grafted it onto his campaign.

That's only because he was stunned by being repeatedly rejected by the middle-Sinhala heartland of paddy farmers and peasants. He fought back by almost shamelessly copying his opponents on this score, by going for Sinhala Buddhist imagery to decorate his campaign train, or bus.

But in his jelly of a political ideology (which is still setting like the earth's crust, which after millennia still cannot behave itself…) there is a core consistency. This core consistency is that his political ideology is primarily modern/post-modern. He does not believe in any non-negotiable concepts. All he values is that he gets the job done, and the more Western the method he uses the better.

In this Battle of Banockburn, his 2005 campaign, his opponents are bruising for the fight from a totally antithetical political position.
It’s as if two poles of a magnet are frenetically repelling; the more Wickremesinghe becomes post-modern and Western in his core political ideology, the more his opponents are hardening into a group of nationalist, anti-imperialist hell raising cultural puritans. They repel Wickremesinghe as if their lives depend on it, and sometimes it’s clear their political lives do…..

Politicians need enemies, and Wickremesinghe provides one.
If Rajapakse didn't have Wickremesinghe, he would have had to invent him. All of the political enemy-making in the past five years or thereabout, during the post-ceasefire Kumaratunga reign, has been out of the demons that Wickremesinghe provided by sticking to his core political ideology of taking Sri Lanka forward by making Sri Lanka foreign. (Read Western post-modern, anything that connotes non-Sri Lankan.)
By doing so - he has commanded the kind of attention only an infant does.

Ask any parent at the beck and call of these mewling, demanding weak bundle of joy?

Wickremesinghe is the political weakling that in the end defined the political chemistry of these times, particularly this election. His post-modernism -- an acceptance of the notion for instance that Sri Lanka can be morphed into something of a quasi nation state, without strict internal boundaries, a decidedly post-modern political concept that he seemed to accept with his championing of the interim-administration for LTTE areas - comes always so close to appearing as an excuse for not having any other good ideas.

But if he hadn't any other ideas, he has been consistent in not having them. In this way, it has been easy to make an enemy of him. His political opposition's main plank in the end has been defined by demonizing Wickremesinghe. In this way, he has defined, albeit weakly and by default, the politics of his time.

Weakly and by default he thinks this will be his battle of Banockburn, his final successful try at spinning the spider’s web. He is breathtakingly very close to being right.

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