A fashion for a backlash - this time is it Ranil's?
"We campaign in poetry, and govern in prose.''
A flamboyant politician contributed that piece of practical wisdom in his published autobiography.

Mahinda Rajapakse's campaign manager could not have said it better. The Prime Minister's campaign is poetic now to the point of being on song - yet, the more poetic the campaign, the more prosaic his eventual governance is feared to be. Like hell he will be able to find harmony between so many baying coalition partners, thinks the UNP.
His campaign poetry can mostly be sourced, ultimately, to Prabhakaran. Buddhist monks on his campaign trail who were earlier running the threat of being made irrelevant, got jump-started when Lakshsman Kadirgamar was shot dead, presumably on Prabhakaran's orders.

Prabhakaran detests letting his monks down anytime, see? For about the tenth time running therefore, the Sri Lankan election is now being called a referendum on the peace process, or a referendum on the north and the east.

These factors that should have ceased to be campaign issues decades ago, continue to be the main campaign planks of both parties thanks mainly in this poll outing, to Kadrigarmar's killing. It’s as if we do not have an unemployment problem, or a poverty problem or a headache with investment. For decades our campaign issue has been "the war.'' If the blurb writers have it, we have not had a single election in this democracy. We have always had 'referenda' on the peace process.
Mahinda Rajapakse is not known for his ability to innovate, but he has strangely defined this 2005 campaign almost entirely so far. Improbably, it's as if he is the decision maker from among the two candidates, his opponent contrasting as a borderline hesitant Hamlet.

How so? The UNP thinks Mahinda Rajapakse is a snivelling hypocrite to ride this kind of divisive campaign poetry -- and then audaciously talk of an economy also, forgetting whether it's an open or a mixed one. It's the chaos theory -- if Rajapakse is elected there will be such anarchy within his coalition, and so much war in the country to make economic considerations pop out of the equation.

Rajitha Senaratne's rider to this theory is that Wickremesinghe received enough aid to pursue 17 Mahaweli projects, but that president Kumaratunga derailed this aid train when she brought the UNP government down. It's an exaggeration, this theory, even though perhaps a pardonable one. We have a national average aid utilization rate of just 13 per cent. What's the point in receiving a bushel of aid in a country that can utilize only a chundu of it from off the top of the heap??

Notwithstanding foreign aid for 17 Mahaweli projects, the Milinda Moragoda label of UNP economics invited a backlash. In this country, when you invite a backlash it is rarely that you are not given one. Not even the almost canonized Lakshman Kadirgamar was spared the charge of engineering the "power grab'' which brought the current UPFA to power. But, Moragoda-economics was derailed not by a power grab but a backlash -- a backlash against the wide scale LTTE mollycoddling and simultaneous World Bank heavy petting practiced by the Wickremesinghe UNP of 2002.

All politics in this country is politics of backlash. The polarizing Mahinda Rajapakse outfit of 2005 is a backlash against the Kadirgamar killing, and the Kadrigamar killing itself is a backlash against the uncompromising UPFA government, which in turn is a backlash against Ranil's LTTE-mollycoddling model of governance -- and so on.

But, all these backlashes are traceable to hubristic petty politicking i.e. these are inspired backlashes. The engineers of any particular backlash at any time are so power hungry they have often been waiting preserved and embalmed for an opportunity to strike hot. In the Sri Lankan polity, it's rarely that an opportunity is not presented to those who want to engineer the perfect political backlash.

Each time you hear a giant sucking sound of a huge backlash -- the country needs to look for the dull thud of morons falling over each other performing the ideal political acrobatics, with an excuse for a backlash.
By this criteria there is one politician in this country who is not a moron - - and that's' Mangala Samaraweeera. This is for the simple reason that he preferred straitlaced honesty to trotting out an excuse.

When the President launched the P-TOMS he claimed he would not support the tsunami mechanism, as that would get the JVP out of government - which will then lead to the collapse of his regime, in turn causing his own abdication of power. That can be translated roughly as: 'I would like to do the right thing, except that the right thing will result in my own ass getting kicked.'

For a brief but memorable moment, Samaraweera became a spokesman of sorts for all other politicians from every side of the divide of this country. The political backlash of the moment belongs to Rajapakse, and it's the one against Kadirgamar's killing. The backlash against this backlash is being mounted by the Tamil National Alliance.

Wickremesinghe has yet been unable to run with it -- and make the T.N.A backlash against the Kadirgamar backlash, a backlash of his own. Thondman's impetus is being awaited by Ranil Wickremesinghe to do just that, the hacks keep telling us.

Prizes and jackpots are being offered to guess who Thondaman will go with. Being a Presidential election, he cannot move his votes around, run with one party and support another as in a general election. When his pliant block prefers one candidate, the votes are locked -- and not even the opportunistic Thondaman could do anything about it after that, in a presidential poll of this sort.

Assume Thondaman throws in his lot with Rajapakse. He will then sit in Cabinet, which will almost be a Cabinet of a theocratic state -- some Buddhist monks are headed to hold portfolios in it.

Forgetting the usual modus of engineering a backlash out of the big issues, the Rajapakse camp has turned Wickremesinghe's campaign trivia into a political backlash - - for example the backlash now running against the Perakum Ugaya. The educated theory is that the Perakum Ugaya line is a throwback to the UNP's long tradition of the greening of Sri Lanka, associated with D.S and Dudley and the immediate post colonial pukka sahib push for back to the land agricultural slash and burn policies. But the undereducated theory is that the Perakum slogan was borrowed by Ranil from the popular and stirring C. T Fernando 60s hit, which explanation has derived more currency on the campaign trail.
"Veeera vikum pe hela daruwo - desa deya mura keruwo - eh leya athi me suraviruwo - nomvauw nayakaruvo - parakum ugayak nevathath arambavu nija bhoomi tale lanka.''

The ditty maintains that a corollary to a Perkum Ugayak is to be "nomavavu nayakaruvo'' - not be debtors. Though Wickremesinghe could have borrowed that excerpt and asked for a society that does not look upto IMF and World Bank bailouts, he didn't do it. The explanation is that lingering Moragodaism is still part of the party's basic makeup. If so Wickremesinghe faces one of the longest lasting backlashes against the UNP.

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