Columns

Long before election fever gripped Sri Lanka, the writing was on the wall signalling that a maddened electorate will opt for amputation of ‘mainstream’ limbs of the nation’s political establishment at the speed of greased lightning.

 The sins of the past

Pushed beyond limits by a crassly arrogant ruling class, public fury turned with a vengeance against the once-adored Southern so-called political dynasty, the Medamulana Rajapaksa’s ‘war-winning’ clan. Even after country-wide mass protests ejected the Rajapaksas in 2022, the political establishment did not learn its lesson. As bankruptcy was declared, the Wickremesinghe era oversaw a decimation of the middle and lower middle classes by a ruthless enforcement of austerity measures.

The populace was directed to ‘tighten their belts’ while Colombo’s protected ministerial, official and business elite glittered in a web of seemingly unstoppable gross corruption. The nadir of the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa regime’s endemic profiteering was reached in a former disgraced Minister of Health and his officials warping health procurement protocols and enabling the importation of substandard medicine, leading to poor patients dying or going blind.

Even in Sri Lanka’s corruption-riddled history, nothing of this magnitude had been evidenced. Regardless, as often marvelled upon in these column spaces, there was a remarkable ‘Nero-like’ lack of understanding of the explosive anger that was building up. The former President, his coterie of favourites and his Ministers fiddled while the country burnt in small fires everywhere. Arrogant Presidential flailing out against rulings of the Supreme Court only aggravated the flames.

Reading the public ‘mood’

On its own part, the main Opposition ‘Samagi Jana Balavegaya‘ (SJB) party also did not quite comprehend the enormous public appetite for ‘radical change’ including casting aside dynastic politics with candidates trailing jaundiced wives or husbands in tow. In contrast, the NPP modelled itself perfectly in sync with the public ‘mood.’ Apart from what mud-raking social media adventurists dug up, the families of electioneering candidates of the Anura Kumara Dissanayake led National Peoples’ Power (NPP) remained invisible.

The demand to end incessant party conflicts, perennially a feature of Sri Lanka’s political landscape, could not have been clearer. Nonetheless, the main opposition continued in its own discordantly merry way, plagued by intra-party and inter-party wrangling,  confident that they would not be discarded in favour of a largely untried, inexperienced alternative. The result was predictably an NPP electoral tidal wave.

Notably, a bloc of corrupt public servants voted overwhelmingly for the NPP with the finely honed survivor instinct of proverbial cockroaches who scurry when a light is suddenly switched on. That dilemma was acknowledged by President Dissanayake in his Statement of Policy to the 10th Parliament when the House ceremonially sat on Thursday. He pointed to ‘a historical milestone in which the highest number of public servants had voted in favour of a single government.’

The new Parliament’s
comedic moment

However, as was added, ‘ ‘it is no secret that the general public does not hold a favourable perception of the state service.’ That had a two-fold impact, that of ‘significant dissatisfaction and negative sentiments among the public as well as ‘many within the state service who feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled…’ All in all, the Government has to meet a daunting dual challenge of an ‘unsatisfied public and a discontented state sector,’ the President said.

This is just one of the many challenges for the new Parliament filled with newcomers unaccustomed to legislative traditions and conventions. That is apart from the occasional comedic moment as exemplified by an independent newbie ‘social media celebrity’ parliamentarian from the North, boorishly refusing to yield the customary seat in the House to the Leader of the Opposition. He cited the fact that the newcomers had been asked to ‘sit anywhere they wanted.’

But to more serious issues, a senior law academic perceptively remarked to me a few days ago that media reporting of the ‘left-leaning’ NPP’s electoral victory is far from the case. On the contrary, the NPP’s ‘left or even ‘centre-left credentials’ have been abandoned. As was further observed, it has ‘compromised its left agenda so much that it is very much a bourgeois centrist formation.’ This remark invites pointed reflection.

The evolution of a new
political creature

Certainly, mere shreds of the once loudly trumpeted leftist credentials of the ‘Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna‘ (JVP) have been retained in its decade-long meticulously crafted metamorphosis to an amorphous NPP. The party had to ‘adapt, had to change…’ as per the JVP’s General Secretary Tilwin Silva’s explanation in the wake of its phenomenal victory. The General Secretary who is unusually basking in the media spotlight said more recently that the ‘love of the people’ is the party’s greatest strength.

We will return to that sickly sweet sentiment later. But to borrow with apologies from the old Marxist adage of an entirely different reality, the ‘old’ is withering away and the ‘new’ is struggling to take root. In the interim, Sri Lanka’s Presidency and the Parliament have been entrusted to the eager and untried hands of a strange political creature. In that fraught process, the risk of potential major internal conflict between ‘what was’ (the JVP) and ‘what now is’ (the NPP) is only natural.

That these conflicts have been managed successfully so far says much for the political agility of JVP-NPP party heavyweights. However, the corroding impact of state power has the possibility to change all that. A grim warning to that effect underlines the inglorious implosion of the failed Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s ‘Viyathmaga‘ experiment (2019-2022) and its tension-filled power relationship with the Rajapaksa ‘Pohottuwa‘ party.

Party cohesion versus
party squabbling

True, the NPP is far from a racist ‘Viyathmaga’ but the warning in principle is still valid. This is implicit in cautions issued by the President to his cadre to guard against over-confidence in the wake of its electoral victory. For now, party cohesion is the keyword. We must however distinguish between exemplary party discipline and the travesty of party authoritarianism which the JVP has not been completely free from in the past.

That being said, the JVP-NPP filled their seats on the National List (NL) sans teary outbursts by forsaken party members. In contrast, opposition parties remain mired in the quicksand of their own confusion, squabbling over a much smaller quota of NL seats. A few days ago, a female Opposition SJB candidate bizarrely held a press conference promoting herself for a NL seat after she lost her constituency.

Days later, a SJB parliamentarian who had held the electoral line unlike his rejected fellows, waxed eloquent on why two of his colleagues in the party should be accommodated on the NL. This unseemly squabbling cannot be airily brushed away as ‘democratic disagreements’ of coalition politics. Politicians are free to exercise individual freedoms but that is different to distasteful public canvassing on internal party decisions.

Living up the electoral mandate

Meanwhile, a fuss over a meagre two NL seats allocated to the United National Party (UNP) led coalition led by former President Ranil Wickremesinghe went from comedy to farce when its secretary nominated a controversial former UNP parliamentarian, which was duly gazetted by the Elections Commission. In true Wickremesinghe style, it was announced that a ‘committee’ will inquire as to how this ‘mishap’ occurred.

In sum, even after being resoundingly trounced in the general elections, the country’s opposition parties still air their dirty linen in public. Its frustrated constituency can only ask, ‘when will they ever learn?’ It is high time that legal fetters are imposed on electorally rejected candidates parachuting into Parliament through the NL. As for the NPP jubilantly riding high on ‘the love of the people,’ it must be cautioned that ‘love’, as in all other things, is transient.

The time has come to stand up to its mandate.