12th December 1999

Last days of Dompe!

All the opinion polls suggest that the UNP's candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe will emerge the winner on December 22, in the event of a free and fair poll, of course. Paakshikaya has last week wasted his space arguing about those who left the UNP. I will not dwell on that anymore- the less said about them, the better! But let us get back to basic political facts and statistics and try and see what could happen, come Tuesday after the next.

One needn't be a professor of Mathematics to work out what, after all, is a simple mathematical problem. Chandrika Kumaratunga received 62 per cent of the vote in 1994 against Srima Dissanayake, a few months after polling less than fifty per cent of the vote at the general election. Necessarily then, that vote must come down- it cannot rise further! The 'block' SLFP and SLMC vote together is about 42 per cent. In the plantation sector, with no Saumyamoorthy Thondaman to prop up Ms. Kumaratunga and now with P. Chandrasekaran resigning from the government and joining the UNP, that sector is split. In fact, the estate sector overall may well favour Mr. Wickremasinghe given the CWC's less than impressive performances at recent local and provincial polls. All this will accrue to the UNP, which also has a 'block' vote of about 42 per cent. So, with the 'block' votes roughly equal, the deciding factor would be the JVP votes, the minority votes and the floating votes because all the other candidates put together will not poll even a hundred thousand votes!

Of these, the northern vote- or what is left of it, because the LTTE wants a boycott, presumably- will certainly not be for Ms. Kumaratunga. Even if Colombo Tamils vote, they will vote for Mr.Wickremesinghe and not for the present President. The base Muslim vote- cultivated by the Mohommeds, Hameeds and Bakeer Markars over the years- is still there and will also be for Mr.Wickremesinghe. So, my friend, if at all, the contest will be a close one but the winner undoubtedly will be Mr. Wickremesinghe. And not strangely, I believe Ms. Kumaratunga is aware of this and with each passing day we see her panic increasing. Her smile has turned sour. She has apparently given Ramzi, her hairdresser the boot because she is trying to have a designer disheveeled appearance- to create an image of the working woman, which she never was! Her media pundits are getting so desperate that the Daily News made it look like the Senanayakes of Botale (including the ghosts of F.R., D.S. and Dudley!) were with Ms. Kumaratunga. And, it was not just a story tucked away in a corner- it was the main story on page one! Not only did that weird story get contradicted by the Senanayake family but also the Editor of the newspaper, Geoff Wijesinghe almost quit saying 'this is the limit'!

Then, Ms. Kumaratunga is now paranoid even about her cabinet colleagues. She didn't inform them- except ministers Lakshman Kadiragamar, S. B. Dissanayake and Mangala Samaraweera- about her decision to have a snap Presidential election beforehand - fearing it would be leaked to the media and the Opposition. Even more recently, senior ministers- the likes of Lakshman Jayakody and Dharmasiri Senanayake, SLFP loyalists from the Sirima Bandaranaike days- were asked to come one Friday morning to Temple Trees for breakfast but were not told why- probably because the President felt they could not be trusted. Many of them were hurt and some of them even jokingly queried from each other whether the President was getting married but it was only the crossover of the Mr. Amunugama and his motley crew!

And this is the confidence your supremely confident leader has in your own ministers! And then of course, we have Rupavahini distorting coverages of our leader- lying about what he said about the North and East- and getting sued in return! Now just tell me, Paakshikaya, are these the signs of a supremely confident government facing the people? No sir, in fact it reminds me of the kind of publicity spewed out by the state media in the last days of SLFP rule in 1977! So, we are indeed witnessing the 'Last Days of Dompe- Part IV", the end of yet another disastrous period of Bandaranaike rule.

Why, you may ask, Paakshikaya, did it all end this way, and I shall tell you. It is due mostly to Ms. Kumaratunga's sheer inability to deliver the goods in keeping with the high expectations she generated in 1994. In 1994, she was a breath of fresh air in a political desert: unknown and untried in national politics but with the correct lineage (or should I say pedigree, Anura?), charisma and untainted even by the past misdeeds of her mother. Needless to say, the UNP had made its share of blunders and Kumaratunga won, handsomely too. But today Ms. Kumaratunga has amply demonstrated her lack of knowledge to govern, her incapacity to rule and inelegance to reign and her profound incompetence to get a team into action.

To counter these short comings the PA is asking Mr. Wickremesinghe what he did when he was in the UNP and I shall enlighten you. To begin with he has been in parliamentary politics for over two decades now and has been a deputy minister, minister, Leader of the House, Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister. Tell me, my friend, can a person be more qualified before asking for the top job? He was first the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and as we all know his minister A. C. S. Hameed was a frequent traveller abroad- he was called 'All Countries Seen'! - so, Mr.Wickremesinghe at a very young age cut his teeth in accepting responsibilities as Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs. Then, as Minister of Education he ensured that schools- unlike today- functioned without political interference.

Then, consider Ms. Kumaratunga's resume, my friend. She is someone who could not enter a university here (she said recently she wanted to become a doctor: the loss for politics has definitely been medicine's gain!), so she went to Sorbonne, France but did not complete her studies there. In Sri Lanka, she left the SLFP founded by her father and then led by her mother after a bitter fight to form a party called the Bahujana Nidahas Pakshaya- or the 'Bahubootha Party' as everyone knew it then- and then clawed her way back to the SLFP, ousting her long suffering brother. Then, she happened to be at the right place at the right time when the DUNF split with the UNP because she then became Chief Minister of the Western Province and then she became Prime Minister and President: all within 18 months! As we all - including the voters-know now, Paakshikaya it was too much too soon for too inexperienced person to handle. The voters are no longer captivated by the charm and the charisma and the smile, it is performance that they want and that is precisely what is lacking in Ms. Kumaratunga.

And that is why, on December 22, Ranil Wickremesinghe will be elected the fifth Executive President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.

Inside the glass house

Editorial/ Opinion Contents