Editorial

If confirmation was ever required, the presidential election of last Saturday further reiterated the fact that cohabitation government just does not work in Sri Lanka. An imitation of the French Gaullist Executive Presidential system, bipartisanship and a National Government of the country’s two main political parties — the UNP and the SLFP — has not only failed, but the two are fast disintegrating in the process.

From the muddied waters of local politics has emerged the lotus bud, the symbol of the victorious People’s Party (SLPP).

The UNP has become a fractious group, seemingly collapsing like a house of cards following last Saturday’s election results, the same fate that befell the SLFP in 2015 and led that party to split into two. All things are however transient.

The UNP waving the white flag so early is a repudiation of the more than 5.5 million voters who placed their faith in their candidate. The leaders just left them in the lurch overnight allowing a few cases of post-election violence against their very supporters to take place with no government in place for 48 hours. The ‘new’ government is now left with a ragtag Opposition, and the danger of seeing the country drift into a one-party state omnipresent.

A priority for the new Administration would be to make the minorities feel one with the country. Any marginalisation could have a detrimental impact. These ethnic and religious minorities voted for two majority Sinhala Buddhist candidates, not for minority candidates from the North or East. Foreign news agencies are trying to make a meal of the voting pattern and stress the need for minority “inclusiveness”. It might serve them well to turn the searchlight inward and ask their own governments to practise what they preach.

Setting right the economy would be high on the list of priorities as well. On the cover page of our ST2 section of this edition, a former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India has warned that Sri Lanka’s “whopping” debt-to-exports ratio of 270% and non concessional loans, low FDIs and continuing dependence on external financing will be a challenge for the new President. It is as simple as it is stark, he says, to see that Sri Lanka, South Asia’s onetime Scandinavia, does not become its Argentina.

That’s a sobering thought now that the milk rice has been consumed and fire crackers lit to welcome a new Executive President.

On the foreign front

The big powers today, be it the resurgent India-United States-Japan-Australia axis or China that has arrived (of course with the caveat that India wants the US only to counter-balance China and no further), are trying to woo Sri Lanka into their orbit or at the least, to ensure it does not get sucked in to the others.

In recent times, Sri Lankan leaders after an election have made it a practice to pay homage first at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, and then do pooja in New Delhi.

New Delhi took no chances by dispatching its Foreign Minister to meet the new President within 24 hours of the latter sitting on his chair. That the visiting FM carried an invitation to Sri Lanka’s President, hopefully is not to be read as a summons to New Delhi. Hopefully too, the diplomatic world will not view this as the new President, the former military man that he is, being frogmarched to Delhi to listen to certain red lines on where Sri Lanka’s relations with China should be.

Seemingly upstaged by New Delhi, Beijing has also invited the new President and rubbed it in by saying there’s no hurry, and to come when he is more settled in his job.

India has reason to be wary of President Rajapaksa’s leanings towards China. During the last stages of the military operations against the LTTE, as Defence Secretary he was part of a troika along with his brother Basil and the then President’s Secretary Lalith Weeratunge who were engaged in back channel diplomacy to win the crucial support of the then Congress Government in New Delhi and neutralise the vociferous Tamil Nadu lobby. However, soon after the defeat of the LTTE, and Mr. Rajapaksa taking charge of rebuilding cities, he was confronted, and often frustrated by the slowness of the Indian bureaucracy in approving projects and impressed by the speed with which Chinese government-backed companies got his blueprints financed and operational.

The President’s position would be that there was nothing anti-Indian or pro-Chinese in what he was doing; he just wanted the job done, and done quickly. International relations, however, are not the same as getting building projects accelerated. In India, one would hope he would not come empty-handed, merely lectured to, and would ensure that issues like poaching in Sri Lanka’s northern waters and inter-alia, the futility of Provincial Councils are conveyed to the Indian hierarchy.

The new President will, no doubt, be haunted by the United Nations Human Rights Council probe into the conduct of Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces in the defeat of the LTTE under his watch.

The original co-sponsor of the resolution against Sri Lanka, the US and now the UK which had been cherry-picking on Sri Lanka’s war against terrorism are themselves now embroiled in a huge controversy over pardons of their own soldiers accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Honing Sri Lanka’s diplomatic skills with the required political backing, pushing the country’s national interests among the comity of nations in multilateral and bilateral matters, especially in free trade agreements and negotiating loans, and in security and strategic matters should be of critical importance to the new Government.