Columns

As deadlines approach and Wednesday’s fascinating election story is still to unfold fully, what has emerged from the battle for ballots needs to be told even briefly.

Many results are still to come as I write this. But one need not be a psephologist to unravel some of the trends already emerging to say who killed Cock Robin and turned Sri Lankan politics on its head.

One might tire of repeating ad nauseam that tourism blurb writer’s sales pitch promoting Sri Lanka — “a country like no other”.

But even if one were to repeat the cliché it fits the purpose right now. For the first time in Ceylon/Sri Lanka’s parliamentary history one of its oldest and leading political parties decided to commit hara kiri with its leader wielding the weapon that killed the party and himself.

True, it had been a long time coming. The signs were all there. But when it came last Thursday it seemed like a political tsunami had swept the UNP away with the flotsam and jetsam of minor political irritants

As seen from a distance right now, two things stand out like beacons on the beach.

One is the sweeping victory of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) which like a juggernaut has pushed most other contending parties out of its way to record an outstanding parliamentary electoral victory.

If ultimately it turns out that the SLPP does not get the two-thirds majority that the party leadership strove for, Mahinda Rajapaksa said the other day that there are ways and means of achieving that end result.

The target of such a majority is to do away with provisions some perceive as pernicious articles of the 19th amendment which do exist as several constitutional experts have pointed out.

That is part of the end game that the SLPP leadership is expecting to achieve before the day is done, as it were. What should be repealed and could stay with changes must surely have been discussed by the party hierarchy in the days gone by and when it should be put before parliament which is said to sit for the first time on August 20.

If the SLPP wishes to adhere to other provisions of the constitution just as much as it endeavours to get rid of some, one would hope that the President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Mahinda Rajapaksa working in tandem would decide to limit the cabinet of ministers to 30 members as seems to have been the original intention of the drafters of the constitution.

The cabinet should hardly be a stable for pack animals who often contribute little or nothing intellectually which is not what Gotabaya Rajapaksa wanted from those in his close circles as politics began to have a new appeal to him.

Mahinda Rajapaksa also would not forget his childhood days when his father D.A. Rajapaksa quit the UNP and joined hands with SWRD Bandaranaike to form the SLFP which eventually won the 1956 parliamentary election in a landslide victory with a two-thirds majority.

Then in 1970, Mrs Bandaranaike, in a coalition with the political Left won a decisive parliamentary election that virtually wiped out the UNP, which if I remember correctly, was left with eight seats in the House.

Surely Mahinda must recall the days when that two-thirds majority provided the political ballast for the government to try and push through progressive reforms.

What is significant about the results of this week’s election is that UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe managed to achieve under his own volition (as some in our Foreign Ministry would say) what neither SWRD Bandaranaike nor Sirima Bandaranaike could do — eliminate (certainly as of now) the United National Party from the political landscape of this country.

Instead of building the UNP and harnessing the resources available to it, Wickremesinghe surrounded himself with friends and batch mates from his alma mater irrespective of whether they had the wisdom, capability and strength to perform the tasks mandated to them.

Eventually it was his increasing stubbornness within the UNP to run the party machine as he wanted and ignored the younger members of the party who offered advice. That made him unpopular with the UNP which was manifestly getting sick of his irascibility and stubborn refusal to take advice genuinely proferred.

Whether Donald Trump picked up habits from Ranil Wickremesinghe or it was the other way round, it was becoming increasingly clear that both were heading towards the destruction of the oldest political parties in their countries.

Ranil’s uncle JR Jayewardene picked up a UNP battered at the elections way back in 1970 and restructured it into a political machine that could take on the Sirima Bandaranaike coalition which itself was slowly coming apart in the late 1970s.

Nephew Ranil Wickremesinghe did the opposite. He took a functioning party which had support not only among the rich, urban upper/middle class but also among the rural peasantry and tried to turn it into a cog of the globalised, pro-western world.

If ‘JR’ was intent on building a strong UNP using his 1978 constitution, his nephew set about gradually dismantling it because he was not ready to modernise the party and throw it open to bright young members with fresh ideas on how to take the party forward.

Take a step back into the politics of, say, 25 years ago. That was the time when Colombo was a UNP fortress. It was impregnable and most other parties hardly had a look in.

Today it appears that the UNP has been unable to win a single seat and even the party leader could not successfully defend his own seat.

If the UNP, the oldest party in Sri Lanka save the LSSP which began somewhere in the 1935s, if I remember correctly, is to be resurrected to play a significant role in local politics then it should be extirpated from the hands of an outdated and stubborn old guard whose shelf life was over a long time ago.

What is difficult to fathom is why the UNP leader seems to have taken such a delight in committing political hara kiri. As I write this, the coffin of the UNP has still not brought for mourners — if there are any — to perform their last rights.

One cannot forget the words of Calpurnia, the wife of Julius Caesar to her husband: “When beggars die there are no comets seen”.

“There are some who think that Ranil will somehow swim across the Diyawanna Oya and gain entrance to the Great Hall where rubbish is churned out so regularly. Who knows these are strange times.”

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before joining Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)