Cohabitation has been defined as the greatest evil of our times. In some parts of Colombo even the war is being seen as a lesser evil than the evil of cohabitation.

For most Colombo wallahs (to use the enduring Indianism) the war was remote, and it was enacted in slow motion. But, cohabitation is more immediate. Some UNPers dream of a larger than life Chandrika battering Ranil and his entire package of dreams, and they wake up in a cold sweat. They never had nightmares like these about Prabhakaran.

But, in Sri Lanka's own way, cohabitation has been handled, and handled perhaps for the good of the country.

Cohabitation here may have been marked by a certain degree of booing, catcalling and plain boorish behaviour between the two parties involved, but then this is not France. But all the bad blood between Ranil Wickremesinghe's government, and the Executive represented by the President, has been a safety valve of sorts that has helped to let off steam and thereby ensure stability in the system.

But, boorishness is only the outer manifestation of cohabitation. Beneath, there has been a fair amount of substance, which has not been brought under proper scrutiny.
Cohabitation is not an accident, even though the framer of our Constitution the late J. R. Jayewardene probably never envisaged a situation of Cohabitation such as we have today.

But the substance of today's cohabitation is that it is a good system of checks and balances. The UNF would have got away with bigger calamities than the Voice of Tiger radio station, has it not been for the fact that Chandrika Kumaratunga is sitting on Ranil Wickremesinghe's head.

But that does not mean that Chandrika Kumaratunga is running the country. Ranil Wickremesinghe is running the country, despite all the jokes that have been made about cohabitation being like 'sleeping with an elephant.'

The entire peace exercise has proved that the pundits who prognosticated that the President will be running the country even if a UNF government is elected, were very wrong. There is nothing more obvious than the fact that the UNF has set the political agenda of the day, and that it is the UNF which is talking to the LTTE for better or for worse.

The President has been moping that she and her party has been left out of the loop. But, beneath the histrionics, we have seen a good display of some of the most subtle aspects of 'good governance,' and the practise of 'astute' parliamentary democracy.

The word 'astute' is being used with caution here. Doesn't he know the meaning of the word astute it might be asked? What's astute about the President being accused by the entire Cabinet of bringing a hidden camera to record proceedings? What's astute about the President saying 'I swear to god, Ranil Wickremesinghe is holding a gun to my head, saying he will shoot me if I do not support the peace process.''

There will be a good deal of shouting and sloganeering at a May Day rally, yet it does not make May Day a carnival. Cohabitation in Sri Lanka may have been outwardly a childish exercise of bickering, of calling each other various unprintables, and of general uneasiness with each other bordering on the paranoid. But yet the core of this exercise of cohabitation has shown that Sri Lanka can be a mature polity, and that there can be such a thing as a balance of political forces, that can be ensured between the various branches of government.

On the one hand various columnists have in their considered wisdom pointed out that Prabhakaran is doing all that is within his power to drive a wedge between the two main political players, with the aim of dividing the country down the middle so that he can derive an advantage. This is conventional wisdom, and there is no doubt truth to it -- but it is to see the issues in absurd black and white.

Despite the designs of Prabhakaran, healthy dissent and the inbuilt safeguards of cohabitation have ensured that government is not converted into a juggernaut that is headed 800 miles per hour in one direction. Even the UNF cannot get carried away by their own successes, as there is a nagging wife back home in the form of Chandrika. The most tried and proven piece of conventional wisdom of them all, is that nagging wives can be good for some husbands.

Chandrika Kumaratunga may be firing off letters and calling for explanation, and she may be generally seen as the biggest thorn on the side of the UNF. But if she was a real disruptive force the UNF, and their peace exercise would have come apart by now.

But a FIDE grandmaster type of chess game does not have a lightning ending. The chess board cannot be seen in one dimension, and the polity cannot be seen in black and white.

The UNF has left the dialectic aside, and is seen to be engaging in an exercise, which at least they and a lot of their sincere followers believe is a pragmatic exercise. It is certainly a pragmatic exercise to ensure that there is proper sharing of power between the centre, and all other parts of Sri Lanka in the peripheries.

But pragmatism creates its own momentum which leads to a 'conditioned' foolhardiness, such as that was displayed several times by J. R. Jayewardne who to a great extent is the political mentor of the current leader of the UNF. In the best traditions of democratic political maturity, Chandrika Kumaratunga is serving to temper the rash instincts of the governing UNF. She may be accused of not doing it with finesse, but then this is not an evening out at the theatre. The UNF cannot exactly be accused of being genteel and bashful in their conduct too.

Maybe Chandrika Kumaratunga's ultimate ambition, in the best traditions of partisan politics, maybe to pull the rug from under the feet of the collective UNF leadership. But, that's only incidental to the reality that in the process, she is fulfilling the grand plan of the universe. Sorry, I just got carried away -- but she is fulfilling the plans of constitutional accountability, which can be ensured by devises such as cohabitation. 'Great societies' such as the USA for instance, considered black man and white man equal just the other day, in terms of time in the historical context. There is no need to think that Sri Lanka will reach a state of Utopian political maturity in an instant. There will be unsightly bickering, and some of it will border on the disruptive, But, while turf wars may not really be nice, they are acceptable, and they serve the purpose of keeping the general atmosphere on some even keel.

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