Ranil wins the election easily -- but loses it
Tigers elect Rajapakse and Prabhakaran sinks Ranil, period
That headline doesn't even sound bizarre, even if it should. But, what better way of telling the unalloyed and obvious truth?
Particularly after a hard fought election, sugar coating and papering-over is mealy-mouthed hypocrisy that's amusing more than its idiotic.

Like death and taxes, we have one more certainty now. Ranil Wickremesinghe would have been elected President on November 17th, had the LTTE not chosen to torpedo him by torpedoing the North Eastern voter. (I wrote last week: ….."(that would theoretically at least) give Wickremesinghe a 55 and counting (55+) victory at this election, provided that the North East vote is not disturbed, disrupted or otherwise messed up.)''

Come to think of it, Wickremesinghe would have won by about exactly that much if the North East had not been "disturbed, disrupted or otherwise messed up'' as speculated.

Rajapakse's margin over the required 50 per cent of the votes for victory, was an infinitesimal 28,000 votes over 50% -- 0.29 of a percentage point, to be exact. That's less than a hair's breath in terms of the country's voter strength. It's in fact 0.28 percent of the valid nationwide vote… and so, it was thaaaaat close….

Mahinda Rajapakse qualified to win by just that much, whereas if the North East polled properly Wickremesinghe would have easily polled at the very least 5 times that much, even if he got just one-25th of the Jaffna district votes ALONE, leaving aside the rest of the North East. (The actual vote in Jaffna due to the LTTE intimidation was 1.1 per cent of the total eligible vote in that district!)
Obviously everybody knows this -- and best of all, Mahinda Rajapakse knows it himself.

As for the majority over Wickremesighe, the around half of 180,000 votes or 80,000 Wickremesinghe needed to reach the magical 50 per cent and win the election himself, could have been won in Jaffna district alone -- even if a mere tenth of the Jaffna district voted for Wickremesinghe. Just for the record, even though it sounds inanely a statement of something more than obvious, Wickremesinghe would have undoubtedly got scores more than that number if the Jaffna, Vanni, Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Digamadulla voters were properly allowed their right of franchise.

Were the voters stopped from voting -- or did they keep away?? The short answer, to be got firmly out of the way before this article gets to even more serious concerns is: All election monitors say the Jaffna voter was disenfranchised due to LTTE intimidation, period.
Even if they weren't, the LTTE by asking for the boycott torpedoed Wickremesinghe, which is the long and the short of it.

Why does the obvious need to be reiterated?
Partly because the global media -- the BBC and Reuters for instance, have already started their witting or unwitting campaign to say that Sri Lankans elected a "hardline'' (…their term) president!
Sri Lankans did NOT elect a 'hardline' president -- the Tamil Tigers 'elected' a 'hardline' president.

A BBC world service commentary headlined a news item to say: "Sri Lankans elected a hardline president. So now what options are there for the Tamils?''
That's one heck of a way of putting it. The Tamil Tigers make very sure that an obvious Wickremesinghe victory is stalled -- and yet, Tamils are supposed to be stunned and anxious by Sri Lankans voting for a 'hardline' president!!

Obviously the Sri Lankan nation as whole, Tamil Muslim one and all did not vote for a 'hardline' president. They voted for a 'conciliatory' president -- Ranil Wickremesinghe -- which any sixth grader would have no problem figuring out having regard to the above numbers.
The voting patterns show, of course, that the majority of Sinhalese people alone perhaps preferred this so called hardline president, which means Rajapakse has the Sinhala mandate and not the country's mandate. Well near half of the Sinhala south and the southern minorities together however preferred Wickremesinghe. However, definitely the Sinhalese and northeastern Tamils and Muslims together in this country, certainly did not prefer this 'hardline' president. They wanted Wickremesinghe, the so-called conciliatory President.
If the Sri Lankans preferred a conciliatory president, its clear that the Sri Lankans did not elect Rajapakse - in the final analysis, the Tamil Tigers did.

Why did the Tigers do it?
Last week I wrote the following in these columns in now what seems something quite eerily correct: "(That would theoretically at least) give Wickremesinghe a 55 and counting (55+) victory at this election, provided that the North East vote is not disturbed, disrupted or otherwise messed up. All of which also has to be qualified by saying that nothing untoward can happen from now until the last vote is counted, such as an attempted assassination or something outlandish that the LTTE can notoriously get itself upto''

Even before the ink was dry on that article on Sunday, the LTTE did the outlandish thing by asking the Tamil people for a boycott of the vote. We know that when the LTTE 'asks' anything, its no sweetheart request for some tender loving cooperation. Anyway, as if to prove it wasn't, the LTTE enforced their request with road barriers, burning tyres and turning-around buses. That's as if the threat of getting shot at a later date wasn't enough.

Why did the LTTE do this? It appears they wanted the short memories of the international community to register this election in their minds as a Sri Lankan/Sinhala vote for a 'hardline' president.
They didn't even have to wait for short memories, given the global media reaction that echoed "Sri Lankans elect hardline president', without so much as even stating in some reports that Wickremesighe would have certainly won if the Tigers had not deliberately disrupted the poll. (Reuters allowed sheepishly: Wickremesinghe may well have won if the LTTE had not called the boycott. Talk of damning by understatement.)

The pattern of circumstances (ah, what do they say in the Law of Evidence - "system evidence'') shows the LTTE always prefers to negotiate with the new leader rather than the old one. This is to play on the classic Sri Lankan egoistic notion, entertained by almost every new leader, that he or she alone has the special charm and intelligence to deal with the Tigers.

Another reason they wanted Rajapske was that with Wickremesinghe they would have been compelled to agree to a honourable settlement - something they do not want in their quest for separation.
No doubt if Wickremesinghe did put on a slightly better performance in the south, he would have won with or without the Tiger boycott. Well he almost did.

Just 70,000 or so more votes would have got him over the magical 50 per cent, which is just a teensy infinitesimal blip in a valid vote count of 9717039. But in the Sinhala south, he got solidly beat - particularly in the rural Sinhala south. He won the Sinhalese Tamils and all -as expected - in Colombo, in and around Kandy and Nuwara Eliya etc.,

This translates unfortunately almost as if Rajapakse is in fact the President of the Sinhalese - while Wickremesinghe would have been the president of the Sinhalese Tamils and Muslims, had the Tamil Tigers not finished him off. This is the third presidential election they decided -- the first two by assassination or attempted assassination, this by political subterfuge. They achieved the same or a better result than if they had assassinated Wickremesinghe, this time without in fact killing him.

Uncannily, Rajapakse is almost in fact the President of the Sinhalese only, as most Sri Lankans to the exclusion of Tamils seemed to have preferred him. But if the Tigers had not willed otherwise, the country would have had the president that the Sinhalese and the Tamils preferred, and not just the one that most of the Sinhalese alone preferred.

To strike a personal note - to me it underlines my worldview that international actors (including global media) and their agents contrive to keep us divided, rather than united.

Which is not to say that Rajapakse, against all odds, did not beat Wickremesinghe hollow in the suburban and rural Sinhala south - even if he did not in the multi cultural urban melting pot and the minority areas. He is no doubt the president of the Sinhalese, elected by the Sinhalese alone - and of course the Tamil Tigers.

We should say, considering his achievement in defeating Wickremesinghe in the aforementioned areas, however - congratulations Mr President and good luck. We should specially commiserate with Mr Wickremesinghe more than we generally do with the usual loser - you would have been president, if not for the Tamil Tigers you always seemed to love so much.

The end-piece: There were two obvious occurrences. * The North East vote was disrupted by intimidation and violence * Given the 28000 margin over 50 p.c. for the victor to qualify as president, this could have changed the outcome of the election. The Election Commissioner crowed through every microphone before the elections that there will be a re-poll in the areas in which polls are disputed. But, when the UNP asked for one when it could have changed the outcome of the election itself, he refused.

For an Election Commissioner whose primary goal is to retire, its not surprising he wanted to retire to bed early that Friday morning.

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