Columns

• One year to the day when people power awoke a nation’s conscience

Exactly last year to the day, Lanka was in horrible flux. It wasn’t only the rising prices of food nor the shortage of essentials nor the winding queues for fuel nor the long power cuts that had driven the people out of their homes to the streets. A swirling mass of humbug on humbug, deceit upon deceit, lie piled on lie had fogged and befuddled the mind to deny common sense its true purpose; and, with judgment taken hostage by brutish political beasts who had crept out from the grottos,  left the people hopelessly bewildered.

Rather it was a motley of all these curses, with corruption the heaviest, cramped into one unbearable bundle of despondency that had made the people decide that enough was enough, and say, ‘stuff the lot, the whole bleeding lot of them who have brought ruin on our heads’.

HISTORIC DAY WHEN LANKA CAME OF AGE: Freed from political fetters, people from all strata of society gathered on the Green to stand up against a corrupt regime (Photo by Tavish Gunasena)

Throughout the land, the nation’s collective conscience heard the singular call. The young, the old, the poor, the rich, people of all genders, races and faiths shed aside the petty divides that politicians had used to keep them asunder, to rally as one to answer the nation’s plaintive cry. They joined any protest they could find, bringing with them their handwritten homemade placards all bearing the common message echoed in the chant they roared, demanding the President and his Government to resign.

In the nation’s capital, Galle Face Green, the seafront esplanade, the place of recreation and amusement for decades, lay poised on April 9th to be transformed into a site of historic protest where for the first time since independence, people power amassed and laid siege on the president, taunting the full force of the Government’s military might to take on the Gandhian staff of nonviolence.

If the paralysed Government had hoped that with the going down of the sun on Galle Face Green’s western horizon, so would the protesters slink to their homes when night gathered, its prayers went unanswered. Instead what was witnessed was wave upon wave laving the Galle Face Green with no sign of ebbing. The morning light revealed the protesters were in for the long haul.

Just a stone’s throw and an earshot away from the Presidential Secretariat, three little words, ‘Gota, go home’, became Lanka’s new national mantra.

But were the leaders hearing the message? Were they listening to the tumult? Those who had not heard the rumble in the grassroots where it had first sounded, still remained aloof to the din when it was brought closer home to the seat of Government. The moat had been crossed, the drawbridge raised, the ramparts stormed, the citadel besieged but they still remained in their ivory towers, clinging to the fast-vanishing vestiges of power, contemptuously treating the masses’ concerns.

Their only answer had been to seek an Indian credit line, stubbornly refusing to seek an IMF bailout as the SJB had been demanding them to do before the situation turned worse. In fact, in the first week of April, the Government lay in utter disarray.

On April 4th last year, ex-Justice Minister Ali Sabry was sworn in as the new Finance Minister. Ex-Education Minister Dinesh Gunawardene, ex-Foreign Minister G. L. Peiris and Ex-Highways Minister Johnston Fernando were respectively re-sworn into their old posts. Along with the President and Prime Minister, the sixsome made up the new makeshift cabinet. While G. L., Dinesh and Johnston stood firm through the week, Sabry reversed direction the following morning and resigned.

If that was bad enough, to have the all-important Finance Ministry and Treasury without a minister, worse was to follow when long-serving Treasury Secretary S. R. Attygalla resigned within the hour of Minister Sabry’s resignation.  To compound the crisis, Nivard Cabraal, the snooty Governor of the Central Bank, also resigned. The two main monetary and fiscal edifices of the nation now
stood rudderless.

The Sun God, who heralds the dawn of a new year with his entry to the warring Mars-owned sign of Aries, and becomes exalted in his powers therein, seemed debilitated to cast a single ray of blessing to defuse the nation’s ticking time bomb, when, on the eve of his transmigration from Pisces to Aries, the newly appointed Governor of the Central Bank offered his own ‘kokis’ for the people to crunch on while gobbling kavun and athiraha on New Year’s day.

The Governor announced that Lanka would renege on her international USD 51 billion debt. Though couched in economic jargon that the move was to preempt a hard default, it could not conceal what in ordinary parlance simply meant: that the nation was broke.  Gone bust due to the reckless squander of its finances and gross economic mismanagement by a regime which, after turning Lanka into a failed state, has lost the right to govern.

In the next tumultuous twelve months, Lanka went through a series of political upheavals that stretched the social and democratic fabrics to the utmost. For the first time in Lanka’s democratic history, sheer people power forced a prime minister to resign, hours after his political goons had emerged from Temple Trees to brutally attack peaceful protesters on the Green.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, around whom the political fortunes of the SLPP revolved, and the anchor of all its hopes, had to suffer the humiliation of having to be rescued from a braying mob besieging Temple Trees, by an Air Force helicopter in the twilight hours of May 10th and forced to remain holed up for days in a Trinco naval camp.

With ‘strong man’ Mahinda’s exit, it fell to ‘man of straw’ Gotabaya to hold the crumbling fort.  But it would be to no avail. Exactly two months to the day his brother Mahinda resigned and fled, it was his turn. With people power surrounding President House, President Gotabaya sneaked through the back door. After lying low as a hidden stowaway aboard a naval vessel for three days off-coast, he returned briefly to shore to furtively board an Air Force plane in the midnight hours of July 13th and fled the havoc he had wrought. A day later, he resigned.

But the violent churning of the political sea brought forth from its disturbed depths an incongruity none had anticipated. Nor was it found to be in harmony with the prevailing mood. But neither could they throw it back to the ocean floor and make it disappear. All were landed with it.

Ranil Wickremesinghe had been the leader of the UNP for 29 years. During these years he had twice contested for the presidency and had twice failed. After 2005, he had given three presidential elections the miss. For six times he had played the prime ministerial maid, never the presidential bride. The Presidency had always eluded him.

Now the man, who had lost his own seat at the last general elections two years ago, and had only crept back to Parliament through the rear door on the sole national list seat given to his similarly routed party, suddenly found himself heir to the mantle of the presidency by fortuitous chance.

Such were the quirks of cruel fates that when his hour had struck for his lifelong aspiration to be finally realised, he was denied a power base in Parliament to elect him as President. Though he made entreaties to the opposition to crown him with their votes, it was rebuffed.

Instead, he was compelled to woo the votes of those he had branded as rogues and even taken to court on charges of corruption during the Yahapalana era. The Rajapaksas, who still controlled the SLPP MPs, saw the advantages of electing a man as President, beholden to them in the House; and he was duly elected. It empowered the Rajapaksas, though dethroned, to rock Lanka’s political cradle, secretly from the wings.

The people, who had driven out a President, elected with a record 6.9 million votes, due to a perceived loss of popular mandate midway in his five-year tenure, were now saddled with a President who had no mandate at all. With the stark irony of the unexpected result staring straight in their eyes, they had none but themselves to blame, since they had been so focused on getting the known devil out of office, they had lost sight of the unknown angel as the caretaker replacement for the rest of the term.

Thus, Ranil Wickremesinghe, though he lacked the legitimacy to assume the mantle of the presidency, he acquired constitutional title to it when 134 MPs legally elected him to the supreme office to exercise the ‘executive powers of the people’ elected, in normal circumstances, by millions of people.

But these were not normal circumstances, nor were they normal times. As an old Chinese curse puts it, these were ‘interesting times.’

As Charles Dickens would have written, it was the best of times for Communism to rise, it was the worst of times for Democracy to fall, it was the age of wisdom for the resilient to endure and the wise to warn of folly, it was the age of foolishness when the sheep could be more easily led and mules made to drink on the nod, it was the spring of hope for wolves in lamb’s wool to exploit public anger, it was the winter of despair for those sworn to democracy’s ideals to defend their creed after its custodian priests had queered the pitch with corruption.

If that weren’t enough to convey the befuddled bleak house Lanka had become, he would have continued to write further to make the tragedy replete, and to reveal another bizarre irony confronting the nation.

He would write: And yet, despite these oddities, a fusion of the best and worst of times made it the most terrifyingly grotesque time of all, when lifelong democrats played dictators and lifelong aspiring tyrants played democrats and feigned their willingness to give their lives to preserve its freedoms, especially the freedom to use its poll gates to enter its hallowed shrine of democratic power; and there, as Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, sole reigning hold the tyranny of Marxist heaven.

The President’s initial actions seemed only to drive the people from democracy’s reach to the jungle terrain of the unknown. As Milton said, ‘where no hope is left, is left no fear.’ The danger was that the people, bereft of hope and with nothing to lose except their pains, would soon lose fear itself, and then not all the king’s horses nor all his men, would be able to halt the slide into anarchy’s hell.

But in the first seven months of his reign, the new parliamentary crowned president had no hope to offer nor tears to shed, only more pain to give. All he could offer was bad news, more bad news and even worse news. His constant refrain ‘economy first, economy second, economy third’, became his presidential anthem and the people’s moanful dirge, since it preceded the imminent advent of more bad news, greater hardships, and more crackdowns on the people’s rights and freedoms. At its altar, even the March 9 scheduled election was brusquely sacrificed without a qualm.

But last month, the clichéd tide of bad news turned awry. The new March moon, emerging out from its ‘amawake’ on March 21st, began to wax, and shone its benevolent beams brighter on the island. With the IMF Board approving the bailout package, the President’s long resilient wait for his one and last hope to realise was at long last over.  And the people, with their mettle mercilessly put to the test of fire, finally heaved a great sigh of relief that, at least, the IMF Gods had looked kindly on the disenfranchised ‘Les Miserables’.

Fled hope returned from more realisable climes.  But that hope is fraught with danger. The ADB warned on Tuesday that ‘Lanka’s recovery hinges on timely progress on debt relief and steadfast implementation of reforms’. We may have passed the worse but there is a worse to follow.

As Ranil Wickremesinghe resumes crossing the burning Caucasian bridge, clutching malnourished Lanka to his side, muttering the ‘economy, economy, economy’ mantra beneath his breath, it should be the fervent hope and prayer of all, that, this time, he does so sensitively,  with a durable social security net under his feet.

The art of governance lies in striking the ideal balance between two competing demands. To concentrate only on achieving one extreme to the total exclusion of the other, will end, if not in disaster, then in a pyrrhic victory. To follow such a course with eyes blinkered by the arrogance of power, is to blindly follow the wisdom of a fool.