Rajpal's Column

24th October 1999

Folks, this time she is early

By Rajpal Abeynayake

How was this decision taken. Over dinner, with Tara de Mel, and the kitchen Cabinet in attendance? After a hurried message that revealed a budget coup, in which some party elements were planning to vote with the wretched UNP?

The President has been prone to take some very secretive decisions in the past few months. This was a quickie. Almost panicky, you'd say?

What do you tell a President who wants your vote for a fresh term in the post she promised to abolish within three months of her ascension to it? It doesn't matter for the moment . This is the face- off of the yuppies (the young upwardly mobile politicians who inherited the mantle from the national dress obsessed, politically - correct halfway capable old guard.)

In yuppiedom, decisions are taken in a hurry, never mind the consequences. Decisions taken are received in the other quarter of yuppiedom, with Mustang's tent youthfullness. ( " I am ready ,'' he says.)

For once, Kumaratunga is early, and that's news in six years. Nobody will begrudge her right to the bombastic brag about being early — it's a first. But the question is whether this early outing will help? On the one hand this premature call maybe a concession that the UNP is not allowing her to be usually late.

So, then, what's the history of this story? In yuppie fashion, maybe in halting and sometimes with downright Johnah's luck, Ranil Wickremesighe was beginning to get the UNP machine cranked up. Wickremesinghe's opposition was said to have been the PA's best gift for longevity, or so the PA pundits and palanquin bearers always said. If that was true, the government was, in this last year, any opposition's dream in tandem.

Starting from antagonizing the media, the PA was on a roll, displaying a remarkable yen for kitchen cabinet politics. Policies on education, good - governance and almost everything else were hatched over dinner, with half the cabinet longtimers being dropped from the decision making process like some hot pretzels.

This would ultimately go down as the lasting stamp of the Kumaratunga regime, assuming theoretically that there will only be one regime, for sakes of hypothesis. It was a regime that seemed to enjoy a love-hate relationship with itself, with the press and the people. The Presidency, that institution which should have been six feet under, according to election promises, was the defining factor of this regime, and any reports of the death of the Presidency proved to have been very vastly exaggerated.

If there is an undercurrent of thinking in the political ball-park these days, it is the almost hard luck story of the fact that there is only one person of national stature today in Sri Lankan politics. That's the President. The Presidency rubbed off this stature on her, and it's just one among the dozens of benefits that accrued to her from the J R Jayewardene Presidency that she loves to hate.

She expects that this Presidential stature will help her keep the pestilential Ranil Wickremesinghe from getting back into Temple Trees, the house Wickremesinghe quit with some gentlemanly fanfare some six years ago. She also probably expects that Wickremesinghe's perceived lack of stature will make walloping him easy business.

There is merit in the thinking, which doesn't mean that she can't still find herself unpleasantly surprised. It's the J. R. Jayewardene thinking process which seemed to have guided the ambitious Kumaratunga in most of her political moves, and this other imitation of holding the Presidential election ahead of schedule shows Kumaratunga plays the Jayewardene clone with girlish abandon. Jayewardene's 1982 equation was, however, in comparison relatively less complicated than what obtains for Kumaratunga in 1999.

Jayewardene had his economy humming, and his second term malaise was not even seen on the horizon when he announced elections after ensuring that Ms. Bandaranaike was stripped of her civic rights. Politics in Kumaratunga's late 1999 is almost infinitely more complicated, and she is not being helped by a stagnant economy which is the opposition's to exploit.

Minorities, to add to things, are much more important in the election equation in the post Jayewardene era than any of the parties would like to acknowledge, and even the moderate minorities are not docile and malleable entities they were in the pre-Jayewardene era politics.

In sum, all this may mean that President Kumaratunga has the edge, and she would have been an idiot to announce elections if she didn't have it.

But the edge may be a razor thin one, which can become a thinner or wider edge depending on how things play out between the days that remain between now and polling day in December 99. As the race approaches, she might have visions that Wickremesinghe is beginning to look more like Jayewardene than she does, but, for now, she will have her fingers crossed – and kitchen cabinet suitably wined and dined.

ENDPIECE: It's a heady feeling, almost with more body than the feeling engendered in these parts by the so-called passing of the millennium. Millennia are less attractive prospects, compared to the adrenaline that is offered to Sri Lankans by elections.

The boys of the government election brigade, clerks who generally exist on the low intensity excitement such as the monthly cheetu or the water-filter gossip, will be hit on the head with election light headedness just about four weeks from now, and will be seen to be as mad as hatters.

But, if that was to unnecessarily associate levity to the process, there will surely be attacks and counter attacks, the brandishing of weapons as long and as large as the T 56. The nation will be so riveted by the process that even Velupillai Prabhakaran will realize that any tactics such as outrageous bombings will go unnoticed. Can anyone possibly add to that surmise?

Hulftsdorp Hill

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