Thursday Sep 19, 2024
Thursday Sep 19, 2024
Monday, 5 January 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The headline is borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks. It is appropriate for the subject that is discussed.
Amid competing predictions on the presidential election to be held next Thursday, we seem to have ‘unremembered’ that this is an election sought by the incumbent President.
The past 40 days saw the charisma of an unassailable leader turn into the chagrin of a sizeable section of the electorate. The great promise that marked every milestone on the road behind is now replaced with a meandering road ahead into disputed terrain. The trophies on the shelf are no guarantee of success in the impending encounter.
Mahinda Rajapaksa
President Mahinda Rajapaksa was supremely confident of his ability to persuade the electorate to give him a third term in office. His sanguine enthusiasm for an election two years ahead of schedule was firmly rooted in existing ground realities. He was adept at image engineering. Gifted with exceptional c
ommunicative skills, he exuded such tangible confidence that intimidated political adversaries into sharing his own sense of destiny.
It is this shared belief of his role as redeemer that enabled him to garner the required two-thirds majority to enact the 18th Amendment. Even to this day, Comrades Vasu, Vitarana and Dew in the charming company of Dulcie De Silva, Leader of the Mahajana Party, have not abandoned their hopes on the leader whom they believe is transformational and not a transactional leader.
The UNP
The UNP, which claims to be the main Opposition party, was in disarray.
Some of its young articulate Parliamentarians eager to restore its credibility and relevance pinned their hopes on a change of leadership substituting the passionless preaching of Ranil Wickremesinghe with the glib oratory of Sajith Premadasa.
The more farsighted Parliamentarians of the UNP who were equally disenchanted with the lackadaisical leader were reconciled to a state of suspended animation.
The JVP
The advent of Anura Kumara Dissanayake as the Leader of the JVP bought about a qualitative difference to the Parliamentary Opposition. The middle class intelligentsia disenchanted with the internecine quarrels in the UNP were suddenly alerted to the oversized effect of an emerging plutocracy and the rising inequality in society.
More than any other political group, the JVP under the leadership of Anura Kumara Dissanayake succeeded in shaping public opinion on the widening chasm between those who do well in class and those of the chosen class thriving in politics of patronage.
Dissident voices
The other notable dissident voices were those of Venerable Maduluwawe Sobhitha Thero and members of the Movement for a Just Society. The clergy-led civic initiative spurred the JHU an integral part of the ruling coalition and its fiery monk Athuraliye Rathana Thero to threaten an implosion within the UPFA.
The ‘Post-Conflict Patriotic State’ turned into a politically-polarised land. The Rajapaksa monolith was discovered to be fragile and less frightening.
Politics is a fluid process
Politics is essentially a fluid process. In this cyber age, it is more fluid than ever. New issues, new personalities create new circumstances. Perceptive politicians who accurately and dispassionately read the patterns of the evolving circumstances can frame strategies that fit the new landscape.
The Maithripala Sirisena candidacy is the result of such intuitive reading of public discontent that lay dormant and ignored by an Opposition at war with itself and a Government anesthetised by its absolutism.
J.R. Jayewardene
The 1978 Constitution with its Executive Presidency and the electoral system of proportional representation was imposed by the sheer will of one formidable politician, J.R. Jayewardene. It was a measure of redress to a personally-humiliating defeat he suffered in 1956 when his party was reduced to eight seats in Parliament and he himself was deprived of his own seat.
To be out of office and out of Parliament while garnering the largest popular vote as a single party was particularly galling for J.R. Jayewardene who practiced meditation, read Marcus Aurelius and admired Napoleon Bonaparte.
Introducing the new Constitution, he was the first to refashion the Supreme Court. Secure in office as Executive President, he allowed a nonviolent minority agitation by an elite group of Tamil lawyers to spiral into a vicious civil war.
The repressive provisions of the new order, muted a vibrant trade union movement and pressed fast forward a market economy and tampered with social safety nets that were in place even before Independence. He amended the Constitution again for the express purpose of disenfranchising his main political rival.
The erosion of democracy is no recent phenomenon. Whatwehave today is the accumulated folly of 37 years capped by the 18th Amendment of 2010.
The present incumbent in office is more of a victim than a villain. Every apology tendered by defectors for their thoughtless endorsement of the 18th Amendment is an indictment of the system and a plea for exoneration of the subject person.
Entrapped in history
President Mahinda Rajapaksa is entrapped in history. Soon after the decisive defeat of the LTTE he was conferred the title ’Wishwa Keerthi Sri Three Sinhaladeeshwara’ at the Magul Maluwa in the historic Dalada Maligawa, Kandy by the Mahanayakes of Malwatte and Asgiriya Chapters. Receiving the honour, he pledged to protect the nation that he united with his life, and to ensure that it would never be divided again.
From that point onwards, the political project that consistently generated consent and popularity was in place. The persona and the image was inscribed in every edifice not so much for personal glory but as an act pregnant with power implications. Elected representatives built cohesive coteries of apparatchiks ostensibly to serve the principal project. If they in the process intimidated opponents or suppressed dissent, it was to serve the higher purpose of serving the patriotic state.
Maithripala Sirisena
Former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in a stroke of genius persuaded candidate Maithripala Sirisena to run for the dual purposes of reclaiming the SLFP and restoring democratic governance. In doing so, she has unleashed a movement that will last much longer than its immediate tryst with destiny on 8 January, no matter what its outcome.
Maithripala Sirisena is the quintessential SLFP prototype who fits the profile given by the erudite journalist the late Mervyn de Silva who wrote on the founder of the SLFP “…personal sacrifice has a greater moral worth and the sacrificial idea is a leading motive in oriental mythology from Siddhartha to Nehru. The hero is not the man who makes millions but the man who leaves the palace.”
Maithripala Sirisena, born to a lower middle class peasant family a day after the founding of the SLFP, has a birth certificate as proof of being a child of 1956.
(Sarath De Alwis is a former journalist and a retired professional in leisure and aviation industries.)
