What Maithri wrote to Mahinda

Following are excerpts from the letter written by President Maithripala Sirisena to Kurunegala District UPFA Candidate and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Thursday.

Maithripala Sirisena and Mahinda Rajapaksa

You won the presidency twice thanks to the SLFP and its supporters. I became President in a different way. I became President as the candidate of the common opposition, by providing leadership to a nationwide movement that was mobilising against your rule.

How can you forget my tireless efforts to make you prime minister after the parliamentary election of 2004?

I stood with you against the JVP’s efforts to prevent you from being appointed premier and Wimal Weerawansa’s destructive project to withhold the position from you.

When there was a crisis regarding your nomination as our party’s candidate for the 2005 presidential election I stood with you.

The Muslims and Tamils have immense faith in me. If I had spearheaded the UPFA election campaign, the party could have attracted Tamil and Muslim votes as well.

The political friendship we had built from being members of the SLFP was ruined because of Basil Rajapaksa’s conduct, as you well know. His attempt to end my political career and portray me as an unsuccessful politician ended up boomeranging on you all.

When Basil Rajapaksa repeatedly obstructed me politically, I hoped that you would have the humility to intervene and protect my independence. But even until I stepped out to be the common candidate on 21 November, you had failed to do so.

On all three occasions that we have met over the past seven months and in our telephone conversation two days before you announced your candidacy from the Kurunegala District, I urged you to refrain from contesting, assuring you that I would lead the party to victory at the election. But with you signing nomination papers from the Kurunegala District, my hopes as new President and SLFP Chairman were destroyed. If you had not contested in this election, I would have been able to attract Muslim and Tamil voters and a new generation of supporters to the party.

Even though I suggested that you do not contest the election, I had no desire or need to remove you from politics altogether. I suggested a constitutional provision to grant you a dignified political existence. I know that many of your family members were in favour of this move. But you rejected all this because you have become a prisoner to smaller parties within the UPFA who have no love or feeling for the SLFP. All these parties wanted from you, was to steal your valuable vote base in order to secure parliamentary seats for themselves.

You must take the responsibility for making the glorious SLFP, a party with a 64 year history, hostage to the petty agendas of small parties and groups. As a result, many SLFP seniors are in deep crisis over the preferential races in their districts.

The right that you have given these small parties and groups to dictate the path of the grand old SLFP must end immediately.

Since you took over the leadership of the SLFP nine years ago, this party has turned its back on social realities and pluralism.

Did you not see how these communal flames you yourself had set alight worked against you and precipitated your defeat on 8 January? The SLFP had become a party that only represented Sinhala-Buddhists. This type of extremism is not suited to a great party like the SLFP. The challenge is before me now to transform the SLFP and rebuild the party so that it will represent the interest of all Sri Lankans, instead of a single race or religion. Today all those around you are inflaming communal tensions to win preferential votes.

They should not be allowed to manipulate the party and our party members according to their whims.

When you were President you kept repeating the fact that there were no more majority and minority races in Sri Lanka. Yet since the last presidential election and all the way up to 12 August in interviews, you and those who represent you express a blatant racism. According to the Buddhism I practice, and according to the teachings of any other religion, the spreading of this racism cannot be condoned.

To be inciting communalism at a time when national unity and reconciliation is crucial to overcoming the challenges of the 21st century and building a Sri Lankan identity, is a crime against the country and the party.

In the crisis over the nominations, you were willing to divide the SLFP and contest separately at the first opportunity. My aim was to prevent the party from splitting at all costs. To keep the party together, I purposely stepped aside.

When the Gampaha District nomination list was being prepared, I was hoping that the Western Province Chief Minister would step aside, since it was not practical for three members of the Ranatunga family to contest in the same district. But unfortunately, your position was that if the Chief Minister did not get a nomination, you would contest separately. So once again I was silent and I let you win, even when your position resulted in one member of the Ranatunga family leaving the SLFP to join the UNP. The risk of a 64 year old party splitting in two over the nomination of a single individual was averted only because I tactically withdrew at that point.

The National Government concept was not my decision alone. It has the full backing of the SLFP Central Committee. Your group condemns those from our party who took ministerial positions in this national government. But this is only a preferential battle. I feel it is my duty to tell you the true story about this. Those who have gathered around you, keen to extract your last drop of political blood as it were, by exploiting your vote base, those who sing your praises, telephone me or send messages to me through envoys, informing me that they are ready to join hands with me after the parliamentary election and asking me to secure their political futures by giving them ministerial portfolios. 

These same people portray our party-men who are ministers as enemies of the state and erode public confidence in them. On the one hand they seek to show a division in the party, but I have watched with interest how they used my photograph in advertisements to increase their electoral chances.

I have seen media reports where you have claimed you are willing to work with me. If you have such hopes, there is something I must warn you about. Your self-centred decision to pass the 18th Amendment eroded democratic freedoms and oppressed the people of this country. Your decision not only destroyed the SLFP’s democratic image, but it also did a great injustice to party seniors.

It is clear how you stole the people’s freedom and the party’s pride, and a future from our party seniors with that decision.

If you had retired gracefully like other presidents before you after two terms in office, there would have been a chance for a senior member in our party to contest the presidency and also become prime minister. Now it looks as if you are intent to steal their opportunities again at the end of this election. Even now should they not be given their due?

I believe that if the UPFA obtains the 113 required to form a Government, the premiership will go to a SLFP senior leader. If the UPFA comes close to 113 and needs more seats to form a Government, as executive president, I can intervene to secure that majority. Even in that scenario, it is not you who should be prime minister, but another senior party leader. Our party’s true strength is that it is the only party that has leaders with vision, political purity and the maturity to hold the premiership.

In the name of the people of this country and the SLFP, I request you to express your willingness, your support, your generosity and your blessing, for Nimal Siripala De Silva, John Seneviratne, Chamal Rajapaksa, Athauda Seneviratne, A.H.M. Fowzie, Susil Premajayantha or Anura Priyadarshana Yapa to be appointed premier after the parliamentary election.

It is stunning how you have gone from temple to temple, over and over again and how you obtained media coverage for those visits since you lost the election on 8 January.

I have my doubts if these trips to these temples have increased your spirituality at all.

Your words at personal meetings with our party members are being reported, and they are words filled with anger, bitterness and hatred.

Until the parliamentary election, I ask that you act with your intellect rather than your emotions and refrain from making remarks that could cause communal tensions and create the space for the UPFA to win a greater number of seats.