Weighing Tweedledee and Tweedledum

Opposition and SJB Leader Sajith Premadasa

Former President Ranasinghe Premadasa

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable” ― John Kenneth Galbraith

No sooner I read Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka’s tract in Friday’s issue of the Daily FT, ‘Rajapaksa arc of political history begins to descend,’ I started on this riposte.

His concluding remark provokes this counter: “The completion of the current cycle of Lanka’s modern political history looks likely to restore and resume a Premadasa period. The Chinese reclaimed land from the ocean. The Sri Lankans must reclaim the middle ground, the moderate social democratic centre, in politics.” 

Really? Are you serious? From Tweedledee back to Tweedledum? 

The Premadasa presidency did not represent the social democratic centre. Ranasinghe Premadasa transferred the patrimonial state and its institutionalised clientelist or patronage-based voter party linkage from the Comprador class who went for Saville Row tailors in London to the ‘Mudalali’ class who relied on tailors in Bombay and Bangkok. Dayan should not confuse ‘Nawaloka’ with Huxley’s Brave New World. 

The organic continuance from father’s memory to the son’s claim is personified in Tissa Attanayake. 

Oh! By the way if I were to write my memoirs I will have to write about my interlude in Aviation – when I worked for the State-owned national airline.

It is under the Premadasa presidency that pedigreed puppies were flown down from London to Colombo gratis with instructions to the airport staff at Dubai the stopover to ensure that Very Important Pup gets its water. 

When we moved from parliamentarism to presidentialism the ‘patrimonial state’ moved from consent of parliament to obedience to the presidency. 

Dr. Dayan J says that “top-heaviness of the executive presidency can be rectified only by stepping away from the 20th Amendment while not sliding all the way back to the 19th.” 

As Donald Trump demonstrated in the oldest Presidential Republic, an Executive Presidency is top heavy.

No one complained when FDR was top heavy with his new deal. Some people complained when George Bush Jr decided to be top heavy in Baghdad but to no avail. 

Now Biden has decided to be top heavy with his trillions of COVID stimulus package.

If you do not like an Elected Pied Piper, for god’s sake get back to either Ivor Jennings or Colebrook and Cameron. 

Dr. Dayan J says that the autonomy for the Tamils can be rectified only by the reactivation of the 13th Amendment within the parameters of the unitary state. 

Unitary state is not the problem. Majoritarian hegemony is the problem. As a student of Gramsci Dr. Dayan J needs no lecturing on that subject.

Dr. D.J says that the “lopsidedness in Sri Lanka’s external affiliation can be corrected only by re-setting the Port City as a level playing field through a ‘concert of powers’ rather than the patronage of one.” 

As Marx said, Capital is dead labour, “which vampire like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” 

That said in the present context I am obsolete and so is dear old Karl Marx. 

The generations after me, including Dr. D.J’s, can live in their imagined comfort zone or be practical about this business of direct foreign investment. Personally, I would agree with Peter Drucker.

The multinational corporation Chinese or Mongolian, American, or European puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision makers, and the national governments.

Where there is discretionary authority, there is grease money. I felt sorry for Dr. Harsha de Silva. It is heartrending to watch a man insisting that a virgin can survive in a bordello. 

Dr. D.J. says that the problem of accountability can be realistically addressed only by an internationally credible, independent national mechanism and process. That the “economy can sustainably take-off in a social democratic Open Economy”.

That takes us to Adam Smith, the man who started it all. 

“The agents of government regard the wealth of their master as inexhaustible; are careless at what price they buy … at what price they sell.”

What the country needs is not Premadasa’s son or anybody else’s son. We need genuine profound change. We need human breasts that will not entertain the idea of linking the vaccine with the next election. 

If a better economic model is to be created, we should first bring about profound existential and moral changes in our society. I draw these words of wisdom from Vladislav Havel’s ‘Power of the Powerless’. What we need is not a new variation of the old system.