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| Sunday, 6 November 2005 |
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Southern verdict will be the key Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayaka If a talent for making headlines can be considered as being part of the success of a political campaign then the scoop of the present Presidential Election campaign season has undoubtedly been the understanding Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse has reached with the JVP and the JHU. This naturally was grist to the media mill because it seemed to place the Prime Minister at odds with the President and indeed it looked for sometime as if the Rajapakse campaign had entered choppy waters. But the Prime Minister's persistence seems to have paid dividends since he has been able to project himself as the candidate with the broadest range of support ranging from the Old Left and its trade unions to the militant Buddhists with a sizeable Tamil and Muslim following as well. Certainly Prime Minister Rajapakse has shown a gift for political sleight of hand. While retaining the support of the LSSP, the CP and the SLMP who pursue a more accommodationist line on the ethnic issue he has been able to bring into his ken the nationalist JVP and the JHU. While these parties attack the UNP on the Rajapakse platform as being pusillanimous to the LTTE the Prime Minister himself seeks to project himself as the one single figure capable of bringing about what he calls a honourable settlement acceptable to all communities. This intervention on the part of the SLFP's presidential aspirant has also served to broaden the national debate. The single major contribution of President Chandrika Kumaratunga to the national political debate was to persuade the SLFP and then broad sections of the country about the need for the widest-ranging devolution of power if the National Question was to be resolved. This was no mean achievement considering the fact that as late as 1988 the SLFP had boycotted the first Provincial Council elections. However, particularly after the signing of the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) with the LTTE by the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe a substantial section of opinion (and not confined to Sinhala extremists either) grew up with the view that the UNP was too submissive to LTTE demands particularly in the light of the LTTE's repeated violations of the CFA. It is this vein of opinion which Mr. Rajapakse has sought to mobilise behind him with his understanding with the JVP and the JHU and time will tell how successful he has been in this effort without allowing the anti-LTTE rhetoric of the two parties to alarm moderate opinion. In the light of moves by the UNP and its media cohorts to place the President and the Prime Minister on a collision course it is worth remembering that the President herself backed ably by the late Lakshman Kadirgamar was quite critical of the CFA and the UNP's handling of the LTTE. In that light Mr. Rajapakse's position that the CFA needs to be re-negotiated does not appear to diverge radically from the Government's position though naturally the UNP leader has begun asking the Prime Minister why he did not oppose the CFA earlier. It is not so much the CFA as the whole approach to the resolution of the National Question which poses the more interesting political conundrum. Mr. Rajapakse advocates wide-ranging power sharing within a unitary constitution and while this differs from the federal structure identified with the President it does not depart radically from the Constitution introduced by the President some years ago and rejected by the UNP. The UNP on the other hand is committed to a federal model as outlined in the Oslo declaration but has to contend with the Internal Self-Governing Authority (ISGA) demanded by the LTTE subsequently. While the casuistic squabble over 'unitary' and 'united' will mainly interest the constitutionalists it is worth noting that what will ultimately determine the question is the balance of political forces which November's election will generate. In such a context how do things stand? It is possible that the LTTE will not take sides and anyway it is tacitly accepted that it is the UNP which wins the Tamil vote. In fact it is this acceptance that has prompted the Rajapakse campaign to go all out for the Sinhala vote with its alliances with the JVP and the JHU. On the same token the UNP has alienated sections of Sinhala opinion by its soft line towards the LTTE and to counter it the UNP will do its best to alarm moderate opinion with the bogey of the JVP calling the shots in a Rajapakse administration and frighten non-Buddhists by suggesting that the JHU will unduly influence Mr. Rajapakse. While the LTTE as usual has turned up its nose dismissing the election as a squabble for power among the Sinhalese it will perforce have to take the result into account. In the case of a Wickremesinghe Presidency it will be more or less a return to the status quo but a Rajapakse Presidency will radically alter the situation. On the plus side for Mr. Rajapakse is the fact that it will for the first time forge the most wide-ranging southern consensus with the JVP and JHU as major actors. In his first election address on Channel Eye on October 29 Mr. Rajapakse advocated what in effect was a two-track approach of talking simultaneously to the southern parties and the LTTE in order to arrive at a consensus. Parallel to this he proposes the convening of a Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution. For his own part Mr. Wickremesinghe of late has begun to speak of devolving powers in excess of what the Provincial Councils enjoy to the North and the East while Matara District UNP, MP Mahinda Wijesekera says that the same powers will be extended to the South as well. So how will the power game work out? The Man in the Wanni (who will turn 51, days after the election) will brood over the situation while the Sinhala parties fight it out in an election game which in turn has become dirty, comic or plain bizarre. In many senses then the verdict which the southern voter gives come November 17 will starkly determine the destiny of this country under seige from contending communal and party political forces and patronisingly monitored and policed by the Big White Brothers in their various disguises as NGO mandarins, donors, monitors or election observers. |
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