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| Sunday,13 November 2005 |
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Election: Morality play or tele-drama? Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake And so we come to the climacteric act of a Presidential Election enacted as a morality play. As in all such age-old classical dramas this is a contest between good and evil played out against a heavy medieval back cloth. It is meant to purge the emotions, exorcise evil and anoint the victor. It is designed as a gigantic act of national catharsis. The script for this modern morality play was written well in advance by the Mahinda Rajapakse campaign and one detects the hand of Comrade Wimal Weerawansa with some aid from Gunadasa Amarasekera a playwright whose two plays have yet to be produced. The imagery is drawn from history both ancient and modern. Here Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe is dressed up as a colonial gentleman - a Portuguese General a Dutch constitutionalist or an English Sahib in cahoots with the IMF and the World Bank and sundry other votaries of globalisation to sell off the country's assets. In another act he is shown huddled with the ugly Mr. Prabhakaran hatching a dark conspiracy against the nation. Caricature Then to triumphal music appears Mr. Mahinda Rajapakse holding aloft a flaming sword to cut down all the nation's enemies and to put to rout all foreign predators and their local collaborators. The Prime Minister is cast as either a warrior of old battling the forces of evil or Diyasena the mythical saviour who is believed to appear in times of national distress to redeem the people. There is naturally an element of caricature here but caricature is an integral part of all political imagery. The motivation of all such political imagery is to present a Manichean world of black and white, of us and them, good guys and bad guys, the boy and girl of celluloid fiction against the villain. There is no doubt that this modern morality play will have a powerful appeal to sections of the southern audience (to continue with the theatrical metaphor) who have felt anxious at the relentless march of the open market economy which they see as being corrosive of traditional values and that section of the Sinhala audience which fears the equally relentless march of the LTTE. This audience will be primarily Sinhala Buddhist (i.e. the traditional rural SLFP constituency, the lower middle and middle class JVP constituency, both urban and rural and the middle class JHU constituency) but such an appeal to traditionalist sentiments can also strike a chord among Sinhala Christians and particularly. Catholics who have been radicalised in recent years by the teachings of nativistic liberation theology. Tamil audience The catch, however, is that such an appeal can well have no resonance among the Tamil audience in particular unless they are persuaded to see Mr. Rajapakse more as a benevolent monarch seeking to bring all communities and religious groups under a broad panoply rather than a mere Sinhala Buddhist warrior. It was this former image the Prime Minister sought to offer when unveiling his manifesto he quoted Arahat Mahinda who exhorted King Devanampiyatissa to think of himself as the caretaker and not the ruler of the forest where the latter embraced Buddhism. Sensing the danger posed by the rousing of such intense emotion implicit in the new morality play the UNP candidate has deliberately kept his campaign low-key and down-to-earth. Mr. Wickremesinghe does not trade in rhetoric but realism. Not for him high flights of fancy, grandiose visions. His chosen battle ground is the kitchen, his recipe for success the lowly 'hal messo' and milk for the kids. He offers a full plate of rice and fruits into the bargain. He alarms the populace with the spectre of having to make do with a paltry 'roti'. And he seeks to extract the emotional appeal from the Rajapakse campaign by projecting the enhanced powers he has proposed for the North and the East as mere administrative powers for building hospitals and establishing universities. It is a pretty sanitised domestic tele-drama designed to appeal to the urban middle-class challenged by the cost of living the UNP having taken for granted its upper class fans and its traditional rural audience. Nationalism and populist socialism It is the Rajapakse campaign therefore which has cast the coming election in ideological terms. It was Gunadasa Amarasekera who said that the November polls would be a re-enactment of the popular revolution of 1956 which brought Prime Minister Bandaranaike to power. It was the forces of nationalism and populist socialism which powered that 1956 engine. Both are present in the current campaign as well. But it is necessary to remember that 1956 had negative aspects as well exemplified most starkly by a parochialism which brought about the Sinhala Only Bill alienating the Tamils but failing to dislodge English from its dominant position. The challenge before Mr. Rajapakse in his national dress, 'kurakan saluwa' and all, is therefore to obviate that negative impression and rather embody the later Bandaranaike of the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Bill and the Bandaranaike - Chelvanayakam Pact. Whether he will succeed in thus projecting himself as everybody's leader capable of a honourable settlement of the National Question and forging a sturdy national economy or whether Mr. Wickremesinghe will succeed in his somewhat premature Santa Claus act (bag of goodies and all) November 17 will decide. So will it be morality play or tele-drama? Two days from when these lines are read the rhetoric will cease and an unusual quiet will grip the land. The country will enter a political 'nonagathe' from which it will emerge on November 17 to trek to the poll. But whoever wins what is certain is soon it will be all over bar the shouting leaving the country to contemplate an uncertain future. |
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