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by Susantha Goonatilake

The local government LG election results were the best slap in the face that could have been given to Chandrika Kumaranatunge who had tripped Mahinda Rajapaksa at every turn in his bid for the Presidency.

Worse, in a world first, her brother Anura Bandaranaike, Prime Minister-designate, hence indirect co-candidate had kept away from the hustings. At one stage as I recall, Kumaranatunge was to say at Anuradhapura that the Presidency was only fit for certain families.

And spoil sport, even after Rajapaksa won the presidential election she attempted to control the local government elections through her position in the SLFP. Her popularity was soon deteriorating fast as in one SLFP provincial audience she had been jeered. She quickly packed her bags and left the country.

The turnout was low compared to the General or Presidential elections probably due to a demoralized and dispirited UNP keeping away as well as due to election fatigue by others. The motivated JVP on the other hand would not have had such an attitude. If both the UPFA and JVP had contested together, the arithmetic show there possibly would not have been any wins by the UNP.

Close fight

The UPFA local government sweep did not indicate that a very close fight had recently taken place during the Presidential election where Rajapaksa had only won by a hair's breadth. This had been thanks both to the LTTE guns stilling potential pro Ranil votes in areas under their control and to the JVP campaigning for him while Chandrika did her best to trip him.

The tendency this time was virtually just the opposite as the "Vasi Paththata Hoiya" factor kicked in. This " Hoiya" had also occurred earlier in 2002 when the UNP won substantial number of LG seats in the wake of a UNP General Election win. Mahinda supporters now yell that it is a victory for Mahinda Chintanaya.

In the present elections system, the councilors or councils won do not necessarily reflect underlying voting trends. One has to tunnel down to the individual votes cast for each party to get at trends. In multi cornered fights this becomes still more relevant.

I will deliberately not take into account the LTTE influenced TNA votes where the voting must invariably be considered at least partially rigged. The figures in brackets below indicate the percentage obtained by individual parties. Let me use the last Sunday Times figures.

The number of councils won were UPFA 223 (83%), UNP 35 (13.1 %), TNA 5 (1.8%), JVP 1 (0.3%), CDUA 1(0.3%), Independent 1 (0.3%), JHU 0 (0%), total councils being 266. The percentages of councilors elected however were UPFA 1,972 (55.4%), UNP 1,155 (32.4%), JVP 362 (10.1%), TNA 46 (%), JHU 14 (0.4 %), Independent 7(0.2%), CDUA 5 (0.1%), the total number of councilors being 3,561. And at the voter level things become still stranger, more warped.

The UPFA gets 3,325,528 votes (48 .6%), UNP 2,400,401 (35.1%), JVP 855,000 (12.5%), JHU 59,942 (0.8%). All these percentages have been calculated in reference to the total number of valid votes cast 6,845,698 not to the total votes cast (which include spoilt votes). This of course is the meaningful way to calculate.

What the electoral system implies is that the 48 .6 % UPFA votes is translated to 55 .4% of councilors elected and then to 83% of councils won - the latter nearly twice the figure for votes. The winner's lot gets amplified along the way in terms of councilors and councils won.

In a reverse way, the UNP which got 35.1 % of the popular vote gets 32.4% of councilors and only 13.1% of councils. This logic accelerates with the JVP which got 12.5% of the popular vote, 10.1 % of councilors but only 0.3% of the councils. If a general election was fought on these votes, there would be different outcomes because then the calculations would be on district basis and not on council basis.

Trends

Let us briefly examine the individual parties' performance and make some guesses at the trends. Why was the UPFA led by Rajapaksa considered worthwhile by a significant section of the electorate?

Apart from the UPFA's own merits, one obvious answer is that because the JVP and JHU - two UPFA opponents now in the LG elections - had praised him and wholeheartedly supported him only 4 months earlier.

They swore by the Mahinda Chintanaya MC which was the UPFA election platform of both the Presidential and LG elections. Mahinda Chintanaya was however not Mahinda's personal Chintanaya. It was the electoral program built around the 12 points initially agreed between the JVP and Mahinda Rajapaksa and subsequently endorsed by JHU.

There are other reasons. The anti national tendency of Chandrika had been partially halted by Rajapakse's Presidential victory. Some firmness with LTTE on the military front had returned, strengthening the original SLFP's nationalist direction.

So any electoral drift on nationalist criteria from the UPFA towards the JVP and JHU would naturally have got slowed. The JVP who had campaigned heavily for the President also had not joined the government, disappointing many of their supporters as well as Mahinda.

They had spurned an opportunity to show their potential at governance. And a major factor of the UPFA victory especially in estate and Muslim areas was its agreement with the CWC and SLMC.

Eroded

The UNP, the results indicated, had got eroded in the Deep South. In the Deep North it was still struggling to cling to Prabhakaran's suicide capsule in spite of the LTTE rejecting Ranil Wickremasinghe during the Presidential election.

His uncle J.R.'s UNP lost two key elections in 1956 and 1970 but JR immediately took the lead to learn the lessons of the defeats.

After 1956 he changed the UNP to a nationalist platform. After 1970 his propaganda took a social orientation wanting to reduce the land reform ceiling to 5 acres, imitating the low ceiling of US-induced land reforms in Japan and Korea.

After gaining power using these slogans JR of course changed this tune of social concern. Ranil's marriage to the LTTE albatross had already been annulled by the LTTE during the presidential election.

But one did not realize this divorce in the pro UNP propaganda especially of Sirasa and the Sunday Leader the main outlets for the LTTE wing of the UNP (or if you will, the UNP wing of the LTTE!).

They continued to extol the benefits of the LTTE-UNP ideology. The eroded UNP had got mired in the albatross of the LTTE and Ranil's unimaginative leadership. Cracks in that leadership has already appeared.

Tactical blunder

The JVP had chosen not to join the very government of the president it had worked so hard to get elected. Rajapakse had, it is said been very keen on them joining. Here the JVP had possibly made a tactical blunder which cost them votes.

A parallel one can think of was when the NSSP decided to launch a suicidal General Strike shortly after J. R. Jayawardene had come into power with a massive vote in 1977 and JR had not yet shown his dictatorial fangs. During the 2002 local government election the JVP had got 487,139 votes.

Four years later in 2006, it had increased its vote by 335,665 that is by 69%. The 2006 total however does not include those votes which it would get in the other council elections that have been postponed, so that the increase over 2002 would be larger (as would for other parties). But that total the JVP polled in 2002 had been a drop from the 814,309 votes it had got a year earlier during the General Election.

This drop in 2002 was shared by the PA because of the Hoiya effect of that General Election won by the UNP. The percentages of votes obtained by the JVP in the different districts are very instructive.

They got their highest percentage in Hambantota 23.4 % (coming close to the 26 .2 % of the UNP). Surprisingly Colombo district followed second with JVP taking 19.5% of votes cast.

The other districts in descending order of JVP votes were: Anuradhapura 14.5%, Monaragala 13.4%, Kalutara 13% Matara 13%, Gampaha 12.9%, Polonnaruwa 11.7%, Galle 11%, Kurunegala 10.3%,, Kegalle 9.9%, Ratnapura 9%, Matale 8.8%, Badulla 8.7%, Puttalam 7.8%, Nuwaraeliya 6.8 Trincomalee 5.1%.

Hambantota district, where the JVP had won most, was "traditional" JVP territory in the Deep South. But surprisingly, Colombo district had come second with nearly 20 per cent voting for it. This was significant because Colombo district has the lowest poverty rate in Sri Lanka with only 5% below the poverty line.

Hambantota has nearly 28% below the poverty line; the highest being Monaragala with 32.4% of the population below the poverty line. The JVP had become a force among the urban middle classes not only among the rural dispossessed.

The JHU had earlier scored in the suburban areas such as Maharagama (centre of the Buddhist suburban Buddhists, the home of Dharmayatana and of the pious monk Madihe Pannaseeha and once of Soma hamuduruwo).

The last election had been held after the mass demonstrations of sorrow on the death of these two monks. The JHU consciously tapped this grief for their votes. One of the JHU slogans during the last election was that they would carry forward the programme of Soma hamuduruwo.

Nationalist orientation

The JHU did maintain a general nationalist orientation. JHU leaders included a few pious monks but had quickly split into several warring factions indicating its lack of binding principles and that it was being driven more by personality politics.

This personality driven politics was illustrated in its march from the original pressure group, the National Movement Against Terrorism to the political party Sihala Urumaya and then to Jathika Hela Urumaya.

All their once key leaders from S.L.Gunasekera to Tilak Karunaratne to Professor Madduma Bandara to Professor Indraratne to the venerable Akuretiye Nanda to the later JHU's key figures such as the Venerables Uduwe Dhammaloka and Kolonnawe Sumangala had defected or left. But parties have split into factions earlier.

From the original UNP, the SLFP was created in a split. The classic splits were in the now dead, Old Left. Beginning from the early 40s it split into various Stalinist, Trotskyite, Social Democratic and other factions giving rise to CP, LSSP, NSSP and so on.

Although personalities would have mattered, the major reasons for all these splits were actually ideological, that is matters of principle. And here we have one party, the JHU, presumably following the principled thinking of the Buddha splitting into so many personal factions.

No wonder that the JHU fell from its figure of 552,724 in 2004 to only to 59, 942 in 2006. It had probably committed Harakiri, but in a less dignified manner than in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. Snap elections? Parliamentary stability? The UPFA and the JVP had both announced publicly that the local government elections were not on macro national issues including the ethnic issue.

In the words of the JVP, it was on roads and cleaning of garbage. The UNP on the other hand used the ethnic issue and the so-called peace process in its propaganda as did to some extent the JHU. The UNP pushed its albatross, the flawed ceasefire agreement. Flogging this LTTE horse deal possibly contributed to their loosing.

The UPFA insisted that it was fighting on the Mahinda Chintanaya, which one should remember, had definitive clauses on the so-called peace process, including rejection of invented traditional homelands, rejection of federalism and accepting a unitary state within an agenda of individual equality for all citizens.

Presumably, the CWC and SLMC both ethno-religious parties but not strident like the separatist ones also did accept Mahinda Chintanaya at the LG elections. Meanwhile, the unconditionally pro CFA, UNP fared badly.

Real civil society had spoken and also given a rebuff to foreign funded NGOs who had together with some tendentious newspapers campaigned against the stands of both Rajapakse and the Mahinda Chintanaya. The UPFA win was on the strings of Mahinda's victory and a demoralized UNP.

But he has only a small majority in parliament. The question is would he now capitalize on his present sweep and call for snap general elections.

This of course has been formally denied. But that could prove to be tactical politics of the moment. If he goes to polls with the original Sandanaya and his new allies the CWC and SLMC with Mahinda Chintanaya as policy, he has a winning combination and more importantly, parliamentary stability.

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