Six-point marriage in the south, pointless fighting in the east

by Rajan Philips

The UNP and the SLFP are on the verge of finalizing their marriage of convenience in the south even as reports of more fighting in the east are hitting the new waves.

The government and the LTTE are becoming adept at walking and chewing betel at the same time. Or, running with the hare and hunting with the hound - seems more appropriate metaphorically. No sooner they announced a new round of talks than they have resumed a further round of fighting.

A government, or a country, for that matter, does not live or fall by the ethnic problem alone. There are other problems and challenges to paralyze a country and bring down governments.

Sri Lanka has a long list of them: a deteriorating economy and the rising cost of living, the challenge of poverty and growing disparity, poor government services and the pathetic state of the infrastructure, systemic inefficiency and corruption in governance, and so on and so on.

Other problems

The symptoms of these malaises are not difficult to discern. There was a mini passenger-riot at the Mount Lavinia Railway Station not long ago. The national electricity crisis and the Colombo garbage fiasco have become stubborn facts of life. Come January, the schools will be battlegrounds between parents looking for admissions and principals managing spill over capacities.

Engineers have been sending warning sounds to anyone who will care to listen about the poor maintenance and repair of the country's bridges. Climatologists and geologists have been warning about the ever present danger of floods and landslides. The urgency after the tsunami to build up our infrastructure has all but disappeared.

The ethnic issue, electoral reforms, good governance, economic development, nation building (education reforms) and social development are the six points around which the governing SLFP and the opposition UNP are reportedly planning to act jointly in parliament and outside.

The coming together of the SLFP and the UNP pushes out of the power-loop the JVP that fancies itself as the third force in the country's politics. The setback in this is not at all for the country but for the current leadership of the JVP - notorious for its chauvinism on the ethnic issue and frog-in-the-village-pond approach to everything else.

Hopefully, a new leadership will soon emerge in the JVP and open more progressive possibilities for the organization and the important constituency among the Sinhalese that the JVP could objectively represent.

The prospect of a broad southern consensus on extensive devolution to address the ethnic question will no doubt be boosted by the new SLFP-UNP joint working plan. Beyond the ethnic issue, however, the joint working plan of the two parties will require careful scrutiny.

Needless to say, the UNP and the SLFP as part of the People's Alliance have proffered different approaches in the past to the question of economic development and distributive justice. It remains to be seen how these differences have been addressed in the joint working plan.

And what it means to promoting economic development while ensuring that the benefits of development are not confined only to the have-mores of Colombo but spread to the have-lesses in Lanka's hinterland.

In the now somewhat distant past, the two Old Left parties, the LSSP and the CP, bestrode the Old Parliament, fighting with passion, panache and purpose for good governance, parity in language rights, economic development and social justice. The Left today is less than a shadow of what it once was, and Bawa's ornamental palace in Kotte is not a patch on the Old Parliament, politically speaking.

But the Left's weakness does not make the tasks of the Left any less important, and the irrelevance of today's parliament makes it imperative that these tasks are articulated elsewhere and everywhere.

The Democratic Left Front - a Party that includes Vasudeva Nanayakkara, Kumar David and others who were once the rising stars of the Old LSSP - identified and addressed these tasks in a recent Political Resolution.

Marriage of convenience

The DLF's Political Resolution is a worthy attempt towards political education and discussion. Not daunted by the Left's parliamentary weakness, the Resolution is "ambitious for the people to develop their social consciousness through involvement and action," and for the twin developments of a mature leadership and people's involvement in the country's political processes.

The question in the context of the SLFP-UNP marriage is if it will help or hurt the cause people's involvement and a responsive leadership. More specifically, how will the new marriage implicate the progressive aspects of the Mahinda Chintenaya?

The Political Resolution anticipates such a cautionary scrutiny of the SLFP-UNP marriage in regard to national socioeconomic matters while welcoming the co-operation between the two to resolve the ethnic question.

Mahinda Rajapaksa sprang on the international scene as an unknown quantity to outsiders. But his positions and priorities were not unknown within the country, even though the unnecessary influence of the JVP and the JHU on the ethnic question had besmirched an otherwise progressive platform on socioeconomic issues.

In a global and regional sense, Mahinda Rajapaksa's election as President represented Sri Lanka's objective alignment with the growing global dissent - in India, Malaysia and practically every Latin American country - towards the US-led forces of globalisation. This was a significant departure from the preceding UNP and even the Kumaratunga presidencies.

Past failures

Primarily, it was the result of the people's protest against the failures of nearly thirty years of Sri Lanka's open economy. The failures are not only in regard to neglecting the growing level poverty outside Greater Colombo, but also in regard to the non-achievement of sound and structurally sustained growth in the economy.

Related to the latter has been the failure to establish clear roles for the state and the market forces in the development of the economy, which often leveraged the vices of both and the virtues of neither.

While professing the primacy of the market and withdrawing or weakening the role of the state in building infrastructure, the previous regimes augmented the authoritarian and coercive aspects of the state for their own political purposes and in the name of fighting the LTTE.

Thus we have a politicized bureaucracy, an oversized army, and a lopsided presidential/parliamentary system, but a thoroughly undersized physical and social infrastructure.

On the economic front, Sri Lanka cannot ignore the market, turn the clock back to 1505, and turn our back on the contemporary world as the JVP theoreticians tend to fancy.

At the same time the tourism and commercial enterprises and commission agents cannot be allowed to run down the economy at their pleasure as has been the UNP's wont throughout its history. Will the six-point marriage be consummated differently?