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by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA

"Victory breeds hatred, for the defeated lie down in sorrow," warns the Dhammapada, adding: "Above victory or defeat the calm person dwells in peace."

Victorious, as it is today, after its sweeping triumph in the local government elections the United National Party, if not its allies in the United National Front, should know, full well, the truth of the Dhammapada. This is not because the UNP is any more religious than other parties in these secularist times, but rather, because of this party's very experience of the cruel results of arrogant triumphalism.

Even if formal historiography has yet to describe the arrogance of the triumphalism that followed the five-sixths majority victory in parliamentary elections in 1977, intellectual writing is already documenting and narrating the subsequent colossal blunders of governance that flowed from that arrogance even as we, today, struggle almost vainly, desperately, with the immensely complex crisis and social trauma that flowed from those tragic blunders.

However, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, our greatest savant in modern times,has noted that those ancient dharmic currents of self awareness yet survive 0 if largely unconsciously - in this part of the world (he referred to India but, by cultural extension, would include us as well).

In his classic study of Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government Coomaraswamy draws out a fundamental principle of that Theory: that "all self-importance leads to the disintegration and, finally, the death of the body politic, collective or individual" (Spiritual Authority...page 85). Pointing to (his contemporary) Gandhi's political philosophy of Svaraj (something with which, ironically, J.R. Jayewardene was familiar), Coomaraswamy concludes that the classical dharmic conception of government "survives even in modern India".

The post-1977 triumphalism and arrogance seems embarrassingly vulgar today, especially in its sharp contrast with the contriteness of the succeeding generation of UNP leadership, now, increasingly firmly, in power in our (disintegrated) body politics. That J.R. Jayewardene, one of the last of national leaders steeped in the classics, so profoundly, flouted those classical values, is more than an irony. It reflects the sheer poverty of the political intellect that five centuries of colonial depredations have left for us in these immediate post-colonial decades.

If JR's divided self, demonstrated that post-colonial debility, a certain humility and sobriety in the current UNP leadership reflects, perhaps, a partial recovery of the pre-colonial dharmic self. Ranil Wickremesinghe and associates, if unconsciously (in their eager modernism) are certainly free, so far, of the arrogant posturing that characterised that last UNP tenure in power.

I say "perhaps" because, after all those years of arrogant finally bloody, authoritarianism, in which some of the current UNP leadership participated at a subordinate level, it is difficult, at this stage of hesitant progress away from that authoritarianism, to be anything more than tentative and cautious in one's conclusions about political behaviour even if one (hopefully) seeks out the positive.

In this, certainly Ranil Wickremesinghe and colleagues have the advantage over their closest rivals (for both power as well as that elitist conceit), the leadership of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and the PA it leads. They have the advantage of going through the mill, the whole mill of major political triumph (1977) immense power, the arrogance and autocracy deriving from that power, and finally the chaos, disintegration, tragedy and shame of its outcome.

Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and colleagues hopefully, will never have the luxury of such a concentration of political power which might lead them down that path of self-importance and ruin. While the political system itself, in 1994 as well as subsequent polls, prevented such an accumulation of electoral power, our society's very experience of tragedy and crisis also circumscribed the PA's regime. Even so, even with that limited electoral eminence, even with society's post-JR, post-Premadasa vigilance, the PA ended up attempting a half-hearted, half-ashamed, autocracy.

That is possibly because the PA's second generation leadership, unlike Ranil and Co., did not have the luxury of practical experience and bitter (bloody traumatic) lessons.

Chandrika herself, has indeed suffered terribly from the violence of our times and has heroically endured and overcome that suffering. Unfortunately, being at the receiving end of autocracy and aggression does not necessarily imbue one with an adequate sensitivity of the dangers of the error of such behaviour.

But electoral defeat should have taught some kind of lesson to the PA in December 2001. That same lesson is being driven home forcefully now via the local government polls. Even if people - those generations old enough to remember that fast receding trauma - do not want to talk abut the past yet, they are certainly anxious move away from arrogance and autocracy and towards a more stable, more democratic ethos.

Hence the uncertain polls outcome in 2000 and, after the subsequent jugglery for political survival, the more emphatic electoral expression in December 2001. But if those with access to power are being taught lessons, what of the lessons for those yet striving for access - even for a single parliamentary seat?

In last week's polls, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna suffered its worst electoral setback in recent years. In fact, it is a reversal of an, until then, ascendant trajectory for the JVP. Just as much as the JVP improved its parliamentary performance in December, as expected, similarly, it was anticipated that the Peramuna would raise its share of local body seats or, at least retain its current strength.

The drastic reduction in representation can only be read as the voters' response to the JVP campaign platform for the local body elections: its strident opposition to the current peace process. Very categorically, the voters have responded with a rejection of that election platform.

The obvious lesson for the JVP is there for all to see. The bulk of Sri Lankan voters, even in the Sinhala heartland, which is the JVP's base constituency, have firmly shifted peace-wards. Furthermore, it is clear that the desire for peace is so urgent that the Sinhalas do not want doubts about aspects of the peace projects to distract from the primary objective of rapidly moving towards a political settlement. It is clear that Sinhalas are happy to let the secondary problems be dealt with along the way rather than have them hold-up or slow down the process.

The Sihala Urumaya, and its allies in the Sinhala ultra-nationalist movement (whatever there is, of a movement) should have learnt its lesson from December 5.

Nevertheless, they have persisted with their general political platform of complete rejection of a political settlement of the ethnic conflict. And the electorate has sharply reminded them, again, of the national priorities today. Perhaps Foreign Minister Tyronne Fernando is right when he says that the Sinhala ultras are "beyond hope" (see last week's Sunday Observer, page 1).

The local government polls, in this sense, show a significant development: a marginalisation of certain seemingly potent political forces - maginalisation, at least, at the level of the institutions of governance.

Both the JVP as well as the Sihala Urumaya, and the ultra-nationalist movement behind it, are more than 'seemingly' potent. The JVP has launched two insurgencies, each of them shaking the State (1971 was more a psychological shock rather than an actual challenge to State power), suffered two violent suppressions, and yet shown remarkable political resilience to the degree of actually emerging as an electoral force to be reckoned with.

This, no doubt, is due to the existence of a social base whose socio-political aspirations the JVP continues to successfully represent.

The Sihala Urumaya also genuinely represents a small, but politically influential, socio-cultural interest group. Much of its political influence, however, comes from the fact that it represents a political tendency which, in the immediate de-colonisation and post-colonial phase, held hegemony over the State. Although that tendency is yet, formally, institutionalised via the Constitution, the dominant political trajectory of the State, today, is away from such ethno-cultural hegemonism. Hence, the marginalisation of the SU.

But the nature of the SU's political activism - that of ethno-cultural exclusivism - has a potency, which history in this country as well the experience all over the world has shown to be far greater than the sum total of its voter base or membership strength.

It is ethno-nationalism - both the supremacist type as well as the nationalist resistance type - that has sparked the worst violence in the past century and more throughout the world. It is the principal, if not the sole, cause of all the insurgencies and armed conflicts extant today. Mahatma Gandhi, Ytzhak Rabin as well as S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, A. Amirthalingam and Neelan Thiruchelvam were all assassinated by ethno-nationalist extremists.

In fact, the rise of the small Sinhala ultra-nationalist movement has also been accompanied by some - yet few - incidents of guerilla-type violence, and threats of violence: such as the grenade attacks on foreign aid agencies, and the posters with ultra-nationalist slogans put up by previously unknown groups with military-type names such as the 'Ravana Balakaaya' which recently claimed responsibility for the grenade attack on Sarvodaya leader A. T. Ariyaratne's home.

In this moment of triumph, the UNP leadership has not crowed. This is yet another hint, perhaps of its growing political maturity. But much more has to be done, not the least being exploring ways of ensuring that those recently defeated political forces are not left out in the cold - to contemplate desperate measures.

It is not enough to preach about lessons that these forces must learn. Surely one big lesson the dominant political forces - both mainstream national political formations - has learnt is that such potent forces should neither be forcefully suppressed (as the UNP learnt in the past) nor left to stew in the margins, frustrated by mere institutional structures, while human agency, whose fulfilment they too feel they espouse, proceeds without actively including their (if esoteric) dynamism.

However esoteric the political impulses of the JVP and SU might be, ways have to be found to include them in the national discourse in an constructive manner as possible.

The wars we have fought out on this island these recent past decades have been so many-sided as to indicate that the hoped-for political settlement requires many more participants than the current peace process involves right now.

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