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So the Cricket season has burnt itself out with the last of the Big Matches between the United National Front and the People's Alliance ending in a decisive victory for the former. Admittedly it was an unequal contest for not only had some of the PA's star players defected to the UNF but even the depleted PA side could not quite play as a team.

For example it was not clear who the skipper was, whether it was President Kumaratunga representing St. Bridget's Convent, the newly annointed Thurstanite Leader of the Opposition Mahinda Rajapakse or even the maverick Royalist Anura Bandaranaike who is at home in both teams.

The comparison between Cricket and politics comes easily to a mind conditioned to view both as a gentleman's game. Both after all are part of our colonial baggage. The reality, of course, is manifestly otherwise. At a time when Cricket has become just another blood sport to be won at any cost politics has become similarly coarse.

If once it was the De Sarams and the Saravanamuttus who dominated Cricket and the Bandaranaikes and the Senanayakes who towered over politics men and women of a different currency have taken over both and while they might adhere to some of the more quaint conventions of both Cricket and politics one can not help but feel that some thing of the original spirit which permeated both fields has been irrevocably lost.

Don't get us wrong although we can already hear the howls of protest and accusations of elitism. In fact this judgement can be termed too harsh as far as Cricket is concerned. For after all what we have seen at play in Cricket is a necessary democratisation.

Cricket is no longer the enclave of the elite, the rump of the Brahmin class, but has become the patrimony of the popular masses. While this is so the inevitable competitiveness of a post-industrial consumerist society has left its mark on the game. It is no longer the aristocratic game either where what mattered was not whether you won or lost but how you played the game.

Politics has fared infinitely worse. Again the democratisation of the political process and the injection of politicians of peasant and working class stock to Parliament and local bodies was inevitable. Politics could not remain a bastion of the privileged classes at a time of popular franchise.

Three-piece suits had to give way to the cloth and banian white it might be a cause of wonderment to a new generation that once it had been decreed that Members of Parliament could not sing out 'kavi' but could merely read it. The irony today, of course, is that nobody bothers with 'kavi' while even two decades ago no Budget debate would have been complete without somebody from both sides bursting out in verse.

Is it that politicians have become more coarse or that a country gets the politicians it deserves? Largely in the 1950's, 1960's and even the 1970's politicians of all complexions, even if they had no great intellectual pretensions, were men and women of decency who took their responsibilities seriously. Of course there were not so many flesh pots as now to lure them.

They travelled by public transport mostly making use of their bus passes and railway warrants and lived at 'Sravasthi', the MPs' hostel. The archetypal epitome of this common man's MP was, of course, the irrepressible Wijayananda Dahanayake of Galle.

Today such a situation can only belong to the realm of fantasy. It is not merely the security threats which have insulated the politicians from the masses. The seductions, attractions and blandishments of power and office are such that a gulf has grown between the rulers an the ruled.

The physical distance between the people and Parliament (marooned as it is in the midst of Kotte's marshes) represents starkly the growing alienation of the people's elected representatives from the people.

Needless to say this does not augur well for the health of political democracy and when Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe calls on his Cabinet Ministers and MPs to lead more austere lives he can not be unmindful of the fact that what we are faced with today is a question of public credibility. Low voter turn outs have been interpreted as a sign of public disenchantment not merely in the political parties in the fray but of the democratic system itself.

This was the judgement which followed the low voter turn out at the last General Election in Britain. Of course the slack turn out last Wednesday can be interpreted in terms of voter fatigue but it is always best not to be too complacent.

Last week's results confers on the UNF an almost total suzerainty over Sri Lanka which is awesome to contemplate. Even if its majority in Parliament is slender the UNF's dominance over both town and countryside is near complete. Absolute power must also bring about a proportionate sense of modesty and a sense of political sagacity and large-heatedness and if this thinking seeps down to all layers of the governing party there can still be hope for this beleaguered land.

This is imperative since political democracy is dependent on the balance of political forces. Whether it was in 1970 or 1977 (mind you under both SLFP and UNP Governments) the dominance which a single party enjoyed over the country was debilitating of the political system. This the country's political leadership at all levels and transcending political boundaries must realise because if public apathy towards the political system curdles into cynicism that can be destructive of all that we have held dear so far.

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