Ranil falls from raja yoga to paraja yoga

More than before Ranil Wickremesinghe's actions tend to border on antics and histrionics. Increasingly he is veering away from pursuing any credible or pragmatic moves to stage a comeback. Last week, for instance, he resigned from a post which he never held.

He thought he was a member of the Gangaramaya Dayaka Sabha only to find, after he resigned, that he had never been a member of it.

Promising

This is as comic as Wickremesinghe promising to build the tallest ever dagoba in the world when no one has yet beaten the Jetawanaramaya - the tallest dagoba in the world.

It is as bizarre as the invitation extended to the Portuguese Prime Minister to celebrate the 500 anniversary of their landing to initiate the cruelest and devastating colonial occupation of Sri Lanka by a Western imperialist. It is also as ridiculous as his futile exercise in dressing up farmers in jeans for his posters pasted in the presidential campaign.

The list can go on and on. In these comic episodes the difficulty is in deciding whether to laugh at the joke or the joker!

His latest antic of resigning from the Dayakaship at the Gangaramaya Temple came after he copped the flak from Podi Hamuduruwo for demanding the resignation of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the Defence Secretary.

Wickremesinghe wanted him to be replaced by Gen. Janaka Perera. Incidentally, all this happened in the month of April-the month in which he was hoping to topple the government based on astrological readings.

He was fired up. He went on the offensive with an activism hardly seen before. His chosen tactic was to hit Gotabhaya using Janaka as a handle.

It was pathetic. He was only punching the air and hitting nobody. He was trying to exploit a minor setback to downgrade the victories of the self-sacrificing soldiers to gain some political mileage.

He even wanted a debate in Parliament about the bombings forgetting that these planes were smuggled under his patronage when he was negotiating the Ceasefire Agreement to install Velupillai Prabhakaran as the de jure Sun God without informing the President, the parliament, the party, and the people.

In short, the man who has no record of wining anything substantial in his political career - certainly not against the nation's enemy, Prabhakaran - was pretending to be the Field Marshal who can re-conquer the territory he handed over to Prabhakaran in his CFA by hiding behind Gen. Janaka Perera.

In trying to demote Gotabhaya and replace him with Janaka, Wickremesinghe was posing (falsely, no doubt) as the alternative leader who can do better than Mahinda Rajapaksa, the President. He was trying to ride on the shoulders of Janaka to impress that he has with him the military capability to meet the challenge of Prabhakaran. But it was a bogus show.

Wickremesinghe has never been nor will he ever be for a military move that would either defeat or cripple Prabhakaran because, for one thing, he and his 'catchers' like Lakshman Kiriella have been pooh-poohing the military gains in the east and, for another, are on record saying that there can't be a military solution.

The Security Forces will also remember his dismal record as the only Prime Minister who in the known annals of military manoeuvres (1) pulled up his Navy Commander for attacking a Sea Tiger boat threatening the territorial integrity and national sovereignty and (2) exposed the heroic soldiers in the LRRP to the Tiger terrorists on the cooked up charge of plotting to assassinate him.

His criminal record of betraying the Security Forces - not mention the nation has been condemned by the people at practically every election. If the present has been harsh on him history too is unlikely to forgive him for the crimes committed against the people who gave their votes expecting him to uphold and fulfil their historic aspirations.

Verdict

Perhaps, he doesn't care for the verdict of history because the future has no votes. So he plays for short term gains. Running short of time his immediate objective is to impress his dwindling followers to stick with him.

His last gambit was to crow about the raja yoga in April. He relied on April as the month in which he could (according to the raja yoga he thought he was in) make an astral leap into the seats of power.

His side-kick Chandrika Kumaratunga, with whom he signed a secret deal on the eve of the last presidential election to defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa, too was cawing about the raja yoga hovering in April. Not that she cared two hoots for her childhood mate Wickremesinghe. Her main ambition right now is to have a second bite of the cherry as the Choura Ragiini (Queen of Thieves).

Now that April has come and gone both are left groping in the slippery political tunnel which has no light at the end. Both are back in the place they deserve ? the paraja yoga.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, on the contrary, seems to be strengthening his position with positive signs of even the dissidents like Mangala Samaraweera returning to the fold. If Chandrika and Wickremesinghe were hoping Mangala's detour was a confirmation of their raja yoga they were soon brought down to earth by one of the most dutiful loyalists of the SLFP Alavi Moulana. Mangala's place is in the SLFP and Alavi whose heart, soul and body is in the SLFP, played the successful role of the go-between in patching up the estranged friends.

Leaving these side-shows aside for the moment, it must be recognized that at the heart of the recurring tensions and crises in the SLFP and the UNP is the north-south conflict.

No longer are the two major parties divided on the direction in which they should take the economy. The SLFP has moved to the centre of the market place and accepted the inevitability of the overwhelming de-regulated economics.

And the latest statistics indicate that the SLFP is as good as the UNP in managing the economy and its growth.

The outstanding difference now is in handling the north-south issue. The record shows that the UNP under Wickremesinghe has turned out to be the most incompetent managers of this conflict.

The UNP will never be able to able to live down the backlash from its mismanaged north-south conflict. It began with Wickremesinghe secretly signing the Ceasefire Agreement and ended (mercifully) when his co-signatory, Prabhakaran, kicked him out of office.

Illegality

Apart from the illegality of this act, it was a humiliating surrender to the exaggerated claims of one single armed group that has denied the aspirations of all the other communities.

Viewed from another angle, it was like the German Field Marshal Hindenberg handing over power to an Austrian corporal named Hitler. The comparison here begins and ends on the folly of a democratic leader handing over power to a fascist killer.

Hitler, under the circumstances, had some legitimacy at least because he had won a sizeable amount of votes (some 37%). Wickremesinghe handing over power illegally to a wanted criminal was a totally unsustainable formula imposed arbitrarily from the top without taking into consideration the historical imperatives and the historical experiences (e.g., the failed Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement).

Only a naive Prime Minister dreaming in cuckoo land would have agreed to put his signature to a document that had a future shorter than his term in office.

At the bottom of Wickremesinghe's approach to the north-south conflict is his congenital blindness to the grassroot forces.

If by any chance he came into power in the last presidential election he would not have been able to carry forward his asymmetrical formula, tilted towards the north, because the opposition rising against him from below would have forced him to fight both the north and the south.

His strategy has been to go along with the international pressures ignoring the grassroot aspirations. The CFA has proved that the "international safety net" on which he was relying to save his agreement - and consequently himself - never was there to save the nation from Prabhakaran. Only Wickremesinghe and his cohorts in the NGO gangland believed in this fiction.

However, it must be admitted that all southern political leaders are caught between these two positions that lie between the international rock and the local hard place. There is also the third place: the intransigent north mined with explosives.

The conventional and popular theory is that a solution can come only by winning the hearts and minds of the northern moderates/extremists through a constitutional arrangement that would address primarily the aspirations of the northern Tamils. But there is no truth whatsoever in this myth.

The mono-ethnic extremism of the northern politics is not a factor that can be addressed through constitutional compromises or arrangements.

Neither the moderates nor the extremists can be appeased with all encompassing formula that would pacify the demands of the fragmented and the armed segments of the northern community or all the other communities outside the north.

This is an issue that will not go away as long as the armed extremists in the north are in a position to grab militarily a disproportionate share of power to establish and maintain a mono-ethnic enclave excluding all other communities.

There is neither justice nor viability in such a formula that is aimed at appeasing only this community at the expense of all the other communities. The ramifications of an asymmetrical constitutional arrangement would be to destabilise Sri Lanka in the foreseeable future. Nor will it help to defuse the centrifugal forces with its fissiparous tendencies inherent in mono-ethnic extremism.

The main thrust of Tamil extremism, whether in its mythical 'Gandhian' stage or in its current violent stage, has been not to co-exist harmoniously, sharing equal rights as individuals, but to Eelamise a territory based on concocted fictions of geography and history for the northern Tamils to be more equal than the other communities.

Included in the territorial claims invested with powers equivalent to that of a state is the hidden agenda of 'little now and more later', as stated categorically by the father Tamil extremism, S. J. V.

Chelvanayakam, the psuedo-Gandhian. Just in case there should be objections to Chelvanayakam being labeled an extremist it is necessary to point out that the violent extremism prevailing in the current crisis was phrased and spelt out precisely by him when he went through with a fine comb the wording of the Vaddukoddai Resolution that endorsed violence.

No non-violent Gandhian would have been a party to endorse such violence when democratic alternatives were available to resolve differences.

Prabhakaran is the child that came out of the womb of the Vaddukoddai Resolution carrying a hand grenade in one hand and a gun the other. The problem for the leaders of the south in the democratic mainstream is how to deal with this child of Chelvanayakam's violent resolution.

Wickremesinghe is going round the world asking America and India to help resolve the crisis when the solution is there in his hands.

If he joins hands with Rajapaksa and lays down the bottom line then neither the foreigners nor Prabhakaran can have a say in the final solution.

Take the example of the failed CFA. K. N. Choksy has spoken out sensibly when he said that some of the key aspects of the CFA are no longer valid because the ground situation has changed.

He was referring particularly to the borders defined in the CFA. Well, if this key factor is no longer acceptable to the UNP, one of the primary signatories, where does this leave the CFA, Wickremesinghe and Prabhakaran?

Neither can Norway argue that the borders of the CFA should be kept intact to preserve a tattered peace process that has gone nowhere, partly because it is unrealistic and partly because neither the government nor the opposition would be game enough to go down the path of returning to the borders conceded in the CFA, certainly not when the opinion polls show that there is a substantial majority who endorse the military approach as a success story.

Any new moves to kick start the peace process will hinge on this new reality. But will the Tamil Tigers accept it? If they do so they would be admitting defeat.

Based on the past behaviour of the Tigers who are prone to throw in as many obstacles as they can to either sabotage or prolong the peace talks they will insist on the Sri Lankan government 'honouring' the CFA to the letter of the law as a pre-condition to enter a fresh round of negotiations.

In other words, Prabhakaran will be insisting on gaining through Norwegian intervention what he had lost in the battle field. Which southern leader will dare to do that?

Nevertheless, the Norwegians and Prabhakaran would want to keep the pre-Mavil Aru CFA intact to save face. Wickremesinghe has shown no signs of distancing himself from these anti-national agents.

Though Choksy says that the CFA borders has changed Wickremesinghe's rejection of the SLFP proposals can only be read as a move to g back to the ISGA of handing over land and power to Prabhakaran. Wickremesinghe's thinking has been more on the lines of the ISGA. He might even revive it saying that it was a proposal of the SLFP.

He will have an ally not only in Chandrika but the entire NGO caboodle as well. His experience in the political wilderness should inform that he has failed because he has teamed with this mob. Not even the additional backing of his "international safety net" has saved him.

Depending on the so-called "international safety net" is his other fatal flaw. Without developing a domestic agenda and building domestic alliances he is running round the globe aiming to build foreign alliances against the nation.

Not knowing how to win back the confidence of the people and his own party MPs he has taken to globe-trotting in a vain bid to remote control events that are beyond his grasp. These antics make him look more like an agent of foreign forces, ready to sell the nation, when his task is to re-invent himself as the man of the people and their aspirations.

His successive defeats have not taught him that he has lost every card he played because he is way out of the central forces on which he has to depend for his political survival.

April has proved that even his horoscope is not going to save him.

He can be saved only if he joins the rest of the nation. And right now the nation, according to the polls, is with Mahinda Rajapaksa.