The Rajpal Abeynayake Column:

Late lessons from the Eastern front

The Tamil National Alliance you could say was in a bid to leverage its power through an agreement with the SLMC, and this was coincidentally when certain elements were covetous toward leveraging their own brand of power through the agency of the United Nations, and the Commissioner for Human Rights - Navaneethan Pillai.

Leveraging power through any means possible is a democratic prerogative, and the TNA seeking to dominate the Eastern Provincial Council was neither surprising nor unacceptable. But what the through-Pillai leveraging efforts and the TNA's abortive Eastern power grab reveals is the fact that a clear mandate in a democracy has a very long shadow.

The long shadow of the UPFAs post-war mandate is not unassailable, as no democratic mandate gained through electoral victory is unassailable anywhere in the world. But when there is goodwill for the ruling coalition that's reflected in the final vote count - as it was in the Eastern Provincial Council election - such a mandate is being readily reaffirmed.

It is in this atmosphere of democratic re-evaluation, that what's tantamount to a set-up and forced leveraging of power, such as evident in the TNA's bid in forming a provincial administration in the east, becomes untenable.

Time then, that Sri Lanka's collective opposition realised that there is just one way to go - which is to grow. The opposition has to get out of the mindset of regular subversion, and/or attempts to purchase loyalties, in favour of actually getting out there and mustering real grassroots allegiance.

This the Opposition has failed abysmally to do, and one suspects it is in part related to the tendency of Sri Lankan opposition politics to be too closely intertwined with the general policy branding of non-governmental organisations.

The NGOs thrive on a hotbed of subtle subversive and coercive activity. Their modus operandi has been to conjure up some bogey, light a fire hither and thither - and hope for the subversive best.

For example, the sudden hue and cry about an abrupt odd and anomalous 'crime wave' in the country on account of a alarming and eerie incidence of multiple child rapes being reported - and almost over-reported - was enough for the NGO lobby groups to problemetise the issue and frame it as some sort of structural failure owing to the inadequacy of government.

This is natural for the non-governmental sector; it is how that area operates, and low intensity subversion is the currency that NGOs deal in. But for the collective national opposition to mimic the tactics of the NGO lobby is somewhat lame, and definitely the tactics have been less than successful - judging by the nods made towards leveraging power in the east for instance, referenced at the beginning of this article.

The joint NGO opposition masala combine is guilty of the fatal flaw of not being able to calculate the dynamic of the enduring mandate (and here, it has to be stated emphatically that the UPFA's post war mandate has long coat-tails.). Rauff Hakeem could not forget this mandate, when he opted to take his troops along the lines that he had delineated for himself long ago.

He was not going to break with the government, despite the fact that TNA offer of a Chief Minister post was substantial. Talk about the post-war mandate of the UPFA having a long shadow.

Hakeem's choice was to a great extent the choice of the mass of people who feel that there is little that subversion offers as replacement for real policy, and real political action at the grassroots.

Navi Pillais come and go for instance. It is easy to whip up narrative that the UN Human Rights Commissioner is here for the greater good of the country, but the people see that whatever Pillai is doing is no reflection of their post war mandate.

Which is not to say, as stated here earlier, that the post-war mandate necessarily means that there can be no street-wise agitation, and that all democratic activity must be confined to vote-casting at the polls.

The dimensions of free expression are multifarious, but yet, the fact remains that there is no ready legitimacy for every action that goes under the rubric of democratic dissent.

This sort of legitimacy and respect has to be earned. In the above cited instances, we see that there is a tendency to leverage and maneuver for political advantage, without heeding the voices in the background of the people who granted the substantial post-war mandate. If the Opposition was to reinvent itself, it had better start off at the point where the exhortation '1 per cent inspiration 99 per cent perspiration' is invoked like the manthra at the beginning of every grassroots pocket meeting.

There is no substitute for the opposition - it's either real hard work, or the alternative of being taken as a passing curiosity. That the Sumanthirans of Sri Lanka do not see this is something that almost beggars belief.

There is no room for glib talk when up against such a clear post-war mandate which is being validated every now and then, to varying degrees of indications of public support.

The Sumanthirans cannot hope that some magical alchemy of NGO forces and foreign interlopers could together with a Machiavellian opposition, unleash a disruptive force that will unravel the heft of the post-war mandate.

One could see how that worked in the Eastern province. Sumanthiran himself was quoted as saying that the TNA was willing to go to any lengths to accommodate Hakeem and his men, but it was a fact that the party could not so much as come up with the PR report of having given it a worthy shot. The PR message coming out of the TNA's abortive bid was a bit of the lines of 'Hakeem was too busy otherwise to be interested.'

There is nothing Machiavellian about coming a cropper in this way, for a party that seems to think that power flows from Bible-rigour repetition of 'victim rhetoric.'

We hear that Sumanthiran is a good Bible reading lay Christian who is seen regularly at church events. He would know. There is a difference between the message, and the bully pulpit. Sunday sermons get the God fearing nowhere, unless they back it all up by going out assiduously to proselytise, no?