Sun, 2007-07-29 13:53
H. L. D. Mahindapala

At the end of the day, there is no way in which anyone take away from Ranil Wickremesinghe his three major attributes: 1) his insensitive capacity to sell the nation to its enemies in the name of peace which he can’t win with appeasement; 2) his proven ability to run down his party until only he is left holding the fort and 3) his knack of picking the wrong political partners and issues in the mistaken belief of saving himself, irrespective of what happens to the UNP or the nation. If you add up all three it amounts to committing political suicide. And he has done it so many times that he now stands out as the nearest thing to a dead man walking.

His failures are a legion and in any other democracy he would have resigned and faded out of public life. But he clings on to the wobbly presidential chair of the UNP promising to take over power tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow which never comes. These promises are essentially to prevent his backbenchers from crossing over. But his frontbenchers and backbenchers have seen through him and they have deserted him. The last remaining talent is K. N. Choksy and he too has decided to leave him sooner or later. On top of all this comes the news that Tilak Karunaratne, the UNP Treasurer, has resigned citing Wickremesinghe’s latest gaffes of belittling Thoppigala and attacking Buddhist monks.

More than these two gaffes, Karunaratne had dealt the first severe blow to the Wickremesinghe-Samaraweera MoU. He is the first to register his protest publicly though there is an underground swell within the party opposing it. It is obvious that Wickremesinghe has, once again, picked the wrong partner at the wrong time. At a critical time when his grip on the party is shaky he has created another legitimate excuse for the rank and file to leave him. The outstanding quality of any leader is to solve problems. But Wickremesinghe excels in his extraordinary capacity to create problem for himself, the party and the nation. He just can’t score a single winning run. Whoever named him had foreseen that he will never fail to live up to his name: Run nil!

A desperate Wickremesinghe is now clutching at straws. His new tactic is (1) to blame President Mahinda Rajapakse for his failure to win the last presidential election which was declared fair by independent observers and (2) to embrace Mangala Samaraweera as his new political partner. Feeling quite elated and gay about the crowds that attended his political marriage to Mangala Samaraweera, the head of the SLFP (Mahajana)Wing, Ranil Wickremesinghe has announced that President Mahinda Rajapakse has no mandate to govern. Why? Because “the LTTE-instigated polls boycott had been paid for by the government. Mahinda is looking after Prabhakaran and Prabhakaran Mahinda," he said, at the rally. The Government has denied this accusation and is demanding that he should produce Prabhakaran as his witness to prove the case.

This, of course, is the latest whip of Wickremesinghe to lash out at the government. But he has picked the wrong issue. This is not an issue on which the government is going to lose votes. Nor will he be able to topple the government on this issue. In making this accusation Wickremesinghe, without realizing the import of what he is saying, has placed Mahinda Rajapakse on the highest pedestal as a political genius who had outsmarted Prabhakaran. And, if what Wickremesinghe says is true, then Mahinda Rajapakse has fulfilled the highest qualification to earn the popular mandate to govern the country because the task of any national leader right now is to outsmart Prabhakaran.

In making this accusation Wickremesinghe is also saying that Prabhakaran has played him out for a sucker. In other words, Wickremesinghe is saying that Prabhakaran took everything from him and gave it to his rival Mahinda. This is what is hurting Wickremesinghe and not any violation of democratic principle. Wickremesinghe sold the nation to Prabhakaran in the Ceasefire Agreement to win the Tamil votes. In the end the Tamils votes didn’t come to him. No doubt, Wickremesinghe feels hurt. But why is he blaming Mahinda Rajapakse? He must blame himself. As stated earlier, he has this extraordinary knack of picking the wrong political partners and combining them with the wrong issues at the wrong time.

As far as the law of the land goes, the mandate of the President remains intact. It is the executive President and the elected parliament that have the mandate to govern the country. But, since Wickremesinghe is raising the issue of the mandate to govern, it is appropriate to apply this principle to his own political conduct and ask whether he has the right to govern, let alone the country, his own party. Hasn’t he lost the confidence and the will of the people several times over due to his bungling of party and national affairs? After the people had rejected him 14 times, after 47 UNP MPs altogether had voted against him with their feet by crossing over to Mahinda Rajapakse, (what better mandate than this for the President!), after he had been sacked by his own party men (Gamini Dissanayake) and his erstwhile rival for power, Chandrika Kumaratunga, what mandate can he claim to be the leader of the opposition, or his own party?

Before aspiring to grab the Presidential chair Wickremesinghe must consolidate his position, through the popular will of his own party men, to remain as the head of the UNP. The mass exodus from his party confirms that he has no right, or mandate, to sit in the chair of the President of the UNP. He is sitting in that chair only because he has fortified himself with a constitution that guarantees him a permanency enjoyed only by one other political figure: Prabhakaran.

In plain language, Wickremesinghe, contrary to the high-sounding principles inscribed in International Democratic Union of which he is a regional head, has managed to survive as the leader of the UNP not because of any charisma or power and ability to lead the party to victories but only because he has stifled and suppressed all opposition to him by throwing an iron constitutional wall round him to keep his rivals out. Stalin and Mao established their one-man rule over the party by calling it the dictatorship of the proletariat. The LTTE has established the one-man dictatorship in the guise of being “the sole representative of the Tamils”. Wickremesinghe, of course, has no valid label except to impose his rule as “the dictatorship of mediocrity”.

This explains why all the talented UNPers have left him, leaving behind a set of rag-tag hangers-on whose notable ability is to be servile yes-men. They are harbouring the illusion of enjoying the spoils some day – not in the foreseeable future -- because the senior potential rivals in the UNP have crossed over to the other side. They little realize that Wickremesinghe has driven them into the wilderness and that the feeble elephants in the UNP are an endangered species facing extinction.

They, however, labour under the illusion that by hanging on to Wickremesinghe they can get somewhere. But the UNP is going nowhere. According to news reports, it has even given up its traditional identity and merged into an amorphous National Congress, abandoning its iconic symbol – the symbol that had served the UNP from the time its founding fathers dissolved the Ceylon National Congress and established the first democratic party under the enlightened and pioneering leadership of the Senanayakes who paved the path for a united, multi-cultural, welfare state with equality and freedom for all citizens, with free education from kindergarten to university, free health services and even free rice. President Ranasinghe Premadasa went as far as giving free money to the poor.

Wickremesinghe is going in the opposite direction of the founding fathers of the UNP by joining Samaraweera. He is matched by Samaraweera who is also going against the foundations laid by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the father of the SLFP. The irony in our day and time is that the children who came out of the loins of the two great political fathers never fail to pay homage at the shrines of the Senanayakes and Bandaranaike to gain maximum political mileage from their historic achievements and then walk out immediately to undermine the very principles which they inherited and exploited for their rise and survival.

Wickremesinghe, for instance is distancing himself from the Senanayake-Wijewardene tradition and getting closer Mangala Samaraweera – the anti-thesis of the sacred traditions on which this nation was born and held together. This makes their marriage look like politics of the same sex. Besides, the UNP-SLFP (M) MoU ties Wickremesinghe to a morganatic marriage in which he has been reduced to the lower status with his offspring having no claim to the higher titles.

Knowing that Wickremesinghe is desperate and has nowhere to go except to marry him, Samaraweera has refused to go to bed with Wickremesinghe until he gets on top of him. He is insisting that Wickremesinghe’s brood will have no claim to the title of deputy prime minister. Nor will he agree to work under the party symbol etc. He is shrewdly playing the role of Wickremesinghe’s saviour and getting all what he demands. In the light of all these gains, Samaraweera gaiety is understandable.

This left-handed dress designer turned politician is not going to give up his old habits. Samaraweera is determined to dress his new partner in the lingerie that he designs. Which means Wickremesinghe has to be a cross-dresser – i.e. neither UNP nor SLFP but somewhere in between like a political hermaphrodite. Which means giving up the green dress embroidered with the UNP symbol, the name of party and forcing Wickremesinghe to reject all claims of his UNP partners to the No. 2 position in parliament.

And being birds of a feather Wickremesinghe is quite agreeable to flock together. Despite denials of UNP maintaining its identity and symbols news reports persistently confirm that Wickremesinghe, in his usual under hand way, (like the way he signed the secret deal with Prabhakaran selling the nation) has come to an agreement with Samaraweera to flush the UNP down the drain. Where does all this leave John Amaratunga, Tissa Attanayake, Lakshman Kiriella & Co? Above all, what’s going to be the fate of S. B. Dissanayake’s dreams of becoming the deputy leader? What are they going to get out of this deal except to suck their thumbs in corner and watch their “leader” (?) being dressed up in emperor’s new clothes by his new designer?