Give it to the international media and they would see, rather create, chinks in bilateral relations where none exists. Thankfully, their knowledgeable counterparts in this country did not join the chorus, by declaring that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake had snubbed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi by inviting a Chinese Communist Party leader to the ruling JVP-NPP’s May Day rally.
The fact is that not only did Peng Xiubin, director-general at CPC’s Bureau of South and South East Asia Affairs participate in the May Day rally, but Binoy Viswom from India’s CPI, another invitee from another ‘fraternal party’, too was present. Missing the one and picking up the other, wantonly or otherwise, the international media hurriedly concluded that President Dissanayake had gone back to Sri Lanka’s old ways in handling the two Asian powers, so soon after Modi’s visit and the signing of seven bilateral MoUs.
Otherwise, the ruling combine’s May Day rally was noted for the way some experts went about assessing the number of crowds that gathered at capital Colombo’s Galle Face Green, the venue of the famous / infamous Aragalaya protests in 2002, which simply pulled down the elected Government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa without much bloodshed, as in the JVP’s two failed insurgencies in the early seventies and late eighties. The message was clear. Mass support required not only a moderate politico-electoral platform but also a modest, less violent approach.
In the end, photo-analysts on social media, using AI and other IT era tools, concluded that the crowds were in the range of 225,000. The same figure the police had announced earlier, possibly without the help of technology. Some technology this, did you say?
Results, not ranting
President Dissanayake’s May Day address is noted for three or four points that he made on the occasion. One, there was no external threat (to his government and/or the nation?). Flowing from this is his (reiterated) call for ‘unity’, to face internal challenges.
As Dissanayake extrapolated, one more time, for the benefit of the Sri Lankan voters ahead of the 6 May local government (LG) polls, nation-wide, for facing internal challenges, the present-day Opposition cannot be trusted. Six months after coming to power, he continued to lament that multiple political administrations before his had cheated and looted the people.
It is a line that the people are beginning to get increasingly tired of. They want results, not ranting. It is not only bout punishing the corrupt and otherwise guilty from the previous decades and regimes. Instead, it is about the incumbent addressing and tackling issues that they continue to use to demonise their political detractors.
Yes, Dissanayake has a point when he declared that the Opposition’s hopes of ‘replacing this leadership in August or December’ was not going to happen. Sad but true, the Opposition, too, has not said or done anything constructive since the change of government.
They too continue to rile the Dissanayake dispensation for whatever it is worth, or not. Taking a leaf out of the JVP-NPP campaign style last year, they keep vocalising their innate belief, of this government collapsing under its own weight, long before the conclusion of the elected five-year terms for the presidency and Parliament. Unfortunately, they forget their own recent lessons that even if Dissayanake is down – and out – Parliament will elect another of his ilk to take over.
Ranil Wickremesinghe did it earlier in 2022, and no one went back to the people for a fresh mandate to rule. The latter clause will come into operation if and only if the JVP-NPP parliamentary party splits as did the previous SLPP under-writer of the Wickremesinghe dispensation, 2022-24.
Simply put, that is not going to happen, even Dissanayake’s exit is only a theoretical argument here. The divided Opposition needs to remember the democratic adage that the same people do not revolt against their government twice in two or five years. It requires a whole new generation, as happened in the case of the JVP.
There are those who argue that the breakaway FSP in the South and the army-demolished LTTE in the North are waiting for the birth of a new generation, not just a new slogan. That is what the discredited SLPP’s Namal Rajapaksa too is waiting for, hoping for. The rest of them are all missing the point.
No magic wand
In his May Day speech, Dissanayake at long last conceded that his government cannot turn heaven and earth in just six months. Until now, and throughout their twin election campaigns last year, the JVP-NPP combine had told their hapless, helpless and mostly innocent /ignorant voters that their world will change for the better once the combine came to power.
Now, they either realise or have always known but are publicly acknowledging that there is no magic wand for them to fill the nation’s rivers with milk and honey. Maybe, they have also realised that even if they had a magic wand for the purpose, it could not sustain or respond to the individual aspirations of individual voters who collectively voted in this leadership – rather, booted out all the rest.
‘No’ to street protests
It did not stop there. Dissanayake took extra courage into both hands when he appealed to trade unions not to ‘resort to street protests on petty issues’. Trade unions, as may be recalled, has been the mainstay of the JVP’s cadre-base and vote-bank all along. They were at the back and bottom of the Aragalaya protests after the urban middle class lost the leadership after initial, fanciful momentum.
The President said that trade unions ‘must now move beyond out-dated ideas. The era of fighting for small issues is over’. That is because, he explained, ‘A political authority has arrived that abandons everything. We are abandoning many things that have been given to us through acts, gazettes, and regulations.’
Some explanation this, but it lacks conviction. Or, it just cannot convince trade union leaders to fall in line, as they would simply lose their vast membership to those that may be waiting on the wings for such a disruption, to capitalise on the same, politically and every other way. One only hopes that Dissanayake had consulted his ministerial colleague and trade union leader, K D Lal Kantha, before making such pronouncements that are patently ‘anti-labour’.
And to imagine that this was the leadership that came to power, riding the wave of Aragalaya street-protests, that too on the back of the trade unions…Suffice is to recall for the President to coax his memory, this was the same venue, Galle Face Green, that became the focal-point of all street-protests across the country during the Aragalaya weeks, with the protestors even giving it a new name, ‘Gota-Go Gama’.
Who must ‘change’?
In short, the President is now asking the people to change, possibly without sticking to the avowed promise to ‘change’ them all himself once elected President. He wants them to give the time that his political leadership would not give the replacement regime of President Wickrermesinghe, in the post-Aragalaya phase.
This dichotomy in the JVP-NPP’s political and politico-administrative approach apart, if the President really feels, even if he does not readily concede, that they have bitten more than they can chew, it should not be a problem. Yes, the Opposition would act iffy when approached – and he knows it best, having practised it, but the ball of ‘national unity’ is in his court.
Dissanayake, JVP-NPP combine and their collective government may have nothing much to lose if they concede the factuality of their situation, and to which the nation is linked. The reverse is also true, but to a different degree, big or small.
The ball is in the Government’s court, and President Dissanayake’s court. He cannot hope for ‘national unity’ to tackle its problems and trade unions not to protest, without taking the initiative himself. He needs to be honest and sincere, and also be seen as being both – and more.
The ball of national unity is in the President’s court, whether his team realises it or not, acknowledges it or not. But history will remember him only for what he achieves from now on, and not for his past achievement – of becoming the first-ever centre-left President in the country, which was less than half the battle won. And putting down the political Opposition in the name of ‘corruption-corrective’ will only end up being seen as political witch-hunting, if there is nothing else to show on paper.
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
