As was to be expected under the circumstances, main presidential candidates like incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake have begun telling the voters that the other two are in cohorts, to defeat the complainant. Did you see too much of self-importance or late doubts about what was considered an easy victory?
It is another matter that Namal Rajapaksa is considered a distant fourth, and it all began with his alleged meeting with Sajith in a media baron’s house in Colombo very early in the campaign. There was then a talk of Namal telling his small band of committed voters to mark their second preference for Sajith, and the two forming an alliance for the parliamentary poll.
Either they have forgotten their inherited antipathy towards the ‘rival clan’ in native Hambantota, or the framers of such theories have. It does not mean that they won’t work together now or later. Such is the fate of post-Aragalaya politics in the country. The more things change, the more they remain constant, did you also say?
Ground slipping away
If there is one thing that the Aragalaya protests have changed in electoral terms, it is about the fortunes of the Rajapaksas and those of the JVP. Suddenly, the former saw the ground under their feet slipping away. For its part, the JVP-NPP is being talked about as the possible/prospective victor in the presidential poll. That is from a standard 3-5 poll percentage.
In simple terms, it could mean that much of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s 40 per cent vote-share sliding towards the JVP and Anura this time round, nothing more, nothing less. Mahinda can thank his younger brother Gota for achieving the great feat, as much as he shared the honours for neutralising LTTE terrorism a decade and half earlier.
Has the JVP actually garnered all of the MR votes? It is again a simplistic argument. What the Aragalaya has done is to churn the voter-population at the bottom of the pyramid without actually touching the top – not certainly the system that the JVP all along and those ‘faceless’ hijackers of what otherwise is touted as an apolitical popular uprising had demanded, declared and promised.
Whose victory was it? Was it the victory of those ‘prophets of change’ or of the entrenched system, starting with those entrenched politicians of all hues, including those from the JVP-NPP. Whose victory will it be now, whoever wins the presidential poll.
By a quirk of fate, as it has since turned out, the bottom of the pyramid has actually started turning the top around, even if mildly at present. Unless the victor crosses the mandated 50-per cent mark in the first-preference stage, the victory is not his. He cannot promise to change the Constitution, change the system, et al.
All of it will require a two-thirds majority in Parliament – and a win in a public referendum. Even for changing the Constitution, they have to actually start with winning the referendum under the Constitution that they want exited. Strange ways of the constitutional scheme in the country, did you say?
Flies on the face
Such questions become more important just now than any time in the past, or possibly in the future, too. The past was distant and vague. The future is unclear and unsure, even if any of them grabs power.
For JVP-NPP leaders to speak about dissolving Parliament if Anura is elected President is thus not only impolite. It is also illogical. Even this much could be considered if and only if Anura wins with a 50-per cent first-preference vote. That by itself will not ensure a two-thirds in a new Parliament, which alone party leaders say they will allow functioning.
Anura has said that if elected President, he would begin with a four-member Cabinet, including himself. The combine now has only three MPs, and he hopes to nominate a replacement for him once elevated, making the total as four.
The alternative for a JVP President especially to ‘cohabit’ with a mix of rival parliamentarians in a House that they share among themselves, they are unable to accept. Yes, the political temptation would be to have a Parliament under presidential control in political terms.
Does it not then mean that the JVP’s decision to dissolve Parliament instantly if Anura is elected President flies in the face of their long-held belief in and commitment to abolish the Executive Presidency? Past Presidents too began with dissolving Parliament whenever they did not have a supportive House, or one that they could not ensure by encouraging defections.
With that also went the JVP’s commitments to abolish the Executive Presidency. Granted that Anura had the presidency, until he had won a two-thirds majority in Parliament, he could not promise anything close to the abolition of the Executive Presidency, leave alone ‘system-change’. Unless of course, he too starts behaving like all predecessors before him, who all had begun by coming up with such a promise.
Hang-over from past
This one question about the abolition of the Executive Presidency and also system-change does not apply to other front-runners in the presidential race. People have come to believe that the other two do not mean a thing about it.
That is not the case with the JVP. They want change, they want to change it all, and they seem to mean it. Or, that is what the people now think they want. Both also seem to think that the JVP is ready for the change – or, that is the perceived perception in a greater section of the population than any time in the JVP’s long past.
The voters also think that the JVP is also ready to change. That it will accommodate and be accommodative. Voters are thus looking for those signals from them, given that urban Colombo, for instance, has reminders from the party’s violent past. The raised compound walls of individual homes, and not just in elite Colombo Seven, grilled gates that are two-man tall, and the entire paraphernalia.
Yes, the younger generation does not know it and the middle-aged may not recall it. But there are those oldies who have witnessed it. Some of them were also a part of it, and were remorseful after growing up. This hang-over from the past the JVP has to live with, but also needs to live down.
But the way the party leadership is going about it, they do not seem to know it or remember it themselves. But the streak keeps showing up in their actions and utterances. Like the only way they have talked politics, like dissolving Parliament the day-after….
That is the language of autocrats, though the action by itself has precedents in the country’s post-Independence history. When such autocratic tendencies are identified with an ideological mooring, then they call it the JVP in this country.
Is it the image and imagery that Anura & Co now want to spread across ahead of the combine’s most critical election of all times – past, present and the future?
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
