Reports that third-term Parliamentarian and former Minister, Namal Rajapaksa, has taken over as the National Organiser of the family-run Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) make for interesting reading. The first question is about the future role of Basil Rajapaksa, who until he left office some months back, was the National Organiser. Even more important from the current context is the role that Namal will play in the decision-making process – thus far, he has been providing inputs to his father and Party Leader, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is a two-term President and three-term Prime Minister of the country. Of course, Namal has also been free to air his political views in public, to a greater or lesser degree.
Maybe, the experience of younger brother and former President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, would be on how a political leader and more so, the nation’s top-most elected administrator should not conduct the business of governance. Gota’s is also an experience that expertise and achievement in one field automatically translate into the same in another field, however much one might have observed it from inside.
As the idiom goes, only the wearer knows how the shoe pinches – and how one should cure it. Mahinda had it in him and knew it. Chamal and Basil understood and acknowledged their limitations. As Defence Secretary after winning the conclusive Eelam War IV, Gota acknowledged his limitations to enter direct politics and Parliament, straightaway.
He did not even acknowledge the offer of maverick Parliamentarian Mervyn Silva to resign his Parliamentary Seat for Gota to enter the House and also the Cabinet under Brother Mahinda in the latter’s second term. He should have stuck to that decision, for the good of the Family, the good of the Party and the good of the Nation – but in the reverse order.
Basil’s Game-Plan
Friends, allies and foes of the SLPP and the Rajapaksas would be keenly watching Namal’s transformation from being an ordinary MP into the Party’s National Organiser. While Basil had been talking to incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe on the premise of a common alliance with the latter’s UNP, Namal was believed to be taking the side within the SLPP that wanted the party to field a candidate in the Presidential Election.
Basil has a Game Plan. He wants Parliamentary Polls to precede Presidential Elections under an alliance between his Party and President Ranil’s emaciated UNP. He argues that if Presidential Polls precede the other, as is due now, voters kind of play-act their previous outing and give a (undeserved?) higher number of seats for the Party or alliance that the elected President represents. He seemed to have divined this argument only after his Party – the SLFP first and the breakaway SLPP since – had been out of Presidential power, with Gota’s premature exit, post-Aragalaya.
Still, Basil has a point. But the UNP seems to be looking at it all the other way around. That is, if they won a comfortable number of seats, which no pollster is ready to give the SLPP just now – whatever their samples, reasons and justification – the SLPP might after all want to field a Presidential candidate of their own. Ask the SLPP, they would tell you how Ranil could play uppity if he won the Presidential polls on their strength and may go all out to liquidate friends and foes alike, before ordering Parliamentary Elections.
To Lose, not to Lose
In a way, Namal is under test, both nearer home, and literally so, inside the Party and outside. He has been tasked without being told to retrieve the Party’s still-sagging image if one were to go exclusively by pollster predictions that the SLPP’s vote share is below ten per cent and has been going down. If it were true, and if Party leaders and Parliamentarians believed it from their contacts with the ground, they might have deserted the Rajapaksas faster than the fastest missile in the world.
It is not happening, and this could be a good way for Namal to begin his career, his responsibility. In a way, he has nothing to lose. In other ways, he has everything to lose – or, so it seems. He might then have to start from the grassroots up to reinvent himself and also the Party, and also reinvigorate the cadres, or whoever may remain. Whatever the immediate Election results, he would still be transitioning the Party through the new generation of voters, not all of them would have received their early electoral enlightenment from the Aragalaya protests that were in fact against the Rajapaksa clan – and not just one person.
Namal may have an advantage, as at 37, he is among the youngest Senior Political Party Leaders in the country. The next round is going to be difficult. Like his father, he has to work for himself and move up the ladder. He needs to learn from his father even more, as to when to open his mouth and what to say – and when not to open his mouth and what not to say. He graduated during the five years of the Sirisena-Ranil GNU dispensation – when the government that the family had headed for ten years in the past was chasing them.
Instincts, not Inputs
Of course, the immediate concern is for Namal to provide his field-level inputs on the Party’s position on the twin polls, beginning with his advice on whether the SLPP should field a Presidential candidate – rather, risk fielding one. He was known to have backed the group that wanted an SLPP candidate, which many believed was none other than Namal.
Today, his whims cannot be the guiding principle, not even the cadre mood. He needs to weigh them both like Mahinda was known to act more on his instincts than inputs, and yet do what is good for the Party – and the nation. Then, and then alone will the nation accept him and the Party, too. Or, that has been the Aragalaya experience.
Time used to be when under the ‘transition government’ of the Sirisena-Ranil duo, in the run-up to the Parliamentary Polls of 2015, they had Parliament amend the laws on qualifications for contesting the Presidential Polls. One of course was to revert to the old ways after Mahinda in his second term had facilitated his third-time contest, only to lose it to his own ‘disloyal’ loyalist in Maithripala Sirisena. The other was to deny the Presidency to ‘foreign nationals’, rather than those with dual nationality. Gota thus could contest the Presidency – and win it too – in 2019, only after surrendering his US citizenship.
There was a third amendment, upping the minimum age qualification from 30 years to 35 years. It was aimed at denying Namal a chance, as he was 32 at the time. It was a reflection of the powers that be about the possibility of the young politician defeating him in the next outing. But their calculations were based on the ‘Mahinda constituency’, which was put at a conservative 40 per cent even while in the Opposition.
That is what the Party is believed to have lost, or at least a substantial portion of it – and that is where Namal will have to begin, as the National Organiser.
About the Author:
N Sathiya Moorthy is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst/Political Commentator.
Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com