Ruling (?) UNP General Secretary Palitha Range Bandara’s suggestion to hold a national Referendum for postponing the Presidential and Parliamentary Elections reads typically Ranil. The suggestion or proposal comes just in the footsteps of incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe’s public declaration that the Presidential Polls this year – as if he did not entertain the SLPP ally’s purported demand for him to order the Parliamentary Elections first.
According to Bandara, this Government and President Ranil require two more years to set the economy in order. He holds out the carrot, if it is one, that the Government needed further time to fulfil the Agreement with the IMF. He talked about a return to the 2022 situation, when the nation, both the Government and the People alike, went into a panic mode – and for the very right reasons and causes.
Whatever the outcome of the UNP’s proposal, the very fact that the Party has taken the courage to come out in the open with what to many would read like a preposterous proposition is only a reflection of Ranil’s current mood and self-confidence. When he feels secure of his position, and only then, has he played his game of confusing his friends and foes alike. Some games he won, some he lost – but in the final tally, the losses were too huge for him to manage.
Typically, there is this split in the UNP, where rival Sajith Premadasa walked out of the Party to form the SJB, which is since, the more popular of the two. Not every other UNP leader who walked out with Sajith trusted him to win elections for the Party, which Ranil had failed for years, but they trusted the other, even as a man, even less.
Right Man at the Right Place…
Ranil acolytes will have to only recall how at the end of the 2020 Parliamentary Polls, the nation’s GOP created history by not winning a single elected Seat. It managed to be allotted a lone Seat because of the prevailing PR system, not otherwise.
Ranil needed months to convince his even more ambitious colleagues, for him to be named to that sole Seat that the Party could manage. There was thus a period in the nation’s Parliamentary history when the UNP, for the very first time, did not have representation inside the House even when it had an allotted seat.
Ranil’s Prime Ministerial post first and the current Presidency, both through the back door, if in political terms, but mandated by the Constitution, owes to his grabbing the UNP’s solitary Seat in Parliament. That he did not divine the events and developments leading up to the Aragalaya protests and the forced resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa goes without saying.
He was the right man at the right place at the right time. In comparison, his bête noire Sajith P was at the right place at the right time but proved to be the wrong man. When President Gota offered him the Prime Minister’s job after forcing his elder brother and political mentor Mahinda Rajapaksa to vacate the seat, Sajith dithered.
Sajith might have later said that he wanted power only with the people’s mandate. But his advisors seemed to have concluded that without the ability to break the SLPP’s parliamentary majority, he did not stand a chance to enjoy and enforce that power – first as Prime Minister, or whatever power he would get, and then the Presidency if at all it came his way.
A thinking /cunning Ranil concluded that he only needed to grab the Presidency and hand over a fait accompli to the SLPP Members of Parliament and through them the Rajapaksa leadership of the Party. He calculated, rightly, that no MP, especially from the SLPP, wanted to face the voter for a long, long time to come and pressure the Party leadership to toe the Ranil line. The Rajapaksas were thus left with no choice, or that seemed to have been Ranil’s early conclusion. He was proved right.
Single-window Source
It is this kind of conclusion that is hidden behind the current UNP proposal for a Referendum on postponing Parliamentary Elections by two years, so the SLPP Parliamentarians would be induced to pressure the leadership. The alternative would be for them to swell the Ranil ranks, but only if the incumbent could win the Referendum for them. That looks doubtful, especially if the Rajapaksas go their way and use the occasion to walk out of the coalition.
Will such a course end in Ranil losing Parliamentary support? Already, the SLPP Parliamentary group is split with supposedly a dozen MPs at the very least backing Ranil. The UNP expectation might be that at the appropriate time, the President could split the SJB comfortably. He may begin on a twin path, splitting the core Southern Party on the one hand and its minority allies from the Muslim and Upcountry Tamil community, on the other.
The question especially for Ranil is whether the SJB Parliamentarians would want to cross over if the President had become weak following the SLPP walk-out. The question is whether all of them could give the numbers that the SLPP is offering Ranil as a single-window source.
Fundamental Principles
For the SLPP, national organiser, Namal Rajapaksa lost no time in criticising the UNP’s Referendum talk. “Postponing Elections is not healthy for any Democracy. Extending the terms of the President and Parliament undermines the fundamental principles of a democratic society. Stability should come through the will of the people, not by delaying their voice,” he said on X.
Strong words, these, coming especially from a Rajapaksa. Whether true or not, it also shows the confident side of the clan, that they are ready to face the electorate, whatever the outcome. It thus makes the UNP, as the only Party to have proposed or enforced Referendums of this kind. In his time, JRJ got Parliament’s term extended by a year through a Referendum.
The question is simple. If the President is confident that the people would give a definite 50-plus vote for a Referendum proposed by him, won’t they vote him in for a longer, five-year, settled term, too?
On the reverse, will the people lose their ‘faith’ in the man whom they are possibly learning to ‘trust’ as their saviour in their hour of ‘national crisis’ – and Ranil may lose the personal constituency that he seldom had in his four-decades long political career but may have built up in the past two years of economic crisis? It’s a question that has no definite answers like the ‘Referendum’ proposal.
Spanner in the ‘Tamil’ works
What is not unsurprising in the melee is the way Ranil threw the spanner in the works of Tamil Parties in the North and the East to field a ‘Common Candidate’ for the Presidential Election. On a two-day trip to Jaffna and its neighbourhood, he is believed to have discussed the matter with former TNA Chief Minister Wigneswaran while calling on the ailing Tamil leader. It is another matter that Ranil is not known to have called on TNA veteran R Sampanthan, who too has been ailing and for a longer period – and stays only in the Capital, Colombo.
Prima facie, Ranil should be happy if the Tamils field a common candidate, but only if he is in the company of the Rajapaksas, whom the Tamils despise. Maybe, he is working the other way around to ensure at least a substantial share of the Tamil votes, common candidate or not, before deciding the SLPP’s line of thinking on the Referendum and early Parliamentary Polls – and thus the Rajapaksas, too.
Tamil parties having failed to come to a conclusion on the common candidate are set to discuss the matter at an open meeting called by ITAK Parliamentarian Sumanthiran, on 9 June. It is a personal initiative, so to say, but is worth the try.
Incidentally, Sumanthiran, who, like Sampanthan, is opposed to the idea of a ‘Common Candidate’, is not alone. Others like TELO’s Selvam Adaikalanathan and PLOTE’s Sitharthan too were present at the official functions of the President in their bastions. If that said something, Sumanthiran sharing the dais with Ranil, after having run him down completely since his becoming President, may be saying something even more.
About the Author:
The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst/Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)