Last week, the economic affairs committee of the cabinet met under the chairmanship of the president. UNP dissidents Karu Jayasuriya, Milinda Moragoda, G.L. Peiris among others were present. One of the topics discussed was the supreme court judgment against Treasury Secretary P.B.Jayasundera. The president lamented that the present regime has to pick up the tab for things that went on during UNP times. The UNP dissidents present explained that under the Wickremesinghe regime of 2001-2004, the economic affairs subcommittee of the cabinet which included Charitha Ratwatte and Malik Samarawickreme among others, was the body that took decisions on privatization. There had been a foreign consultant by the name of Jim Robinson living at the JAIC Hilton and all cabinet papers had been prepared by R.Paskaralingam who was another advisor to the Wickremesinghe regime.

The president said that the persons behind these shady decisions had to be held accountable without just passing the blame on officials. He said that if this was allowed to happen, no state official will want to sit on tender boards in the future. This was the clearest indication yet that the president will not be accepting Jayasundera’s resignation, and that he will continue to be treasury secretary.

The judgment delivered by the supreme court has once again focused the spotlight on the UNP. It has highlighted the fact that if there is corruption under the Rajapakse regime, things under the UNP will be no different. From 1994 to 2001, all we heard from the UNP is about the crooked deals of the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime. But once they were ensconced in power, what went on was very similar. This is food for thought for those who think that the cost of living is going to be any lower if the UNP comes into power!

Another celebrity for Wayamba?

One would have thought that after the drama the week before last, concerning Joseph Michael Perera’s questionnaire on party reforms, nobody will be talking about reforms for a while. In fact the committee of party seniors appointed to look into these reforms decided to shelve all discussion on reforms until the conclusion of the NCP and Sabaragamuwa elections. But last Monday, the committee of party seniors had met again with the attendance of just three members, Joseph Michael Perera, Tissa Attanayake and John Amaratunga and the decision was taken to consult the working committee about the suggestions for party reform made by Johnston Fernando and Lakshman Seneviratne. Last Sunday, we reported that just such an attempt was made by Joseph Michael Perera vis-a-vis the UNP parliamentary group, but that it was shot down by Gamini Jayawickreme Perera and Amara Piyaseeli Ratnayake who themselves are members of this committee of party seniors. The feeling was that discussing these questions now would undermine the two PC election campaigns.

The loss of a stalwart

But as the days passed it became obvious that not much headway was being made by the party in the two PC campaigns, so it may be the case that some thought there was no point in postponing the discussion of reforms any further. The defection of Asoka Wadigamangawa, a UNP veteran and one of the most popular politicians in the North Western province, would also have come as a shock to the committee of seniors. What would have crossed their minds is that if this trend continues, there will be nothing left of the UNP. Even before the Wadigamangawa defection, there were rumours to say that six more UNP parliamentarians were going to join the government and that this would be effected close to the day of the NCP and Sabaragamuwa elections on August 23. The government certainly sprang an unpleasant surprise on the UNP by getting Wadigamangawa to appear on their stage in Anuradhapura. This was the one place where the government had a real challenge in the form of Janaka Perera.

So it was more useful to spring Wadigamangawa on the UNP in Anuradhapura rather than Ratnapura. Besides, Wadigamangawa is from the neighbouring district of Puttalam which he represented in parliament for nearly two decades. Even more significant was the fact that Wadigamangawa belonged to the generation that produced leaders like Mahindasoma from Anuradhapura. He was in fact the Mahindasoma of the neighbouring district. So there is no doubt that his appearance on the UPFA platform would have sent shockwaves through the older generation of UNP voters in the Anuradhapura district as it indeed would have within the UNP parliamentary group as well.

The election for the Wayamba provincial council will follow the NCP and Sabaragamuwa elections. Now that Wadigamangawa has not only defected but will be contesting as a candidate of the UPFA, the UNP will have to look for a chief ministerial candidate for Wayamba as well. Just as the defeat at the Eastern PC elections queered the pitch for the UNP at the NCP and Sabaragamuwa, a defeat at these two elections will send the Wayamba campaign into a tail spin. And it is doubtful whether the UNP will manage to find any more celebrities to send to the battlefront. This could well be one reason why the committee of party seniors decided to consult the UNP working committee on the proposed party reforms because it is a majority in the working committee that will finally carry the day when it comes to the reforms.

‘One Shot’

A thing that a lot of people say about the UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe is that he is not a good communicator like Chandrika Kumaratunga, Mahinda Rajapakse, Premadasa, Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake. But in a ‘different’ and ‘special’ kind of way, perhaps he is a good communicator. Some of the things he said many years ago, around the time of the presidential election of 1999 and the PC elections of 1998 are still talked about whereas the things said by Chandrika Kumaratunga, who ruled the country at that time, are long forgotten. In contrast to this, many people still recount with delight things that Wickremesinghe said in the past. That talk of ‘bracelets and chains’ have become an all time favourite as has that desire to get the peasants of Sri Lanka to chew chewing gum instead of betel! A Wickremesinghe gem that people remember with much less amusement is the exhortation that people ‘tighten their belts’ which he made soon after assuming power as prime minister in 2001.

Another powerful communication of this nature by Wickremesinghe was the second christening of actor Ranjan Ramanayake as ‘One Shot’. At the first UNP Ratnapura district committee meeting held after nominations were handed over for the Sabaragamuwa PC elections, Ramanayake requested Wickremesinghe to make a public announcement that he was the chief ministerial candidate. He prefaced his request with the good humoured observation that the UNP leader was well known for prevarication (kalmereema) and that he even has a ‘degree in the art of prevarication’. To this, the UNP leader equally good humouredly, replied that all posts offered to Upul Shantha Sannasgala have now been given to ‘One Shot’. From that moment onwards, everybody, even the newspaper columnists and reporters, started referring to Ranjan Ramanayake as ‘One Shot’. Even as I pen these words on Friday, there is a Daily Mirror page two picture of S.B.Dissanayake and Rauff Hakeem in conversation at a campaign rally with a caption which goes as "In support of One Shot…?"

It is true that Ramanayake himself occasionally referred to himself as ‘One Shot’ just to bring home the point that he was a straight talking type. Even at that meeting in Ratnapura where he requested the chief ministerial candidacy, Ramanayke started off by saying that like ‘One Shot’ he says what has to be said and speaks his mind freely. But everybody started referring to Ramanayake as ‘One Shot’ only after Wickremesinghe gave him the chief ministerial candidature. Until then nobody ever referred to Ramanayake as ‘One Shot’. In fact, until just days to the Sabaragamuwa nominations, Ramanayake participated in the Sirasa ‘Dancing stars’ programme and there he was only known as Ranjan Ramanayake and not by the names or nicknames of the screen characters he had played.

Actors like Vijaya Kumaratunga and Gamini Fonseka were in politics but they were known by their own names. Ramanayake however appears comfortable being known as ‘One Shot’. He seems to be contesting the Sabaragamauwa PC election not as his real self but as the silver screen character. In the first half of the UNP campaign, he was attending campaign meetings in tight fitting T-shirts, displaying his body builder like physique and talking like a silver screen hero crusading for justice and fair play. This was not going down well among the voters and someone seems to have prevailed on him to change his attire. By last Friday, he had managed to change completely, and he had attended meetings in a white shirt and a white sarong. Actors like Gamini Fonseka, never wore T-shirts to display their physique or tried to portray themselves as screen characters once they entered politics. The same can be said about Vijaya Kumaratunga who is a close kinsman of Ramanayake.

In the 1970s Vijaya was a young actor and in real life too he dressed in tight fitting trousers and almost sleeveless T-shirts, exactly like the screen characters he portrayed. It’s hardly surprising that the snooty Anura Bandaranaike looked askance at his sister Chandrika’s choice of a husband. Vijaya’s wardrobe in those early days consisted of clothes not considered tasteful by the Colombo elite. It was more attuned to the tastes of the Sinhala speaking, lower middle and working class hoi polloi who patronized the Sinhala cinema industry.

Katana fiasco

But in the early 1980s when Vijaya Kumaratunga began to play a major role in politics, he changed his attire. The tight fitting T-shirt of the 1970s gave way to a short sleeved bush shirt and the national dress. It was clear that politics was something that came as naturally to Vijaya as acting. Among all the actors that we have had in politics, Vijaya was the most successful, because he managed to build up a separate identity for himself as a politician. Ramanayake however, has not been anywhere near as successful. When Vijaya died, he was around the age that Ramanayake is now. But there is no comparison between what Vijaya was able to achieve as a politician by his mid forties and what Ramanayake has been able to achieve. Ramanayake was not a politician at all until about an year or so ago and this shows. But becoming a chief ministerial candidate of one of the two main political parties after just one year in politics is quite an achievement.

That seems plausible, but the facts are different. Wickremesinghe gave the Katana electorate to Ramanayake after sidelining Olitha Premathiratne - an experienced politician. Even though Ramanayake had the popularity of an actor, and was a devout Roman Catholic in a predominantly Catholic area, he ran into problems in organizing the electorate. During the year or so that he served as the organizer of Katana he was hauled up before the UNP’s committee that oversees the work of electoral organizers on no less than two occasions. Under his stewardship, Katana was one of the most poorly managed electorates in the entire UNP set up. When Upul Shantha Sannasgala refused to be the chief ministerial candidate for Sabaragamuwa, the reason why Ramanayake made the running leap for the vacancy was not because he had a better chance of winning but because that was a way out of the quagmire in Katana. Had Sannasgala thought he would have at least a 50-50 chance of winning, there is no doubt that he would have accepted the UNP leader’s offer and contested as the chief ministerial candidate of Sabragamuwa. But Sannasgala, being a shrewd individual, knew that the odds were stacked against the UNP.

Ramanayake, in contrast, could not care less about the UNP’s chances of winning. What he was doing was making a career move from a sinking ship in Katana to being at the very least, the leader of the opposition of the Sabaragamuwa Province. This was obviously why he compelled Wickremesinghe to declare him the chief ministerial candidate so that when the dust settles he will be left with something. In Ratnapura, Ramanayake will have a seat on the provincial council and the title of leader of the opposition. Had he remained in the Gampaha district, there is no way that he could have become the leader of the opposition of the Western Provincial Council. Some people may ask whether he would nevertheless have been better off in Katana even amidst problems – the three Catholic leaders in the Gampaha district, Joseph Michael Perera, John Amaratunga and Dr Jayalath Jayawardene are all getting on in years and there have been no Catholic leaders of the younger generation in the Gampaha district who can step into their shoes when they bow out.

Ramanayake would have been ideal as a successor to these leaders in the Gampaha district where the UNP has a large following among the Catholic population. But the question probably was whether he would last long enough in politics, to succeed the likes of Amaratunga, Jayawardana, and Perera. The demands made on a politician by the public are such that not many can survive those pressures. This is one reason why so many people who have done well in other careers fail when they try to make a belated entry into politics. One of the few who succeeded in this in recent times is Karu Jayasuriya who had a successful career in the private sector before he took to politics. Another success of this nature is Dr Jayalath Jayawardene, who was in the medical service before becoming a full time politician. But such individuals are few and far between. Gamini Fonseka, was as an actor, far superior to Ramanayake. Besides that, he belonged to the Durava caste and he entered politics from the Matara district where there is a concentration of the Durava community. Yet, Fonseka was a failure in politics. His matinee idol popularity, his standing as a respected artiste, and the Durava caste identity was not sufficient to see him becoming a successful politician.

Much the same happened to Ramanayake after he became the organizer for the Katana electorate. His good looks, his popularity as a film star and his Catholic background, did not suffice to make him a successful electoral organizer. There is no doubt that a politician would have given an eyeball to have what Ramanayake has, but what he has, is not by itself sufficient to make a successful politician. Ramanayake probably realized that despite being a Catholic, had he remained as the organizer of the Katana electorate as its organizer for any longer, he would have become so unpopular, that there would have been no point in contesting elections from the Gampaha district. If the constituents and the grassroots members of his own party are disillusioned with him, he has no future in the Gampaha district. By volunteering to contest the chief ministerial candidate of the Sabaragamuwa province, Ramanayake extricated the UNP leader from a very embarrassing position after Sannasgala publicly turned down his offer. In doing so, he also extricated himself from an untenable situation in Katana. What Ramanayake expects from politics after his Katana experience is obviously not a long term career but short term gain.

Coercive trade unionism

One thing that can be said about Ramanayake is that he knows when to quit when the going gets bad. He was a participant in the Sirasa Dancing Stars programme and was not faring too well. On one occasion, after a particularly lackluster performance, Ramanayake was to tell the judges that he was too busy to practise because of his acting commitments and his political work in his electorate. To which one of the judges, Malini Fonseka, replied that in participating in the programme all of them had undertaken a commitment. Saying he was too busy to practise was not really an excuse. Finally realizing that he was not going to win Ramanayake quit. The manner in which he gave up the Katana electorate was also similar. Having an electorate to organize in Wickremesinghe’s UNP was a privilege. Even Asoka Wadigamangawa, a veteran politician, former parliamentarian and until just a week ago, the UNP opposition leader of the Wayamba province, did not have an electorate to organize! But Ramanayake just gave up what he had as if it was just chaff.

In the midst of all this gloom the UNP managed to score a victory last week by coming to an understanding with a trade union delegation comprising of Sampath Rajitha of the Railway Union, Ravi Kumudesh of the Health Worker’s Union and Gemunu Wijeratne of the private bus operators union. The main point discussed was the indifference of the government to the increasing cost of living. Following this meeting, reports began to appear in the newspapers that the private bus owners also will be joining the JVP’s proposed three day strike for which the dates have not yet been fixed. One of the main reasons why the JVP organized the strike of July 10 was unsuccessful was because the private bus operators the CTB and the Railway workers refused to join. With public transport available, people went to work and the strike was a flop. If however public transport does not run, people will be compelled to stay at home and the strike will appear to be successful even if that was not the case with workers staying away only because there was no way to report for work.