When the JVP politburo met last week, party leader Somawansa Amarasinghe said that there was complete chaos in government and that there was no national policy for any sector. He said that at least the JVP should intervene to formulate national policies. Agreeing with this suggestion, Tilvin Silva said that the party should concentrate on formulating national policies for the agriculture, education and health care fields. The politburo felt that many areas were affected, but the three most desperate sectors were the above. The JVP is now an opposition party and formulating ‘national policies’ makes no sense except in the context of joining the government to implement it. The JVP will appoint three committees and they hope to present the reports of these three committees to the country. Asked whether they will be presenting these proposals to the government, the answer we got was that there was no plan to present the proposals to the government. Once they were presented to the country, anybody was free to adopt them.

If this is with the hope that the president may notice their efforts, and like appointing Bandula Gunawardene to handle food prices, the JVP would be invited to take over these three sectors, then the JVP would be on the right track. Given all that has happened, the JVP obviously can’t walk into the president’s office and say they want to rejoin the government. They will have to make overtures indirectly and hope that the president will be magnanimous enough to notice. The JVP’s options are in fact very limited. If the government opts to dissolve the rest of the provincial councils simultaneously, the JVP will not be able to mobilize the entire party as they did at the Sabaragamuwa and NCP elections recently. The end result will be that they will be wiped out. Moreover, if there is a parliamentary election anytime soon the same thing will happen. This is a time when the JVP will have to do some quick thinking. Are they to remain as they are now and get wiped out politically or are they going to use the 25 parliamentarians that they still have, to try and salvage what they can? If the nameless and faceless but powerful individuals in the JVP’s central committee have not realized by now that they are getting wiped out at elections because they are fighting on the wrong side of the barricades, then there is no redemption for the JVP. The JVP has lost many of the gains of the past decade in costly political misadventures. We reported that they lost their entire branch organization in Japan which defected en masse with Wimal Weerawansa. It was only very recently that the JVP managed to set up another branch organization in Japan with party leader Amarasinghe visiting that country specifically for the purpose.

As of now, what the JVP will get by contesting alone at the next provincial council elections is predictable. All they can do is to try and salvage something at the next parliamentary election which could come sooner than it’s due. This would be a case of locking the gate after the horse has bolted. But the JVP has no more trump cards up their sleeve. They tried to bring down the government vote by contesting separately; but the move hurt them much more than it did the government. They tried to carry out a general strike, which also failed. The only option left for the JVP is to eat humble pie and rejoin the government or risk getting wiped out politically.

There are signs that the JVP may in fact be moving in this direction. Last week, when the JVP discussed the Sakvithi affair, Anura Kumara Dissanyake stated that he had seen photographs of Sakvithi Ranasinghe with one of the highest in the land. In normal circumstances the JVP would have made hysterical accusations that the president associated with crooks. But this time around, K.D.Lal Kantha stated simply that this is what happens when you pose for photographs with every Tom, Dick and Harry you meet. The tenor of the JVP’s discussion was to let the president off the hook. Could this be an indication of a new spirit of reconciliation?

The green corner

Last week, with UNP dissidents, Lakshman Seneviratne and Johnston Fernando, both being out of the country attending to some urgent personal matters, the rebel movement remained in the doldrums. In the meantime, the suggestions put forward by the dissidents to the committee of party seniors, was being whittled away by the UNP leader. The week before last, the committee of party seniors met under the Chairmanship of Wickremesinghe and decided that seniority would be the main criterion applied in making appointments to the positions of deputy leader and assistant leader. This has not yet been put to the UNP working committee, which is due to meet only later this week. However, the decision to appoint a deputy leader and an assistant leader on the basis of seniority, has already been having what obviously was its intended effect. When the proposal to appoint a deputy leader and an assistant leader was first put to the working committee, only two individuals had opposed the proposal, Galle district parliamentarian Vajira Abeywardene and former UNP trade union boss Srinal de Mel.

While Abeywardene had his own reasons for opposing the appointment of a deputy and an assistant leader, it was De Mel’s opposition that led many people to believe that Wickremesinghe was orchestrating opposition to the proposal within the working committee. Indeed when the proposal was first presented to the working committee, the majority wanted the appointment of a deputy and an assistant to the leader. It seemed as if even the appointment of individuals to these positions would be made by the working committee itself rather than the party leader. This was obviously a situation that Wickremesinghe wanted to avoid, because if he lost control over the process of appointing the top leadership, he would have in the same stroke, lost control over nominations at a presidential election. A working committee which can appoint a deputy leader over his head, can also decide to give nominations to someone other than the party leader at the next presidential election.

The Atukorale precedent

For Wickremesinghe to lose control over his working committee would have had the same effect as the president of the country losing control over parliament. The working committee could have ignored his presence and made the deputy leader the de facto leader of the party for all practical purposes. While the working committee may have a majority of Wickremesinghe’s appointees, even those who owe everything to Wickremesinghe like political power – which is the basic aim of all those involved in politics – could turn against him. There could be times when the general mood in the party is such that even the leader simply gets carried along by circumstances.

There was a situation like this in late 2001, when Wickremesinghe was simply washed along by a tidal wave within the UNP. Just three months before the UNP won power in the December 2001 parliamentary elections, there was an attempt to oust him from office. Even though the bid to remove him was unsuccessful, he was forced to do what the rebels wanted of him.

The negotiations which led to the defection of the group of PA ministers and parliamentarians led by S.B.Dissanayake was conducted largely outside Wickremesinghe’s direct control, with him being reduced to rubber stamping the decisions made by the deputy leader and the assistant leader of the time. The driving force of the UNP then was not the leader or even the deputy leader Karu Jayasuriya, but the assistant leader Gamini Atukorale. The UNP’s victory of 2001, was Atukorale’s victory. It was he who organized the public demonstrations against the government, it was he who basically led the negotiations with the dissidents within the government. The example of Atukorale, will always make Wickremesinghe cautious in making appointments to the positions of deputy leader and assistant leader. Before he became assistant leader, Atukorale was the general secretary of the party. As general secretary, his performance was average. He could in fact be removed from the position of general secretary for Wickremesinghe to bring in a complete newcomer to politics. He did that when a Maharajah Organization group director, Senarath Kapukotuwa, succeeded Atukorale as party secretary and nobody raised a whimper against the change.

As general secretary, Atukorale was in effect the CEO of the party and had direct access to all the internal decision making bodies within the UNP. Yet it was only after he was removed from this vital post and kicked upstairs into a specially created position of assistant leader, that Atukorale rose to his full stature. Within weeks and months of his appointment, he had become an alternative power centre within the party. What he did not have when he was wielding actual executive power within the party, he acquired soon after he was deprived of all authority and shunted off into a position without a clearly defined role. From that position, without any legally defined authority, Atukorale became the biggest challenge that Wickremesinghe has had since he took over the leadership of the party in 1994. Nobody would have dreamt that Atukorale had such abilities when he was the general secretary of the party.

After he was made assistant leader, Gamini Atukorale became almost a Gamini Dissanayake and this is what would be making Wickremesinghe wary about making appointments to the positions of deputy leader and assistant leader. The mere appending of the appellation of ‘leader’ (albeit with the prefix deputy or assistant) to anybody has the effect of turning that individual into an alternative power centre if he has a modicum of talent. All his life, Atukorale was an average individual within the UNP. It was only toward the last several months of his life that he became a political colossus. The only thing that changed during this period was his removal from the position of general secretary and his appointment as ‘assistant leader’. It was the ‘leader’ part of his designation that changed an average individual into a colossus. After Atukorale died suddenly soon after the UNP came into power in 2001, the position of assistant leader was never filled.

The march to Kilinochchi

The example of Atukorale shows that from the point of his personal survival, Wickremesinghe is right to be wary of appointing anyone to these positions. In the recent agitation to have these posts reintroduced into the UNP, the underlying hope is that a another Gamini Atukorale would be thrown up in the process. This precisely is why neither S.B.Dissanayke nor Sajith Premadasa will ever be appointed to these two positions. If Wickremesinghe’s intention was to avoid making these appointments and relegate the decision to appoint a deputy leader and an assistant leader into a seventeenth amendment kind of limbo, then he seems to have succeeded, because by last week even moderates like Ravi Karunanayake who backed the demand of the UNP dissidents for greater democracy, but also wanted Wickremesinghe to continue as party leader, had begun having second thoughts about appointing anyone to these positions just yet.

By that one may assume that enthusiasm for appointing a deputy leader and an assistant leader has gone down significantly within the working committee after the decision was taken by the seniors committee that seniority would be the main criteria in making these appointments. One has to wait for the working committee meeting later this week to see whether they will confirm the principle of making these appointments on the basis of seniority.

While the UNP leader was thus playing the survival game, the government was going ahead with its work. For the past couple of weeks all eyes have been on the northern theatre of war with the troops advancing slowly on Kilinochchi, the administrative heartland of the LTTE controlled territory. The government’s relentless advance on Tiger territory has given many people the feeling that the LTTE’s days are numbered. This feeling has spread into the Tamil Diaspora as well, judging by the articles we see appearing in the international Tamil press. Many years ago when Lakshman Kiriella was in the PA government, there is a piece of wisdom which he expressed at a press conference which is worth recalling at this juncture. What he said was that conflicts end once they have run their course. Taking the Vietnam war as an example, he pointed out that the conflict ran its course, the fighting ended and now the former combatants are friends. What we are seeing now appears to be the final phase of Tamil terrorism in this country.

The UNP as an opposition party, has not developed an appropriate response to this situation. Just last week, UNP Galle district parliamentarian Vajira Abeywardene gave an interview to the Island reiterating that same old UNP slogan that ‘nobody can win this war’. This is the general attitude within the party. The UNP never thought like this, in their heyday. If there was a conflict, the UNP always tried to win - to get on top of the situation. All the UNP presidents, even President Premadasa who was the most gullible of all UNP leaders, at the latter stages did his damndest to win. The fact that they failed and fell victim to the LTTE is a different matter. It was the ‘can do’ attitude that kept the UNP in power for 17 long years. What has now kept the UNP in the opposition for almost as long is their ‘can’t do’ attitude which has prevailed within the party since 1994.

There has been some improvement in Wickremesinghe’s general attitude in recent times. Last week he went to see his former deputy Karu Jayasuriya who is in hospital convalescing from surgery. He has spent over one hour chatting to Jayasuriya. In normal circumstances, it would have been difficult to get Wickremesinghe to visit a party member much less a loyalist. There was one former UNP organizer who told me of an instance when Wickremesinghe had come to his area for a meeting and he had presented himself swathed in bandages and plaster after a major motor accident. Wickremesinghe had not bothered to inquire at least out of curiosity as to what happened to him. This was in the days when he was able to take power for granted. Now, when he is faced with a challenge to his very existence in politics, his general attitude seems to have improved.

Last week, he even busied himself meeting lawyers and making arrangements to obtain bail for a UNP provincial council candidate from the NCP, one Hemantha, who is in remand for having allegedly assaulted Dudley Sirisena, the brother of Minister Maitripala Sirisena during the NCP election campaign. Yet in the 1990s, when Susantha Punchinilame had gone to see him after the Nalanda Ellawela incident, Wickremesinghe’s only reaction was to blandly tell him to surrender to the police. So certainly there has been a change in recent times, but whether this change is genuine or whether it’s just to tide over present difficulties remain to be seen.

Select committee on NGOs

That these difficulties are very much on Wickremesinghe’s mind is clear from the advice he gave the UNP members of the Central Provincial Council when he met them last week at his Cambridge Place office. He warned that the government may dissolve all the other provincial councils together instead of having staggered elections and that therefore all provincial councilors should concentrate on strengthening the grassroots organizations in their areas because MPs from other areas will not be able to come to their area to help them out at an election. That same evening, a meeting of the provincial councils sub committee of the UNP met, and the main topic of discussion was the way in which the party will face the situation if all the remaining PCs are dissolved simultaneously. Wickremesinghe is obviously bracing himself for the next round of defeats.

At this meeting of the Central PC members, a complaint was made that Provincial Councillor Shanthini Kongahage had organized a children’s programme in the Yatinuwara electorate with the CP Governor Tikiri Kobbekaduwa as chief guest without the permission of the electoral organizer. Wickremesinghe laid down the ruling that whenever provincial councilors go into other electorates to conduct programmes, the organizer of that electorate has to be kept informed. Kongahage is one of the weak links in the Central Province UNP set up. The wife of Sarath Kongahage, who is an advisor to the media ministry, there is the strong possibility that she will defect to the government if the CPC is dissolved. There is the possibility that as a female PC member, she would be appointed a provincial minister after the UPFA wins.

Last week, once again Wickremesinghe chaired a meeting of the seniors committee on party reforms and it is significant that what was mainly discussed was the reorganization of the Youth Front and the setting of a new Bhikkhu Front for the party. These are matters that should in fact have been discussed in the political affairs committee rather than the committee of party seniors which was set up to look into the reforms suggested by the dissidents. Thus the whole reform process has been turned into a sad joke by Wickremesinghe. The purpose in setting up the seniors committee was not really to discuss the revamping of the youth front or the setting up of bhikku organizations. Its original purpose has now been completely subverted and the seniors committee has been turned into just another one of the numerous committees of dubious effectiveness that the UNP has.

Ven. Dambara Amila