While Colombo remains petrified due to the terrorist attacks directed at prominent media men, another battle is brewing in obscurity in the hill country. For the government, the two provincial councils are a make or break battle as much as it is for the UNP. In Wayamba, the UNP seems to have already lost because they could not field a good candidate. Hence their hopes are focused on the Central Province where S.B.Dissanayake has entered the fray. If SB wins the Central Province, that will be the beginning of the end of the government. If he loses, that will be the end of the UNP’s electoral prospects for the near future.

Given the importance of what is at stake in on these two elections, the UNP has taken an inexplicably lethargic attitude towards them. The party leader has not so far participated in the Kandy election campaign and will be addressing meetings only in Gampola and Akurana and the final rally in Kandy on February 11.

SB’s lone battle

This is in contrast to the president who has already spent a number of days in Kandy directing the election campaign and is expected to go back there towards the end of this month. He even met the visiting Indian Foreign Secretary, not in Colombo but in Kandy. Rajapakse has been on the scene in Kandy and directing affairs personally. As one UNPer put it, the president’s been feeding the whole of Kandy during his stay.

The Central Province is an area where the UNP has been particularly strong. At the last two parliamentary elections the UNP won the province overall and won it at the presidential elections as well. So the president’s concerns are well founded. Besides, the Central Province has a formidable UNP candidate in S.B.Dissanayake which would add to his worries. The UNP however does not seem to be taking this matter as seriously as the president.

Rukman Senanyake had been assigned to Kandy but has not yet arrived on the scene. Of the UNP parliamentarians assigned to the CP election campaign, only Ranjith Madduma Bandara  has come to stay and campaign. Gayantha Karunatilleke had come for one day and gone back. Dunesh Gankanda had been assigned to Kandy, but he has not yet come on the scene.

Hence what we are seeing today in the Central Province is very different to what we saw at the Eastern PC elections and later at the NCP and Sabaragamuwa elections as well when the UNP marshaled all its resources in an effort to win. In the CP, they seem to have given up hope and are just waiting for the inevitable to happen. Both Janaka Perera and Ranjan Ramanayake had been given several millions each for their election campaigns, but SB has not yet been given any money by the party. Usually the party gives a certain amount to all the candidates but even this has not been given to the other candidates in the CP either. Hence SB is running a cash strapped election campaign.

The cooperation that he has been getting from the other UNP parliamentarians in the district leaves much to be desired. Tissa Attanayake, has not been much in evidence as he is the general secretary and is in Colombo most of the time. Hence Attanayake’s Kundasale electorate has been given to a team led by actor Cyril Dharmawardhana to spearhead SB’s campaign. Parliamentarian Abdul Cader, who has a relative in the fray, has been running around to some extent but the only parliamentarian from whom SB has been getting unstinted support has been Lakshman Kiriella.   

Despite all this, there has been much more activity in the CP election than in Wayamba. SB’s meetings have been well attended because he was one of the principal crowd pullers and orators in the UNP anyway. He has also been meeting at times over 2,000 people a day in groups. He meets people from 6.30 am till 11.00 pm on a daily basis. In contrast to SB, his adversary on the government side is hardly known. The government has not tried to pit their chief ministerial candidate against SB. Rather what one sees in the CP is a contest between the president and SB.

In the NCP, it was President Mahinda Rajapakse who defeated Janaka Perera and not the UPFA chief ministerial candidate Berty Premalal Dissanayake – and so it may well be in the CP as well. There aren’t that many posters of the UPFA chief ministerial candidate on the walls, but the president’s image can be seen all over - so this in effect is a face off between SB and the president.

This is not a battle between the UNP and the president because the UNP, as a political party, is doing very little for the campaign. This is quite understandable in a way. If S.B.Dissanayake wins the Central Province, that would be just the second time that the UNP has won any decisive election in the past fifteen years. The local government election of 2002 cannot be taken into account because it was held on the heels of the 2001 parliamentary election victory.

A victory here would automatically make SB a contender for the UNP leadership by projecting him as a man who can make the party win. Obviously the present powers that be in the UNP don’t want to have another ‘situation’ on their hands – which explains the step motherly treatment for the CP election campaign. In earlier times it was defeat that would have given rise to rebellions against the leadership. But now, Wickremesinghe is in complete control of the party and another defeat will make no difference. It is now a victory that could disturb the equilibrium achieved, by giving the party rank and file the impression that the party can be revived by someone else.

The UNP leader met Yasushi Akashi last week in the company of the Japanese Ambassador and among the matters discussed was the stalemate in the All Party Representatives Committee. It was clear that the Japanese were now looking at the post-war scenario and not at the war. The UNP leader’s gripe was that the government was expecting the UNP to come up with a suggestion for a political settlement without revealing their own plans. Wickremesinghe had told Akshi that he does not know whether the government even has a plan and that being in the opposition, it is the government that should come up with a plan and then seek the help of the opposition to make it law. Akashi had also been appalled at the attacks launched with such impunity on the media.

A president on the defensive

 One thing that became clear last week was that the government was winning the war against the LTTE but that they were fast losing the peace. In the space of two short weeks, a major TV station has been torched, one newspaper editor brutally murdered, apparently with an instrument used to kill livestock, and another newspaper editor, Upali Tennakoon of the Sinhala weekly Rivira, mercilessly assaulted on his way to work. A miasma has spread throughout the country and the whole atmosphere which prevailed up to the third anniversary of the president’s inauguration  has changed.

When he celebrated his third year in office, President Rajapakse was riding high with victories on the battlefield and unparalleled success on the political front. The country was faced with challenges from the West and from Tamil Nadu, but the government was successfully able to weather the storm. Today, he is a man on the defensive, wringing his hands and trying to explain to people what was happening in this country. Probably never in the annals of world history has the leader of any nation been brought so low at the moment of his greatest triumph.    

The week before last the president was explaining to heads of media institutions how close he was to Lasantha Wickremetunga and that the latter was even passing information to him. Then last week, Rajitha Senaratne was in Kandy to address an audience purported to be UNPers who had decided to join the government. During his stay in Kandy he traveled to a funeral house with the president and on the way had reminisced that it was after 15 years that they were traveling in a vehicle together. The president had then asked Senaratne whether he remembers the last occasion they had traveled together to the commencement of the pada yathra in 1992. The president had then said that he knew that Senaratne would have been upset when Lasantha was killed and that was why he had telephoned Senaratne that night.

The president told Senaratne that he even had a wedding gift for the Wickremetunga couple and that he had not been able to give it to them. He had told Senaratne that he knew that Lasantha was his (Senaratne’s) friend that he would not forget old friends despite any political differences. We see here a president anxious to deflect blame for the killing of Wickremetunga from himself. The president and the whole government is on the defensive at a time when they should not be so. Until things began going wrong a couple of weeks ago, this was one of the most successful governments in the post independence history of this country. Many people think that it is the war which is responsible for the success of this government. But that’s nonsense. When this government came into power in late 2005, there was no war but the government was still popular.

The president may have scraped through at the elections and he may have won only because of the LTTE’s ban on voting in the north. But the mere number of votes got was not an indication of the president’s popularity. There would have been plenty of people who would have liked to have voted for him but who voted for Wickremesinghe because it was deemed impossible for Rajapakse to win with the minority parties, the CWC, Up-country Peoples’ Front, the  SLMC, and the TNA, all opposing him. As at previous elections, it was deemed that the Sinhala vote would be split down the middle and that the minority bloc vote would decide the outcome. The fact that this established pattern changed at the 2005 presidential elections is a testimony to the president’s extraordinary popularity even before he became president. His candidacy was able to change a long established voting pattern in the country.

War was an afterthought  

After Mahinda Rajapakse assumed power, many found that this popularity was not misplaced. He was a cautious and benign leader. Even though he won only by a whisker, he did nothing to place the opposition UNP under siege and there was none of the persecution and vilification of the UNP that one saw under the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime. President Premadasa, like Mahinda Rajapakse, took over the reins of government after his party had been in power for two terms. But there was a world of a difference in the way the two men behaved. President Premadasa saw enemies under every bush and especially within his own party whereas president Rajapakse did not see enemies anywhere, not even in the opposition.

Even though many thought he had been elected on a Sinhala hard line platform, Rajapakse was no raging Sinhala chauvinist. During the initial stages, he did his best to preserve the ceasefire. Even when the LTTE was trying to provoke war by killing security forces personnel in twos and threes all over the country, and even tried to assassinate the defense secretary and the army commander, the president acted with the utmost restraint and only token bombing raids were carried out on LTTE positions. He only went to war in 2006 when the LTTE shut the Mavil Aru anicut, cutting off water supplies to the Seruvila area in the Trincomalee district. What started off as a limited offensive to restore the water supply to the Seruvila settlement became a campaign to rid the country of the LTTE once and for all.

At the 2001 parliamentary elections, the Matara district was a battlefield where PA goons attacked every single UNP office opened and every UNP procession held. Once while traveling in the motorcade of a UNP candidate at that election, I too narrowly escaped assault by a club wielding PA goon right in front of a police station. That was in the bad old days. But just a couple of months ago, I saw minister Mahinda Wijesekera holding a meeting in the same area Present were card carrying members of the UNP and  SLFP with a few scattered members of the Communist party present as well. I walked into the meeting towards the end, and even while I was chatting to the minister, he was busy handing out certificates of some sort to the participants. The recipients were being introduced to him as "so and so of the SLFP and so and so of the UNP". Apparently every recipient of a certificate held some position at the village level in either the UNP or the SLFP. Former rivals had been sitting in the audience patiently waiting for their turn to claim patronage from the government.

This was among the reasons as to why political tension was at an all time low in the country during the Rajapakse regime. A village level UNP leader could always get a road constructed or some electricity connections given by approaching one of ‘their’ ministers. Certainly under the Rajapakse regime, members of the UNP who comprise nearly half the voting population, were not living in fear or anguish. This is part of the reason why the UPFA government has won every election since 2005 so easily. The fact that the UNP leader has lost one too many elections, and is incapable of firing the imagination of the UNP rank and file is the main reason. But coupled to this was the fact that the Rajapakse government was not harassing members of the UNP in any way, and since they could live without fear, there was no external factor that could goad them into action. Not being at siege from without, the average UNPer tended to see the faults of their leader much more than the faults of the ruling party.

For a party to be galvanized into political action aimed at capturing political power, there either has to be inspiration from within, in the form of an inspiring leadership or there has to be goading from without in the form of a demonic enemy against whom the whole of society comes together. During most of the Rajapakse regime, both these factors were missing in the UNP. What one has to understand is that just one of these factors is sufficient to start off an anti-government campaign. In 2001 the UNP did not have an inspiring leadership but the external stimulus provided by the persecution and insanity of the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime was enough to galvanize the whole of society into a concerted effort to overthrow the government.

The music stops

How the presence of just one of these factors can change things can be seen in the Central Province election campaign. The UNP is running a good candidate in the form of S.B.Dissanayake and the people in those areas have been inspired to attempt an overthrow of the government. But Wayamba has Chamal Senarath as the UNP candidate and the Wyamba campaign is in shambles with party members not even turning up to go canvassing. Had there been an external threat, where each member of the UNP felt personally endangered by the government as they did by 2001, then one can be sure that an almost spontaneous campaign would have built up even in Wayamba.

Be that as it may, the point that has to be made is that even though the opposition leader is unable to fire the imagination of the general public, that does not mean that the government will be able to get away with anything. Very often it is not the opposition that brings governments down - the governments bring themselves down. If the present government does not check this terror against the media, what is going to happen is that they are going to give rise to an anti government wave in the country – something that has not existed up to now. This is of course not to say that the government is responsible for the violence. If one peruses the Sunday Leader or the Morning Leader of the past several weeks, there was nothing that could have acted as an immediate provocation for the murder of Wickrematunga. In Keith Noyhar’s case, there was one particular article which was the immediate cause of the attack.

This raises the chilling question whether the present wave of murder, arson or assaults on journalists is not something done on impulse due to an immediate provocation, but a part of a long term plan to silence the media? But for what purpose is the next question. If there was any government that could have stayed in power for as long as they wanted, it was this one. There was never a government that was riding so high due to genuine popularity. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose by this kind of attacks. Many UNPers privately admit that they too being politicians, would have given an eyeball to have been able to be running a government like the Rajapakse regime. This government had everything going for it until the past two weeks and with each passing day, they seemed to be gaining in popularity. The precursor to this deterioration was the attack on Keith Noyhar and Namal Perera, but at the time many people dismissed it as an aberration until the events of the last two weeks made it plain that this is no aberration but a pattern.

Even though the UNP burned an effigy of Mahinda Rajapakse at Lasantha Wickremetunga’s funeral and raised the cry "Ghatakaya satakaya" they privately admit that a government that had everything going for it, the way the Rajapakse regime did, has nothing to gain but everything to lose from acts such as this. Hence many of them are under the impression that it must be some ‘out of control’ section of the armed forces that is doing this. They know that the president himself is too politically savvy to be involved. If one does a cost benefit analysis of these attacks on the media, the government is the loser and the beneficiaries are the UNP, JVP and the LTTE. Firstly, by killing or intimidating the media, the government has no net gain because the media organizations attacked or the journalists silenced would not have been having any effect on the government’s popularity anyway.

If they were got rid of to avoid the ‘stress’ caused by these journalists and media organizations, well, the government is now undergoing much more stress as a result of the murders, arson and assaults and is on the defensive when they should be resting on their laurels and congratulating themselves.

At a time when the government was riding high and its detractors both locally and overseas were rendered speechless, they have once again been given a voice by the events of the past couple of weeks. The UNP has now got grist for its mill and the diplomatic community can once again start lecturing Sri Lanka on human rights and media freedom. When the Sri Lankan government is cornered, it’s the LTTE that benefits. On the one hand, the assailants have been going out of their way to create the impression that they are from the armed forces. They dress in black and ride dark coloured motorcycles.

Then at the Sirasa complex, they warn the staff of a ‘claymore mine’ and after Lasantha’s killing they go riding off towards the high security zone. The assailants seem to have been over-anxious to drop clues about their identity.

So suspicions remain as to who they could really be. But the fact of the matter is that the police can easily find out who did it if they want to and it is to this that we should address ourselves to. If one thing is clear, it is this – we did not want terrorism wiped out in the north and east, only to have it brought to the south. Other than Lasantha, who lost his life, the biggest casualty of the goings on during the past two weeks has been the government – and they know it.