During the past few weeks the main focus of the cabinet had not been the elections but the economy. The government is concentrating on trying to head off the looming economic crisis as they should, but none of that could be reported in this column because of the goings on in the political front. Last week was another action packed week for the UNP. Even with the Western Province elections on the cards, the UNP seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Usually at election time the party pulls itself together and even if there are problems, maintains at least the façade of unity. Despite the ongoing election campaign, the Dehiwala Mt Lavinia Bala Mandalaya meeting which was held last week, had been more like a riot than a meeting. At provincial council elections, each electorate gets to nominate two candidates and Sunethra Ranasinghe, the Dehiwala organizer of the UNP, had suggested two names as PC candidates. One of them was Mareena, the Muslim lady made famous by the ‘Ape gona apata honda" slogan at the UNP’s bullock cart parade last year. Her name had been struck off on the grounds that there were too many Muslims on the list. So only one, Nimal Bulathsinhala, remained as a candidate from the Dehiwala Mt Lavinia electorate.

 Into the existing vacancy, one Sampath Dikkumbura, the treasurer of the UNP’s Jathika Yovun Pereamuna, had been introduced by Ranil Wickremesinghe and Ravi Karunanyake. Ranasinghe had opposed the nomination of Dikkumbura on the grounds that he was from Ratmalana and also that he had been bad mouthing her publicly at gatherings in her own electorate. Ranasinghe’s reaction to this nomination had been to tell Wickremesinghe that Dikkumbura was free to ask for a preference vote from voters in her electorate but that she herself could not take this particular candidate around the electorate. Last week, there was a progress review meeting of the Dehiwala Mt-Lavinia electorate and Wickremesinghe had phoned Ranasinghe before the meeting to tell her that he would be bringing Dikkumbura to that meeting. Ranasinghe, had told the leader not to bring him along. But Wickremesinghe had insisted saying it was a party decision. To this Ranasinghe had responded that she would receive Wickremesinghe but would walk away from the meeting if Dikkumbura arrived.

At 7.00 pm, Wickremesinghe had arrived with Ravi Karunanayake and Dikkumbura for the progress review meeting and had been received by Ranasinghe. As the meeting started, on a cue from Ravi Karunanayake, Dikkumbura was about to be ushered into the hall when a close supporter of Ranasinghe got hold of Dikkumbura and shoved him out. As Dikkumbura fell, face down, those who had come with him had been set upon and assaulted and all hell broke lose. Wickremesinghe had been shouting at the top of his voice for calm. Over the microphone Wickremesinghe shouted at Ranasinghe saying that one person (Dhanasiri Amaratunga the Deputy Mayor of Dehiwala Mt Lavinia) had already left and asked whether she was trying to chase away the other person as well and more to that effect. At this point, Ranasinghe kept her word and walked out of the meeting with all her supporters. The progress review meeting had been held without the electoral organizer and was a flop.

This riot highlights the difficulties that Wickremesinghe is up against. One of the main criticisms leveled against the UNP, and indeed an issue highlighted in this column itself from time to time, is that the UNP has not been able to attract the youth vote and create a new generation of politicians. But when the party makes some effort in this direction, there’s resistance from the old guard. This resistance against newcomers was always there under all leaders; but other leaders, through the force of their personality, have been able to overcome such resistance and do what was needed. However, a complicating factor today, is that Wickremesinghe has a well established reputation for promoting all kinds of nincompoops and the other candidates and a good part of the UNP rank and file tend to treat such appointees with suspicion and even disdain. Ananda Abeywickrema, the UNP co-organizer for Baddegama in the Galle district, who defected to the government a couple of weeks ago, said in an interview with The Island that Wickremesinghe is under the delusion that there is a UNP block vote which can be taken for granted and that the people of the area will and have to work for whoever is sent to them by the party as their leader.

The erosion of Wickremesinghe’s authority within the party is also a contributory factor in what happened in Dehiwala last week. All this trouble was over a candidate -Sampath Dikkumbura - who does not have a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning! Sunethera Ranasinghe who belongs to the 1977 generation of UNPers, and is one of the last remaining stalwarts from that era, is known to be combatively protective of her turf. This meeting shows that Wickremasinghe is doing the rounds despite his offer to keep away from the election campaign. Last week he attended an election meeting in Kaduwala organized by the co-organizers, Jayantha Ketagoda and Sujeewa Senasinghe, and one in Colombo Central organized by M.Maharoof. Mohamed Muzammil has so far been the only UNP candidate to feature Wickremesinghe in his election ads on TV.

 Dhanasiri Amaratunga

 Dhanasiri Amaratunga, the young Deputy Mayor of Dehiwala Mt Lavinia, joined the government recently - one among so many to have left the UNP. He had a running battle with Sunethra Ranasinghe, the electoral organizer. The reason why Amaratunga left is because of opposition to his activities from Ranasinghe, and Wickremesinghe’s indecision and lack of resolve in bringing about a settlement. At the 2002 local government elections, Amaratunga became Mayor of Dehiwala-Galkissa. Ranasinghe was then in parliament. But at the 2006 local government elections, Ranasinghe who had failed to get elected at the 2004 parliamentary election, contested the Municipality and became Mayor and Amaratunga had to settle for the second slot. Amaratunga kept asking for one of the wards of the municipality to organize but was never given one. Whenever he approached Wickremesinghe with his tale of woe, Wickremesinghe would pacify him and send him off.

A couple of weeks ago, Amaratunga expressed his support for the president. The UNP has issued a show cause letter stating that he will be deemed to have left the party. But Amaratunga has written back to the party saying that he has not left the UNP or joined the SLFP and that he has only expressed his support for the president. He has also said that the party constitution has been amended so many times at conventions and special conventions that nobody has the correct version and had averred that he is not certain whether the provisions quoted in the show cause letter are in the constitution any longer. He requested the party to send him a copy of the updated constitution by return post for him to study! Amaratunga will maintain the legal fiction that he has not left the UNP, much like the dissident MPs in parliament, until the next local government elections when he will directly join the SLFP. The UNP’s loss has been the SLFP’s gain. Amaratunga is well known in UNP circles and was one of the few younger generation politicians in the UNP who could rise up to any challenge. Such individuals are hard to replace as it takes years for such people to build themselves up.

Amaratunga’s decision to join the president is part of the malaise that is spreading within the UNP in alarming proportions. Bodhi Ranasinghe who refused to contest the WPC elections will be tendering his resignation from the position of organizer of the Colombo East electorate this week. The decision of the nominations committee was that all electoral organizers not holding public office had to contest the PC election or resign from their positions. It appears that the UNP has not asked for the resignation of any organizers who did not contest as yet because the impression created in the minds of the people by high profile resignations will be bad for the party at election time. Ranasinghe, however, will be resigning as Colombo East organizer whether or not he is asked to go or not as he is quitting electoral politics. However, Ranasinghe who is a Wickremesinghe protégé, will continue to remain a member of the UNP and the secretary of its Management Committee. Ranasinghe’s is the only ‘non-malignant’ resignation in recent times, the other resignations not being so ‘benign’.

 Ranil’s clerk bolts!

 Some days ago, a former Kaduwela Pradesheeya Sabha Vice Chairman, Saranapala Perera, along with another sitting PS member, Prasanna Wilathgamuwa, and a former Kaduwela PS member, Keerthi Siriwardene, met the president and defected to the SLFP. The trio were joined by Wasantha Mayadunne who until the day of his defection was a serving member of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s personal staff. He drew a salary as Wickremesinghe’s clerk while working in the UNP media unit. Until the day before he defected he had been at work in the media unit. Mayadunne had not informed his boss (Wickremesinghe) that he was leaving and is now incommunicado with his mobile phone switched off. This group who left the UNP together after meeting the president will be organizing a meeting today to get their supporters also to join the government. This meeting will be presided over by the Secretary of the UPFA, Minister Susil Premajayanth.

One may think that this spate of defections in the Western Province is because of the elections. But similar defections have been taking place further afield as well. One of the most prominent defectors from the outstations over the past couple of weeks was Ananda Abeywickrema of Galle. Abeywickrema hails from a prominent political family. His paternal uncle Simon Abeywickrema was a member of the State Council from 1938 and a founding member of the UNP and a deputy minister in the first post independence government of Ceylon. His father, Henry Abeywickrema, was a founding member of the SLFP, and an MP from 1952 onwards and was a cabinet minister in S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike’s cabinet of 1956 along with D.A.Rajapakse. As such he was one of the handful of UNP organizers in the south with some name recognition. A couple of weeks ago, he too left the UNP after putting up posters in the Galle district saying "Ithin ayubowan" to the UNPers in the district and circulating his letter of resignation, widely among his constituents.

In Dhanasiri Amaratunga’s case, Wickremesinghe was in a bind because Sunethra Ranasinghe resolutely opposed him at every turn. Wickremesinghe could not afford to lose Ranasinghe so he kept marking time and postponing decisions with regard to Amaratunga. But in Abeywickrema’s case, Wickremesinghe deliberately created a situation where the former had no option but to leave. Over the past fifteen years, Wickremesinghe had sent four co-organzers to the Baddegama electorate of which Abeywickrema was the organizer. The first such was Dinesh Dodangoda, then came Bandula Bandaragoda followed by Maitree Gunaratne and lastly by Manusha Nanayakkara. Wickremesinghe had been appointing co-organizers for the Baddegama electorate even when it was not party policy to appoint co-organizers. He seems to have been deliberately trying to push out Abeywickrema for over a decade.

Abeywickrema, was not the only politician from the south to defect. A couple of weeks ago, Priyantha Jayatilleke, the UNP opposition leader of the Tawalama Pradesheeya Sabha defected. This was followed by the defection of seven sitting members of the Bentara Elpitiya PS including its former chairman. This was in a situation where the UNP had only nine members in the Bentara-Elpitiya PS to begin with. The opposition leader of yet another PS in the Galle district is to meet the president soon to defect. We cannot reveal his name here because he has not yet met the president. It appears, the number of UNP defections depends on how much time the president can spare to meet those wanting to defect. Many of those who leave are aware that given the sheer numbers joining the government, they have no hope of occupying the same position that they had in the UNP. Yet they continue to leave - some out of sheer disgust, the others, out of spite and hatred, some with the calculation that it would be expedient to get what they can now because the prospects of the UNP coming into power anytime soon were rather remote.  

 To the president, these defectors represent a valuable political resource. The UNP defectors at the parliamentary level are playing a vital frontline role in responsible ministries. Likewise, defectors at the other levels are playing a similar role. At the Western PC elections, the driving force of the UPFA campaign in the Colombo district will be Thilanga Sumathipala and Duminda Silva, both defectors from the UNP. Both of them have been tasked with making inroads into the Colombo city limits vote base. As both of them are vying for the chief ministerial post, they will be throwing all their resources into the campaign. The votes delivered to the UPFA at this election will be the litmus test which will determine whether the UPFA can have any hopes of winning the Colombo Municipality at the next local government elections due next year. When the time comes, Dhanasiri Amaratunga will be playing in Dehiwala-Mt Lavinia the same role that Thilanga Sumathipala and Duminda Silva are now playing in the Colombo city.

This is not the end of the UNP’s woes. Last week the UNP national organizer and the leader of the opposition of the Central Provincial Council held a press conference at his residence. Had the Godapitiya (Akuressa) suicide bomb blast not occurred while SB was speaking, that press conference would have been the main news item on the news bulletins that evening. That press conference was SB’s way of meeting head on the challenge thrown at him by the Wickremesinghe camp. Referring to attacks on him and Rukman Senanayake in a Sinhala weekly, Dissanayake charged that this newspaper was being run by the UNP and that the party had direct control over it. So he said that these attacks on him and Senanayake emanated from within the party itself. He did not mention the name of the person behind these attacks but said that this individual was a businessman involved in shady deals involving garment quotas during the period of UNP rule.

Before holding the press conference, SB had told Wickremesinghe that he was going to call for a press conference to reply to the various accusations leveled at them in this Sinhala weekly. Wickremesinghe had tried to persuade him to call it off saying that he should write to the newspaper in question and call a press conference if they don’t publish his reply. SB however brushed this aside and said that he won’t mention any names at the first press conference but that if the attacks on him in this newspaper did not stop, he would mention names at the next press conference he summons.

  The abduction

 A bizarre incident that took place last week, was the adduction and release of Dhammika Ganganath Dissanayake a media advisor to Ranil Wickremesinghe and the former Chairman of Rupavahini. Wickremesinghe called the president at around 11 in the night to tell him that Dissanayake had been abducted on the accusation of having written a scurrilous book about him (the president) and that it’s the president who will have to take responsibility for anything that happens. He requested Rajapaksa to do something fast as Dhammika was one of his men. The president had promised to look into it and had immediately instructed the IGP to have the matter investigated.

Dissanayake’s abductors had questioned him about a scurrilous book that was being prepared for publication about President Mahinda Rajapakse. During the 2005 presidential election there certainly was a scurrilous pamphlet put out by the UNP about Rajapakse and his family and it could well be that the UNP was trying to put out an expanded and updated version of the same as a ‘Choura Regina’ kind of publication with perhaps a change of title as Choura Raja! In the early 1990s the Premadasa camp wrote a scurrilous tract about Gamini Dissanayake and the Dissanayake camp countered with an even more devastating book on Premadasa. The effect of such political mud can be quite damaging to those at the receiving end. The publication of such a book about the president would be an ideal way of discrediting a leader who is now at the zenith of his popularity, especially if the book is well researched and full of facts.

The police or people claiming to be policemen had come to Dissanayake’s house on the morning of the day he was abducted, got some details from his domestic aide and left. When the abductors had turned up in the night, Dissanayake’s domestic aide had opened the gate having recognized two of them as those who had come in the morning, and assumed them to be from the police. The abductors had been in the house only for about three minutes and the first thing they had done was to draw the curtains. A pretense of searching the house was done and they had then hustled Dissanayake out of the house. He had been taken to the van and told to lie down. Dissanayake remembers driving around for about one and a half to two hours until they stopped at some place and then had resumed traveling. All the while he had been questioned about a book. It was around 1 am when he had been dropped off. The abductors had the van radio tuned to Lakhanda and Dissanayake had been able to know what time it was from the radio.

Given the manner in which it had been done, this appears very much to have been a government job. However, they seem to have been barking up the wrong tree as Dissanayake is a member of Wickremesinghe’s inner coterie. No member of Wickremesinghe’s inner circle ever does front line work against the government because there are plenty of others to take the risks. Lasantha Wickremetunga played a frontline role against the government; but he was never a member of Wickremesinghe’s inner circle even though he managed to muscle his way around through sheer aggression. Given the fact that no member of Wickremesinghe’s inner circle ever takes to the frontline, this notion that Wickremesinghe’s inner circle was compiling a book about President Rajapaksa is nonsense.

That kind of thing will only be attempted by others in the UNP who are in a hurry to topple the Rajapaksa regime. Besides, Wickremesinghe who is well aware of his vulnerable position in any slanging match, is unlikely to have initiated something that would have boomeranged on him. Had Wickremsinghe written a scurrilous tract about the president, the Rajapaksa camp would have countered in kind and the loser in the end, would definitely have been Wickremesinghe.