By last week the storm clouds that had been gathering over the Rajapaksa government seemed to abate somewhat. The visit of 10 Tamil Nadu politicians to the north and east, and the fact that their reports have not been negative, gave the government some much needed breathing space to resolve the IDP issue. The earlier visits by Walter Kaelin, the UN Secretary General’s representative, and UN Under Secretary General for political affairs Lynn Pascoe were also not followed by adverse reports - at least not in comparison to earlier such visits. In fact Kealin had met ministers Sarath Amunugama, D.E.W.Gunasekera, Tissa Vitarana at foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama’s house and what he had told them was that the UN routinely deals with much worse situations than the IDP situation in the north. Compared to what the UN often found on its plate, Sri Lanka’s IDP problem was under control. He had urged that the camps should be open to both politicians from the opposition as well as journalists and of course that resettlement should take place at a faster pace. It seems that the Tamil Nadu politicians had left with much the same impression. It will be interesting to see whether these developments relating to the visits of the UN officials and the Tamil Nadu politicians will have any impact on the European Commission’s recommendation on GSP+ to the EU Council, which will be made next week; and on the report of the US State Department on Sri Lanka which is also due to be handed over to the US Senate appropriations committee next week.

The talk of the town over the last few weeks was the possibility of General Sarath Fonseka entering politics. Early last week, General Fonseka addressing the troops at the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Army, said that this may be the last occasion that he addresses the troops in uniform. This set the cat among the canaries and the rumour mills went into overdrive. But when contacted on Friday by an Island staffer, Fonseka said that he had never said that he was going to enter politics. But he did not say that he was not going to enter politics either. Certainly, if a war hero emerges as the ‘common candidate’ of the opposition alliance with the cooperation of the JVP as well, he will give president Rajapaksa a good run for his money. One of the main reasons for the UNP’s poor showing at elections is because they have become identified as an anti-national party. With a war hero as the UNP’s presidential candidate, that image problem will largely be solved. Some individuals in the UNP leadership have been identified as anti-national, but there are others who have not been so tainted. Karu Jayasuriya, S.B.Dissanayake, Sajith Premadasa, Rukman Senanyake and a whole host of others have no problem in this regard and a war hero can easily stand shoulder to shoulder with such people.

General Fonseka for his part, has reasons to be disgruntled – not so much over his appointment as the Secretary of the Ministry of Sports and Recreation – that appointment would have brought him at least protocol-wise on equal level with Gotabhaya Rajapakse who is also a ministry secretary, but over the manner in which he was hustled ‘upstairs’ before his extended term of office as Army Commander expired. He was thus not the commander when the Army celebrated 60 years. The hustling of Fonseka upstairs looks very similar to the manner in which Dayan Jayatilleke was brought back from Geneva before his extended term of office expired. The reason why General Janaka Perera ended up becoming a UNP candidate was because he too was brought back from his ambassadorial posting in Indonesia before his term expired. The opposition is now saying that this is a government that ‘used’ and then discarded people – an extremely harmful allegation, that can make the government rot from within, with everyone with ability wondering whether he too was ‘Karapincha’ to the Rajapaksas.

No military commander or war hero has yet said that he is going to contest an election, but hypothetically if a victorious military commander wants to put himself forward as a presidential candidate, that has historical precedents. After the American civil war, General Ulysses S. Grant became president of the USA. However the difference is that General Grant never contested against the war president Abraham Lincoln. For a victorious general to contest an election against his commander in chief who shares the credit for the same victory would certainly be unprecedented and very unusual. Last week, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa (GR) made an announcement to Derana TV saying that he had absolutely no intention of entering politics and that the reports in various newspapers that he would be entering parliament from the Kurunegala district are not correct. This is the first time the defence secretary has commented on the rumours that have been flying around for months. This statement was not a major item in the Derana news bulletin on Thursday, but in the present context it’s no less than a bombshell.

Such an announcement by GR also impacts on anyone else involved in the war toying with the idea of entering politics.

GR’s statement to Derana said that he did what he did because it had to be done and that he does not expect to make political capital out of the war victory. During the past thirty years of the war, one saw the phenomenon of either defense secretaries or the deputy defence minister parading in uniform and making a show of directing the war. In contrast to this, GR remained a civilian, never got himself promoted - not even after the war was won – and allowed the three service commanders to actually command their forces. If the three service commanders have got any credit for winning the war, it’s because of GR’s self effacing ways. If one reads General Anuruddha Ratwatte’s memoirs published in Sinhala, he claims that it was HE who saved Jaffna in 2000 while Janaka Perera was hiding under his bed and Sarath Fonseka was nowhere to be seen! Even though GR does not claim credit the way Ratwatte does so unashamedly (and wrongly), still the whole country knows that the directing hand behind the war was GR. When he says that he has no intention of cashing in politically on the credit, that puts a dampener on anyone else trying to do so.

No military officer has so far announced that he is going to run against MR at the next presidential elections. But it will be interesting to consider the hypothetical situation if one does. How will the political system accommodate such a war hero? Sri Lanka has a two party system and the leaderships of the UNP and the SLFP are already occupied by incumbents who are not going to resign on anybody’s behalf. If the hypothetical war hero throws his hat into the ring as an independent ‘third’ candidate, he will have absolutely no chance and will only be ‘used’ as a spoiler candidate to split votes from the war winning camp. Even with a formidable spoiler candidate, the UNP would still be in the wilderness and the war hero’s reputation will be in tatters. The UNP is too far gone for the displacement of a certain number of votes to be able to make a difference in the final outcome especially at a presidential election where the winner takes all and there are no consolation prizes.

The other scenario would be where the war hero would be made the leader of an alliance of the UNP and other opposition parties. In this scenario, he would be the leader of the alliance but not of any constituent political party. So long as the alliance lasts he will be a leader, but if it collapses he will be left high and dry. In any case, unless the leader of the alliance is also the leader of the main party in the alliance, such an individual will exist only on sufferance. The alternative would be for him to join the main opposition party as a member and then become the presidential candidate of the alliance formed with the UNP as a constituent member. In such a scenario, he would be what Chandrika Kumaratunga was in 1994 – not the leader of the SLFP but the leader and presidential candidate of the PA. Chandrika’s situation however was different because she as the daughter of the party leader and the heir apparent could make the SLFP change its policies to suit her. It is unlikely that the UNP leader will allow any outsider (or even insider) to change things in the party. If the common candidate shows any sign of winning, the leader of the main political party in his alliance will start undercutting him because the war hero’s victory will be the end of his own career! Those with leadership potential within the UNP like S.B.Dissanayake and Sajith Premadasa are already being kept in the shadows. A war hero will be allowed to strut on stage so long as he is useful. The moment, the purpose is met, he will end up sitting in the shadows with SB and Sajith.

The UNP is a graveyard of talent. The ability to galvanize the rank and file is a disqualification and will lead to immediate undercutting. Perhaps Mangala Samaraweera is doing a very wise thing by maintaining a distance as the head of a separate party instead of joining the UNP direct; because joining the UNP will only get him targeted as well. Besides, any war hero who joins the UNP led alliance at this stage, will discover that he is only one amongst those jostling to become the next UNP leader. Not one of the contenders will yield his position out of consideration for any war hero. So any war hero thinking of coming in as the UNP’s common candidate will have a lot of thinking to do before he takes any step that cannot be retracted. There is also the fact that if one war hero contests from the opposition, there will be other war heroes on the other side as well so no one individual will have a monopoly on heroism and patriotism.

That presidential advisor Basil Rajapaksa is going to resign from parliament next week is more or less confirmed. This is the clearest indication yet that it’s the presidential election that will be held next. If the parliamentary election is to come first, there will be no need to resign from parliament because parliament will be dissolved. One of the purposes behind the move is to make way for provincial councilor Hemal Gunasekera of Matara to enter parliament in lieu of the southern chief ministership. There were rumblings to the effect that the Rajapaksa’s were all over the place - Chamal and Namal in Hambantota, Gota in Kurunegala, Basil in Gampaha, Sashindra in Moneragala and so on. Now the fact that GR has laid to rest the rumours about his impending entry into politics, and Basil Rajapaksa will be resigning his parliamentary seat to accommodate a provincial SLFP leader whose name is not known outside the southern province, this will no doubt enhance the positive vibrations for the Rajapaksas within the ruling party. If Basil contests the next parliamentary election, he will be doing so after winning some goodwill among the SLFP for resigning on behalf of an ordinary SLFPer. This easing of tensions within the ruling party over what some SLFPers perceived as ‘Rajapaksa expansionism’ is also a contributory factor to lifting the storm clouds that had been gathering over the government.

As we said earlier, Basil Rajapaksa’s intended resignation indicates that the presidential election will be held first. In a parliamentary election, the UNP will increase their number of seats in parliament by at least 50%. At the moment, they have only one parliamerntarian in Matara. That’s going to become two at the next parliamentary elections even in the worst of circumstances. They have four parliamentarians in the Colombo district - Ranil Wickremesinghe, Mohamed Maharoof, Mano Ganesan and Ravi Karunanayake. This number will increase. Of the UNP’s national list, only one parliamentarian is still with the UNP – K.N.Choksy. The UNP will have a full national list next time. When all this adds up, even in the worst of circumstances the UNP will increase the number of seats it has from the present 42 to over 60. If that happens, the UPFA will be going in for a presidential election with a resurgent UNP. Besides, the SLFP does not have political capital. It’s President Rajapaksa who has political capital. If a presidential election is not held first, those with no political capital will become frontline troops, thus reducing the vote of the UPFA as happened at the SPC elections. Besides, if the intention of the government is to secure a two thirds majority so as to change the constitution, then the best thing to do would be to have a presidential election first and to follow up with a parliamentary election immediately afterwards as the UNP government did in 1988/89. If the presidential election is held early, the president may lose one year of the term he won in 2005. But then if the intention is to change the constitution, that will not matter.

One of the points that the events of the last week brought home to us was the way expectations in politics can career out of control. When the government first began its roller coaster electoral ride with the Eastern Province election which was a closely fought battle orchestrated to a nail-biting, knee-knocking finish. At that time the government was happy with a little over 51% of the vote. Then came the North Central Province election and the government was overjoyed with the 57% they got. Parallel to that came Sabaragamauwa with 55%. Then expectations began to rise and the government began to lose sight of reality. Even with a formidable candidate like S.B.Dissanayake against them, they still got 59% in the Central Province. In Wayamba the UPFA got 71%. In the Western Province, despite the UNP block vote in the urban areas, the UPFA still got 65%. Then they went to Uva and got 74% of the vote. This was what fuelled expectations that the government would get over 80% in the Southern Province which the Rajapaksas considered their home turf.

In the days after the SPC election, the government was trying its best to explain away the lower than expected performance and the opposition was trying its level best to highlight it. The opposition’s point was that the government’s popularity had stopped growing and was indeed on a downward trend. Last year, even in a district like Kurunegala where the UNP has been traditionally strong, they got over 70% of the vote, but in the south where the UPFA parties have been traditionally strong, they got less; so one might indeed say that the government’s popularity is in decline. But then, we need to get things into perspective. The situation that prevails in Sri Lanka is something quite out of the ordinary – one that will not usually prevail in a democratic two party system. The present popularity of the government and corresponding unpopularity of the opposition is mainly due to the position taken by the opposition on the war. There was a very clear demarcation of patriots and non-patriots.

No other opposition party in any democratic country would have painted itself into a corner the way the UNP did. If anyone else had been leading the UNP, they would have at least in words if not in deeds supported the war effort. Any other figure in the UNP, whether it be S.B.Dissanayake, Karu Jayasuriya, Sajith Premadasa or Rukman Senanyake or anybody else, would have taken a running leap and grabbed some of the credit for themselves. So the present situation where the government gets all the credit and the opposition gets all the blame is an unusual situation which should not be taken for granted, as a permanent condition. No rational government can expect to poll 80% under a proportional representation system. A little over 50% is what can reasonably be expected by even a successful government.

Even after getting over two thirds of the vote at the SPC election, the fact that government politicians were moping over the fact that they did not get four fifths is a very dangerous thing. The expectation of getting 80% was fuelled by Sashindra Rajapaksa’s performance in the Moneragala district. But those conditions were not replicated in the Southern Province. Firstly, Sashindra Rajapakse was the chief ministerial candidate of the Uva Province. The people of any district would like to have the officially designated chief ministerial candidate in their midst and this factor increases the overall vote. In the SPC election there was no designated CM candidate in the UPFA and several were claiming the position in their electoral propaganda. Besides this, in Sashindra Rajapaksa the people of Moneragala had a completely new face – a clean cut young man with a ready smile and exuding wide-eyed guilelessness. He had the right face for elections (election ‘moona’). Can we really say that the UPFA candidates in the SPC had an election ‘moona’ in quite the same way? Quite the contrary may be the fact.

A kinsman of president Rajapaksa, the son of a first cousin Aruna Gunaratne contested in the Matara district with the claim that he belonged to the parapura that saved the nation; but he came in last among those elected to the PC. So an ‘election moona counts more than proximity to the first family. Given the un-heroic, undeserving dregs that contested the SPC election, one may even argue that the UPFA got too many votes. The voters of the various districts know fully well that none of the PC candidates are ranawiruwas. The people know that while the ordinary soldier was risking their lives on the battle field, these PC candidates were safe in their homes and the LTTE would not have bothered to kill any of them even if they had walked into Kilinochchci on their own accord.

Before the election everybody thought the UPFA had a fight on its hands only in the Galle district with the UNP putting up a strong showing. There was no fight in the Matara and Hambantota districts. But when the votes were counted, the UPFA had done best in the Galle getting 68% of the vote as against the 62% they got at the last SPC election in 2004. In the Matara district too the UPFA got 67% as against 64% at the 2004 SPC election. It’s only in the Hambantota district that the UPFA got 66% which was lower than the 2004 figure of 70%. Ironically, in Galle where the UNP expected to do best, the UNP’s nine PC seats has gone down to six, whereas in Matara and Hambantota, the UNP managed to escape with the loss of just one seat each.