President Mahinda Rajapakse is odds-on favourite to win a second term and the UPFA has a fair chance of securing a parliamentary majority though two-thirds is pie in the sky – parliamentary elections must be held before April 2010. Notwithstanding, the ruling outfit is in a paroxysm of panic! What on earth is wrong? The remote prospect of electoral defeat can’t, in itself, discombobulate the regime this much? Sri Lanka has seen more changes of government than I can count except when very sober, and we have had a switch of presidential party in 1994 when the ruling UNP was defeated by an SLFP led Peoples’ Alliance candidate. The prospect of the incumbent president or party being defeated cannot alone explain the intense and menacing atmosphere of these days. I will approach this paradox at several levels of a layered political discourse; most significant is the question of the state which I leave to the last.

The high point of the regime was the immediate morrow of war victory, but that was too early in the electoral calendar. The administration had to wait, but it has been all downhill since, first slow and then steeper descent. A combination of factors contributed to slippage; backtracking on the Tamil issue, diaspora campaigns, unconcealed American and European hostlity, the GSP+ crisis, the US State Department Report pointing to alleged war crimes, a tough reprimand from the EU Commission and Parliament, and now an unfolding strike wave in state corporations. At first the regime was confident that it could ride through; refusing concessions to the Tamils was popular in the triumphal Sinhala mind and saying boo to the Indian goose served primordial prejudices. ‘Standing up to the West’ warmed nationalist hearts and buttressed popularity.

Then, the government began to buckle, initially under the pressure of the GSP+ issue; if Sri Lanka loses GSP+ the blow to employment will be painful, and the regime, not the EU, will bear the eventual brunt of public fury. The EU’s criticisms relate to human rights hence coincidence with the alarming State Department report triggered much anxiety. Then came Hilary Clinton’s rape bombshell from the Chair of the UN Security Council. The bit of back-tracking – "she meant before 2005" – was for local consumption, the world at large did not hear it, the damage was done. Secretaries of State do not make slips when chairing the Security Council; a Rubicon has been crossed, the Western powers and the Rajapakse Administration are now in thinly veiled confrontation. Sun Tze would have been mortified by the government’s amateurish antics from start to finish.

What finally drove all the Rajapakses to panic stations was speculation that a retiring military officer will stand as presidential candidate. Now, different media outlets have different policies about naming names, but Juliet has assured us that whatever the nomenclature, a rose still smells fine. Some papers splash names across the page, others snip a bit here and there, but the story is no longer a secret to even the deaf and the blind, so I can get by without holding an identity parade.

When this matter came into the open the Administration threatened the media with a ludicrous gag order which most websites and some newspapers thumbed their noses at. The consequence; the Administration’s state of funk became public knowledge. The reason; obvious, but to repeat: War victory is the opium of the Sinhala masses; therefore a candidate who can split this delirium soaked vote down the middle is a threat to the incumbent.

There are three layers of anxiety; the dynastic, the governmental and the dilemma of state power. There also are three electoral challenges; the presidency, a parliamentary majority, and thirdly, securing a two-thirds majority to write a new constitution. Whoever the challenger, Rajapakse is expected to win the presidency, and in any case if the going gets tough he can drop the early election option and take a rain-check for up to two years.

The dynastic presumption is that the Rajapakses seek to perpetuate their blood line in power for which purpose a new constitution, that is a two-thirds majority in parliament, is needed. The government’s popularity is waning, the minorities are bitter, foreign criticism is mounting, India may play its own game, the new pretender may jinx the applecart; two-thirds seems out of the question. Dynastic ambition then hits a stone wall. What dangers prowl in six years, if not earlier, even with a second-term secured? Is the copybook spotless; what ghosts may lurk? It bodes ill that the serving Chief of Defence Staff has been "invited" for an interview by the US Department of Homeland Security – what next, who next?

Securing a parliamentary simple majority is not a negligible challenge either. If the Joint Opposition, the minorities, and the left including the JVP get their act together, it will be no plain sailing for the UPFA. A slim parliamentary majority will leave the administration exposed to an obstreperous opposition in parliament and the country at large. Paradoxically, this government seems to be so strong, yet it is also so weak! This is to do with the nature of state power in nations of crisis – not Sri Lanka alone, but all regimes of crisis. Confucius would have rebuked them all as scoundrels. Corruption, larceny, abuse of power, kidnapping, assassination, electoral fraud and misuse of state property, such a legacy is dangerous for Ministers, MPs, corporate crooks and hangers-on. They cannot let go the reins of power, the noose will swing and prisons fill; vide Mugabe and ZANU-PF. The crisis of democracy, then, is when governments dare not lose power!

Finally, to the state. Categories are solemn entities, not to be thrown around in anger, misused, or exploited in half-truths. Therefore when I describe the state in Sri Lanka as a Sinhala State, I do so as a considered portrayal of a theoretically validated category. A state becomes what it is through a historical process; the ephemeral and elitist bourgeois democratic state that put in an appearance at Independence, morphed into what it is now, through a process. The overdetermining aspect of society and state for half a century has been the national question, the unresolved ethnic issue, the Tamil question, choose what terminology you will. In this milieu, the state transformed in a process that evolved over about twenty post-independence years, the makeover visibly manifest in every sphere; the institutions of state power, the constitutions, the ethnic composition of governments, and the hegemonic national ideology. Social and economic changes in Sinhala society led the way, but the LTTE by its ruinous and exclusive obsession with armed depredations helped the process no end. In passing then, another paradox; the militarist hyperactivity of the "boys" lulled the Tamil people into political torpor.

The civilisational belief system of a society constitutes the foundational ideology of its state. This is a topic deserving of a book in its own right, but I can spare space for no more than a few sentences. Zionism in Israel is the starkest; but in Lanka, though less stark, there exists a Sinhala majoritarian ideology rooted in lore, mythology and own community. This is fine if it was that of a community alone, not hegemonic over a land peopled by carriers of many identities. The historical, demographic and socio-economic aetiology of the processes through which this ideology came to dominate a whole multi-ethnic country is a much told narrative. One aspect stands out above others; the state, in its avatar as Sinhala State, could never countenance the ‘other’, the Tamil other, manifesting itself as another devolved territorial identity – federalism, autonomy or whatever. The ‘await the presidential election’ version of this same great game of denial is in play again.

A short summary of the structural transformations that denote the Sinhala State will also be enlightening. Of the institutions of state power, the military and police are, in the former case exclusively, the latter overwhelmingly, mono-ethnic, as decreed by the process; the imperatives of ethnic conflict. The centralised administration, its language and its mores are essentially Sinhala, not Sinhala-Tamil. All governments since 1970 have been de facto Sinhala, the token Tamil minister or two simply ornaments; all of them Karunas before the eponymous joker came along. The 1972 and 1978 constitutions perfected the alienation of the Tamils from both government and state. An ethnic civil war was the final nail in the coffin of presumptions of multi-ethnic bourgeois democracy. To complete this thumbnail sketch of the categorisation of the state as Sinhala and not national, I would need to deal with the alienation of the Muslims and the Upcountry Tamils as well. This is too big an addendum for a short article; suffice it to say that alienation is a fact for the Upcountry Tamils, in the case of the Muslims it is a more complex story.

When the ideology and structures of a mono-ethnic state, of however numerous a majority, reigns over a multi-ethnic realm, then, in the modern world, a regime of crisis is born; Israel, many African, Balkan and Central Asian countries and several in the Caucuses, are also examples. In ancient times, slaughter and enslavement of males and concubinage of females was a tested solution to an overflowing demographic inventory, but this is no longer permitted. Hence we are stuck with a state in perennial crisis; Machiavelli would have cried out Shame! In these conditions, dynastic ambitions take root, corruption finds fertile terrain to prosper, and governments too petrified to lose office, flourish. This is an irresolvable predicament with no way out, short of revolutionary transformation.