After an initial spike in political activity following the proclamation of a presidential election and the drama surrounding the fielding of a common opposition candidate, things seemed to hit a dull patch last week. There’s still almost two weeks to go for nomination day, and both sides obviously did not want to exhaust their energy and resources too early. Election day is almost seven weeks away. Be that as it may, this lull in activity after some initial excitement is good for the incumbent, and not good for the challenger. The onus to maintain the momentum of an election campaign is on the challenger, and the flurry of activity the week before last, with the JVP and UNP both announcing General Fonseka as the common opposition candidate, saw a spike in enthusiasm for the general. But this week, that enthusiasm seemed to die down somewhat. It’s always difficult to maintain momentum in an ‘artificial’ campaign. Why Fonseka’s campaign can be described as an artificial campaign is because, the incumbent president was extremely popular to begin with, and the only reason why Fonseka got a shot at the presidential candidacy is because of that reason. Had Mahinda Rajapaksa been unpopular, general Fonseka would not have got a look in, war hero or not.

So the point is that General Fonseka is not riding an anti-government wave as such. There is no wave except whatever he can create in the next several weeks. This is why this lull in activity is not good for his campaign. If the onus is on him to create waves, well, he has failed to do so in the past week. Someone told the present writer that when a government is as powerful as this, opposition can come only from within. And sure enough, opposition to the Rajapaksa government came not from those opposed to him, but from one who has served under them. We saw a similar phenomenon in the early 1990s, when Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathmudali broke away from the UNP, to spearhead the opposition campaign. But compared to General Fonseka’s task, the challenge faced by Lalith and Gamini was comparatively easy. President Premadasa was an easy target because there was a great deal of resentment against his government and what Gamini and Lalith did was to harness the existing resentment for their purposes.

In this instance, there is no such pre-existing resentment which can be harnessed for Fonseka’s benefit. On the contrary, what we have is pre-existing, overwhelming popularity. As such the task that Fonseka is confronted with is infinitely more difficult than the challenge faced by Gamini and Lalith in the early 1990s. Fonseka has to create the all important resentment from scratch and within a period of about seven weeks – a Herculean task. Quite apart from winning, if Fonseka is to even give a good account of himself, he will have to have a campaign that barrels forward with unstoppable momentum from the beginning to the end. But that’s not what we see here. The week before last, there was a lot of fizz as the opposition announced their common candidate. But last week, things went flat again. Once you allow things to die down, it may be difficult to get things going again. In any case, a campaign that goes forward in fits and starts, will not achieve the result some people expect. UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe will be going overseas again for a week, and things may remain flat until he returns.

Mutual apologies

Somawansa Amarasinghe cannot possibly be unaware of this. So what this indicates is that they are preparing to clobber the government with whatever comes to hand in order to improve Fonseka’s prospects. The JVP has been remarkably flexible and playing a game of realpolitik in agreeing to field Sarath Fonseka as a common candidate along with their bete noir, the UNP. For the JVP to cooperate with the SLFP was not out of the ordinary as their ideologies mesh to some extent. The SLFP and the left movement have been traditional recruitment grounds for the JVP. But for them to join the UNP in a common political endeavour is nothing less than a revolutionary departure from past practice. Around 18 joint public rallies of the JVP and UNP have been planned to promote the candidacy of General Fonseka. And at these meetings, it will not be the second rankers of both parties who will be addressing the crowds, but the party leaders, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Somawansa Amarasinghe as well.

I still remember a public meeting at Hyde Park in 1983, or thereabouts, when the JVP and the LSSP came together for some purpose which, if I remember correctly, was to contest the local government elections of that year. That was the first time the LSSP appeared on the same platform with the JVP after the 1971 insurgency where the LSSP leader Dr N.M.Perera described the JVP as ‘CIA agents’ and fully endorsed the SLFP led government’s brutal crackdown on the insurgents. The speaker who represented the LSSP at that rally at Hyde Park was Athauda Seneviratne. The highlight of the rally was Seneviratne apologizing to Rohana Wijeweera, for wrongs done by the LSSP to the JVP in the past (meaning 1971) to wild cheering from the crowd. Likewise, if Ranil Wickremesinghe and Somawansa Amarasinghe are going to appear on the same stage on at least 18 occasions, both of them will not be able to pretend that nothing happened between them in the past. Amarasinghe will have to apologise for what the JVP did to the UNP, and Ranil Wickremesinghe will have to apologise for what the UNP government did to the JVP and these mutual apologies will be the highlight of those rallies.

Coming back to the question of flexibility, we see that the JVP has been willing to promote the perpetuation of what in their view should be considered a tool of western imperialism in the form of the GSP+ concession. Then they have been willing to field the same presidential candidate as the UNP and even appear on the same platform as the party of the bourgeoisie. The question is that this flexibility does not mesh with the rigidity they showed vis-a-vis cooperating with the UPFA government. If one peruses the whole debate that raged within the JVP in the wake of the victory of Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005, publicized by Wimal Weerawansa as a book titled "Nettha wenuwata ettha", the reason the JVP decided not to be a part of the government they helped form was over a question of Marxist orthodoxy. The authenticity of Weerawansa’s book was proved by the JVP itself when they went to courts against the book saying that it contained confidential documents of the JVP. The point is if they were so rigid and inflexible with regard to the SLFP led coalition, which is also their natural recruiting ground, why aren’t they as rigid when it comes to the UNP?

Power motive

The only explanation can be, that the JVP is still sticking to its founding principles. The JVP is the only Marxist political party in this country that sought to capture political power in their own right. This is the only Marxist political party that has shown a consistent dislike for becoming an appendage of centre left parties. In 1971 and again in the 1980s, the JVP had a separate class to indoctrinate recruits about the betrayals of the traditional left parties which went in for a policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie. This aversion for collaboration is so ingrained within the JVP that it deliberately rejected opportunities in that direction and did not drift into being an appendage of the SLFP in 2001 when they formed the ‘pariwasa’ government with Chandrika Kumaratunga and in 2004 when they overthrew the UNP government and formed a government with CBK. But the JVP left that government a short while later and began to collaborate with the UPFA again only to get Mahinda elected president. However they left his government as well. The JVP thus never became an appendage of the SLFP as was widely expected.

Even at tremendous cost to their voter base, the JVP has managed to remain independent. This independence would be of no use to them unless it’s a part of their four decade quest for power. The new strategy appears to be one of working the system to their best advantage. If the JVP is to thrive or capture power as an independent entity, it has to undermine the existing mainline parties by ensuring that neither of them can rule the country. So the JVP helps bring the UPFA into power and then opposes it. Likewise they will now try to bring the UNP into power only to oppose it immediately afterwards. The JVP is not looking at regime change but systemic change. If one thus rocks the boat hard enough, there is the chance that it will tip over. For Lenin to capture power in Russia, forcing the Tsar to abdicate was not enough, they had to get rid of the Kerensky government that succeeded the Tsar as well. What the JVP is engaged in now is the time consuming process of ensuring that neither the SLFP nor the UNP can govern this country.

They have come tantalizingly close to their dream. They have declared a siege on the UPFA and the other side is open ended with a candidate who is not from the UNP. Even in 1988, the JVP’s conditions for halting the insurrection was that parliament should be dissolved and that the presidential and parliamentary elections should both be held together under a caretaker government headed by a retired judge of the supreme court. Now with Wickremesinghe declaring that he does not want to be the prime minister of the caretaker government in the event of a Fonseka victory, the JVP will have what they wanted in 1988, a caretaker government headed by a non-politician, and both the UNP and the SLFP left out in the cold. As a party that believes in systemic change, the JVP thrives in situations of anarchy.

By declaring that he is not interested in becoming the caretaker prime minister in the government formed in the event of General Fonseka’s victory, Ranil Wickremesinghe has made the presidential election completely irrelevant to UNPers in terms of power aspirations. In the event of a Fonseka victory the UNP will have neither the presidency nor the premiership. The question is how will this enthuse the average UNP voter to give of his best to ensure that Fonseka wins? Of course, as S.B.Dissanayake said at the last UNP working committee meeting, Fonseka has not been fielded to win, so there would be no danger in giving up claims to the caretaker premiership. It may also well be the case that giving up claims to the caretaker premiership may be a way of dampening the enthusiasm of UNPers for this election. The extra ‘zing’ that the campaign would have had if there was the expectation of immediate power has thus been lost.

At the 2005 presidential election, Wickremesinghe polled over 4.7 million votes. It’s very unlikely that Fonseka will get as many votes. Once you remove the prospect of immediate power from the election, motivation goes down correspondingly.

Moreover, in Ranil’s case the minority communities vote for him with their eyes shut. You don’t have to labour the point with the minorities if RW is the candidate. But in Fonseka’s case, the minority leaders will have to do a lot of talking to get their constituents to vote for him. In 2005, the LTTE did not want the Tamil people to vote for the UNP. Yet in all areas outside the LTTE’s control, the Tamils voted en masse for Wickremesinghe. It is highly unlikely that such spontaneous support from the minorities would be forthcoming in Fonseka’s case even though he is the anointed candidate of the UNP as well. If Fonseka manages to sell himself to the minorities even half as successfully as Wickremesinghe, that will be an achievement indeed.

When the present columnist says that General Fonseka may not be able get the same number of votes as Wickremesinghe did in 2005, it has to be realized that if Ranil were to contest this time, he too may not get the same number of votes. The reasons of course would be that Wickremesinghe now no longer has a monopoly of the minority vote the way he did in 2005 and anticipation of his victory would not be the same at this election as it was in 2005. Be that as it may, the fact is that if Fonseka fails to get the number of votes that Wickremesinghe got in 2005, that will consolidate Wickremesinghe’s position within the UNP and will put and end to leadership challenges at least until the next presidential election in 2017 because there would then be no viable alternative to Wickremesinghe.

A problem in this election campaign is that there are too many abstractions. The virtues of a parliamentary system of government over the executive presidency, the seventeenth amendment, the independent commissions, the thirteenth amendment and other constitutional delights are not really the stuff of election campaigns. In any event, you can’t really turn a popular government into an unpopular one with such legal abstractions, especially if these legal issues raised have not been weighing heavily on the people. One substantial issue that the opposition does have is corruption. Last week there were indications that these allegations and rumours circulating have begun to bite the first family. When Fonseka spoke at the UNP’s annual convention yesterday, corruption was his main theme. Last week, at a gathering which included heads of media institutions, the president jocularly asked Jeewaka Edirisinghe, the owner of Swarnavahini, whether it was Basil or Gotabhaya who had bought his TV station. The president said that there were rumours to the effect that his family had bought Apollo hospitals, Hotel Ranmal in Panadura, Lalitha Hotel in Matara, the Inter-Continental hotel in Colombo and that they were eyeing the properties belonging to the Ceylinco Group as well. The president had said that he can put an end to these rumours which say that the Rajapaksa brothers have bought certain specific properties, but that he may not be able to put the lid on the talk about Namal’s Aston Martin as Namal keeps telling his female friends about his Aston Martin. He said there was a deliberate campaign to spread these rumours.

Fruitless labours

Last week there were signs that the government had begun answering some of these allegations, with a spokesman for Lanka Hospitals explaining that the hospital belonged to Sri Lanka Insurance Plc and not to Gotabhaya Rajapakse, even though he was recently appointed chairman. The most fiendish of all such allegations is the one leveled at the Rajapaksas by Wickremesinghe himself, to the effect that the Rajapaksas were fleecing Kumaran Pathmanathan of all the LTTE money he controlled! It’s going to be very difficult for the government to meet that allegation. One has to admit that while it may be the case that Wickremesinghe is not an effective leader, he’s an effective disruptor. Even though the Rajapaksa government is undoubtedly the most popular government ever to have held office in this country, Wickremesinghe has managed to bring it to the brink on more than one occasion. Even with half his own parliamentarians sitting with the government, he was able to make the government teeter on the edge at the budget vote in 2007. It was only the JVP’s decision not to vote that saved the day for the government.

Then last year, Wickremesinghe managed to field Janaka Perera in the NCP and create the impression of a fight where no fight really existed. The present presidential election is yet another instance where a fight has been created where no fight really existed. Had Wickremesinghe contested, he would have lost and that is what every UNPer in the country, including obviously Wickremesinghe himself, believed. At yesterday’s UNP convention it was Fonseka who got the loudest cheers and not the master manipulator RW. By fielding Sarath Fonseka, he has managed to up the stakes for the government. By some good fortune, Wickremesinghe has no shortage of cannon fodder to throw against the government, the latest such individual to volunteer his services being General Fonseka. You have to have it in your hororscope to have an unending stream of ‘suicide cadres’ like that. If you look back at our post independence history, no other opposition leader has managed to keep a government teetering on the brink with such meagre political resources actually at his command!

If disruption is the role of an opposition leader, hats off to RW. There is of course something lacking in Wickremesinghe. He can’t be compared to agitators like Vijaya Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa, political ‘gamesmen’ like Gamini Dissanayake or even legendry schemers like J.R.Jayawardene. He seems inferior in comparison with any one of them. Yet Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was the chief agitator of the SLFP, could agitate but he was never able to put the Premadasa government into a flurry the way Wickremesinghe has done to the present government. Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathmudali were able to hassle the Premadasa government only once with the impeachment motion against the president. And they were dealing with a president who was fast losing popularity.

Yet Wickremesinghe, dealing with a government that has been growing in popularity, has been able to cause much anxiety and palpitation within government ranks on at least three occasions – the 2007 budget vote, the fielding of Janaka Perera, and now the fielding of Sarath Fonseka. Even though the fielding of Janaka Perera may not be seen to be much now, at that time, the government had many anxious moments because their chief ministerial candidate Berty Premalal Dissanayake was hardly an inspiring choice in comparison to General Perera. And there was the danger that a defeat for the government in the NCP, would have set off a chain reaction in the other provinces as well. Thus, Wickremesinghe has the luck to find willing cannon fodder and the cunning to use them to his best advantage. But his problem is that he lacks both the luck and the ability to take things beyond that.

Last Sunday the present columnist was not able to watch General Fonseka’s first press conference as the common candidate which was relayed live by a private TV channel as I was busy with my Sinhala column for Monday. After the press conference, I got many calls from UNPers telling me what a good press conference it was and how impressive Fonseka was and I was told that the general was really making an impact on the electorate. But when I watched the re-broadcast of the press conference on Sunday evening, I found that it was an ordinary press conference and nothing more except for the fact that the general may have fielded the questions better than Wickremesinghe. After watching the broadcast, I phoned my UNP friends and told them that this was a party that had seen press conferences conducted by the likes of Ranjan Wijeratne, Lalith Athulathmudali, Gamini Dissanayake, R.Premadasa and others. In that backdrop what was so special about the general’s press conference, except that he may have done a better job than Wickremesinghe?

The problem is that even if Wickremesinghe had conducted himself just as well as Fonseka, (and his public speaking has improved phenomenally in recent times) nobody would say that he has done well because he is now so discredited. Wickremesinghe was notorious for his gaffes. But the politically inexperienced general is no better in this respect. The comment he made to the effect that he was willing to accept money even from Prabhakaran’s parents will not go down well with the very vote he is trying to attract. Even the ordinary soldiers who are his natural constituency will be left wondering, "We don’t need LTTE money, how come he does?" One can be certain that this gaffe will be made use of as the campaign comes to a close.

Coming from a military leader, who still occupies the official residence of the army commander, such a comment is far worse than any comments on Thoppigala, Pamankada vs Alimankada or of ‘gonnu’ conducting wars made by politicians. Had Wickremesinghe made such a comment, his campaign would be dead in the water by now. This is Wickremesinghe’s dilemma. Because of his repeated failures, people tend to judge him much more harshly than they do others who may make even worse mistakes. This is what it means to be a discredited leader – people are just waiting for an opportunity to find fault with you. Losing once too often has its consequences.