The joint opposition held its maiden rally in Kandy, with what was described as an unprecedented crowd in attendance. This column has stressed repeatedly that it is entirely up to the opposition to drum up a campaign if they are to win, and as far as this goes, the maiden rally in Kandy was undoubtedly a success. Ranil Wickremesinghe, as has become usual now, was the star orator on stage. For the first time since he became leader of the UNP, Wickremesinghe can now be described as a wanted feature on the opposition stage because he is the only orator left in the entire opposition. These certainly are positive signs for the opposition and personally for the opposition leader as well. But several disturbing signs emerged at last Friday’s joint opposition rally. The UNP, as the main opposition party, would do well to take serious note of these matters.

Kandy town is a bastion of the UNP and that was obviously why this location was chosen for the maiden rally of the joint opposition campaign. However, the venue of the meeting was decorated almost entirely in red, with only a sprinkling of green. The ratio would be 90% red and less than 10% green. If one looks at the number of votes commanded by the two main opposition parties, the ratio should have been the other way about, with 90% green and 10% red. The construction of the stage and the decorations had been done by the JVP. Since they are in charge of the poster campaign as well, it can be seen that the JVP has seized the initiative in the ground level campaign and it will be the red JVP that will be the most visible feature of the joint opposition campaign.

Even though the entire venue was a sea of red, it was the UNP that dominated the stage. The agenda of these joint meetings (totaling 18 in the various districts) will be decided by UNP general secretary Tissa Attanayake and JVP parliamentary group leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake except in the east, where the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress will have a major say. At last Friday’s rally in Kandy, only Somawansa Amarasinghe addressed the crowd on behalf of the JVP, even though JVP leaders Tilvin Silva, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, and Vijitha Herath were also present on stage. Most of those who spoke were from the UNP. Apart from Wickremesinghe, all the Kandy district UNP parliamentarians were given slots to speak. Abdul Cader, Tissa Attanayake and Lakshman Kirella all addressed the meeting.

Many UNPers are happy that they dominate the joint opposition stage. The JVP understands the mentality of bourgeois politicians well. The typical bourgeois politician in the UNP or even the SLFP usually measures the extent of the prominence he has been given by whether he has been given time to speak at a rally. To the average bourgeois politician, it’s not the decorations or the crowds at the venue that matters, - an average crowd would do fine - but whether he has been given a slot to address the crowd. Also important is the seating arrangement on the stage. It matters a great deal whether you are placed close to the party leader or the presidential candidate on the stage. It also matters whether you are in the front row. The JVP has been giving in to all these protocol requirements of UNP politicians to get them performing on their stage. If there is no speech, the average UNP politician will walk out of the meeting no matter how well decorated the venue or how big the crowd. There is some sense in this too because some politicians cannot simply afford to be seen at the meeting and not address the crowd. The usual formula is no speech, no presence. Sajith Premadasa was not present at the joint opposition rally in Kandy. He had not been assigned a slot to speak. The JVP has bent over backwards to accommodate the UNP’s speakers, even to the exclusion of their own.

Nobody seems to realize what is going on here. One has to understand the mindset of the JVP to understand what is happening. In early 1983 or thereabouts, the JVP and the LSSP came together to (if I remember correctly) contest the local government elections held that year. At that time, the JVP and the LSSP held a joint rally at Hyde Park which was as usual dominated by the JVP, but pride of place was given to the LSSP representative Athauda Seneviratne. The JVPers present hugely enjoyed the spectacle of a former enemy speaking on their stage and Seneviratne’s speech was greeted with wild cheering. This is basically what happened at Friday’s rally in Kandy as well. The decorations were by the JVP and so was the better part of the crowd. The JVP can bring crowds from all over the country with much less expenditure than both the two mainline parties. When I asked one prominent UNPer who attended the Kandy rally as to what proportion of the crowd was UNP, his answer was that "At least 50% was UNP."

Having brought the crowds to swell the meeting and decorated the entire venue in their colours, the JVP was content to take a back seat and allow the representatives of the UNP to speak at what was essentially a JVP show. Since it is the UNP that has the votes, there was no point in the JVP dominating the stage as UNPers will not respond to their speeches. So they allowed the UNPers to speak at the meeting in order to make them persuade voters to vote for the presidential candidate of the JVP’s choice. The JVP was the first to announce Sarath Fonseka as their chosen candidate and from that moment, they had basically hijacked the show. The UNP is happy because they don’t have to do any work at the ground level and they get all the speeches on stage. But this is a ‘crabs in the pot’ kind of satisfaction. The protocol established at the Kandy rally will be the established pattern throughout the country at the 18 district level meetings of the joint opposition.

What has happened here is that the UNP has been stripped of the elephant symbol, the green colour has been relegated to a mere border line on a canvass of red and the UNP leader and parliamentarians have been made to perform on the JVP stage to garner votes for a candidate chosen initially at least, by the JVP. If this was an isolated election, the damage could have been contained. But a parliamentary election is due on the heels of the presidential election and UNPers performing on a JVP stage is not going to be of any advantage to the UNP. The fortunate thing for the UNP is that there is such a wide ideological and attitudinal gap between the average JVP voter and the UNP voter that there is little danger of the UNP losing its existing vote base to the JVP.

Even the JVP cannot be so naïve as to expect even a part of the existing UNP vote base to vote for them. Rather, what they are targeting is the floating voter, the new voters and the opportunistic section of the voting public which would like to back a rising star. From its very inception the JVP had two methods of making a bid for power. One of course was the armed struggle. The other was showmanship – the strategy of attracting votes by organizing huge rallies and giving the opportunistic and faint hearted sections of the voting public the impression that they were the wave of the future. Having done this once too often, it had come to a stage where the public had ceased to be deceived by the JVP’s shows of strength. Even the most ignorant voter knew that the numbers attending JVP rallies was no indication of the number of votes they will poll at an election. So this strategy was no longer of any practical use to the JVP.

But now, by getting the UNP to abandon their elephant symbol and green colour and perform on a stage that is obviously JVP, they have managed to regain the attention of the public. The interesting thing to see will be what effect this JVP dominance of the campaign will have on the UNP come a parliamentary election. By then, those who will be riding high and be most visible at the ground level will be the JVP. A parliamentary election can come at any moment. Given the fact that parliament stands automatically dissolved four months from now, the president may well get up from his daily nap one day and declare that parliament will be dissolved. The point is that if parliament is dissolved before the conclusion of the presidential election, the UNP will be caught with their pants down, riding as passengers in a bus driven by the JVP.

The last couple of weeks saw a few crossovers, but there were no surprises. In the case of Johnston Fernando and Indika Bandaranayake, it was inevitable that they would have to leave the party once they got into the bad books of the party leader. SB was out from the day he was deprived of the UNP’s presidential candidacy. In the case of Wijedasa Rajpakshe he was out of the UPFA since 2007 and functioning as an independent MP in parliament. In Arjuna Ranatunga’s case, the only reason why he remained within the UPFA after 2007 was not to blast his brother Prasanna Ranatunga’s chances of becoming the chief minister of the western province. In many ways this campaign has been proceeding on predictable lines.

This election campaign will no doubt be a rather odd experience for the UNP and especially the party rank and file. The UNP has no previous experience of having their election campaign hijacked. Usually it’s the UNP’s ground level activists who paste posters, decorate towns, put up cutouts of candidates, go canvassing and enjoy the free food, liquor and money doled out at election time. Election time gets the adrenalin pumping in the average UNP village yokel and everybody looks forward to it. This time around however, even the UNP village level activists will be passengers as much as their national leaders. Basically the JVP now has the UNP in a red van. Ideally, they would like to do the UNP in and be the only opposition force standing against Rajapakse government. Whether they will succeed in this, at least partially, will be seen only in the coming months.

Friday’s joint opposition meeting in Kandy where the JVP and the UNP – two diametrically opposed parties in the political spectrum - appeared on the same stage was a historic occasion which nobody expected to see within their lifetimes - but even that failed to produce the necessary spark to get the fire going. The joint opposition campaign is still in the ‘switch on, switch off’ mode. When there is a rally, there’s heat, but the moment the rally ends, the heat dissipates. People said what they had to say and went home and that was that. One thing that the opposition has certainly succeeded in doing has been to rile the government on the corruption issue, so much so that the president felt compelled to pledge that he would bring corruption under control the same way he brought terrorism under control. What that amounts to is a public acknowledgement of the fact that corruption exists. The corruption that the joint opposition has been talking about is not just the alleged skimming off of commissions on contracts, but also the misuse of state property.

One particular misuse of state property and the tax payers’ money that the opposition has focused on is the president’s habit of feeding thousands of people at Temple Trees where various sections of society (including journalists) are invited in their thousands and after a speech by the president, everybody is given a good meal. The question posed by the opposition is, who is paying for all this food? Obviously it is the presidential establishment that picks up the tab and not a party fund. When the president was in Kandy in the run up to the central province elections, he fed thousands of people and this was clearly a case of winning hearts and minds at election time, using state resources. The scale on which Rajapakse feeds people is mind boggling. Thousands upon thousands are invited, and the president goes from table to table talking to everybody while they eat.

One may safely say that during his four years in office, president Rajapakse may well have fed more people than had been fed by all the prime ministers and presidents of post independence Sri Lanka put together - and all of it at state expense. Last week we saw the president responding to criticism of his policy of feeding thousands with the contention that it was customary for people to offer a meal to those who come to one’s house. In a way he’s right. Even at family functions at the Rajapakse residence in Medamulana, apart from the invitees, there would be hundreds of villagers who would come to the house, have their meal, wash their plates and leave. This is an open house policy maintained by all politicians who are close to the people. One reason why Ranil Wickremesinghe is seen to be distant and unfriendly is because he’s not known to offer so much as a glass of water to anyone. If you take the last people-friendly leader that the UNP had, president D.B.Wijetunga, he too maintained an open house policy both at his official residence and his private home in Kandy.

Whenever anybody came to see President Wijetunga, the first thing he would do, would be to order tea for the visitor. If it was meal time, the president would insist that the visitor have a meal before he left. Even his private residence in Pilimatalawa had a kitchen and dining area designed to feed large numbers of people. Of course President Wijetunga never fed people on the same scale as President Rajapakse, but the underlying principle is the same. There is an inner compulsion to see that whoever comes, is given the customary Sinhala ‘aaganthuka satkara’. The president is fortunate that he has an establishment which pays for all the aaganthuka sathkara he does. The question is whether this is acceptable or not, especially at election time. Last week President Rajapakse addressing members of the judiciary said that one cannot legislate customs and traditions out of existence.

One may question whether there should be a ceiling on presidential food bills and whether the president should be forced to meet expenditure for his ‘aaganthuka sathkara’ out of a political fund and not at the cost of the taxpayer. What President Rajapakse has been doing is giving thousands of Sri Lankan taxpayers a ‘Dutch treat’ where the invitees actually pay for their own food. If the cost of a meal is Rs 1,000 per head, even a beggar would pay more than Rs 1,000 a month to the government in indirect taxes. Thus, all those who are given a meal by the president at state expense, have actually paid for their own meal – but so have numerous others not invited for the feast!

The opposition may portray this as an abuse of state funds as indeed it is. But it’s a very people friendly abuse of funds. This is a meal with a difference – it’s at the president’s residence and with the president himself in attendance. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for many people to be able to break bread with the head of state. People like to break bread with the high and mighty. When LTTE suicide cadres went on missions, the privilege they got was a meal with Prabhakaran. People value such opportunities. The fact is that none of those taxpayers who have been fed by President Rajapakse at taxpayers’ expense would resent their money having been spent for such a purpose. Having a meal with the head of state would be a dream for many ordinary people and trying to place book-keeper like obstacles in the way of people getting such a rare opportunity itself shows how out of step the opposition is with the likes and dislikes of the people.

Having a meal with the head of state or at least being able to see him at close quarters is a major event in people’s lives - like buying a new car, getting a job, or a promotion. The photographs that people have taken with various leaders and heads of state/government occupy pride of place in many homes. In the opinion of the present columnist, if some taxpayers money has been spent on the good purpose of providing thousands of people an opportunity to meet and talk to the head of state, that may be considered money well spent as it helps the people to get closer to the ruling powers. Had Chandrika Kumaratunga done what Rajapakse is doing, her rule would have appeared much less dictatorial, because those who are invited for presidential meals are not party loyalists, but cross sections of society - trishaw drivers, health workers, trade unionists, various professionals and the like.

All this while, everybody thought that the politician who had an almost incurable tendency to put his foot in his mouth was Ranil Wickremesinghe. So much so that most UNP local government, provincial and parliamentary candidates openly showed a preference not to have Wickremesinghe participating too actively in their election campaigns. It was because of this, that Ranil was able to get away with the scandalous situation of a party leader spending only one and a half days in the Uva provincial council election campaign – half a day in the Moneragala district and one day in the Badulla district. However the UNP candidates did not seem to mind the absence of their leader on their platforms – they felt much safer without him as he had a tendency to make various gaffes. It was inevitable that this dislike for having Wickremesinghe on their platforms would soon translate into a dislike for having Wickremesinghe as a candidate at elections as well.

We can now see in hindsight, how trivial were the gaffes made by Wickremesinghe in comparison to the gaffes made by the inexperienced Sarath Fonseka. Ranil’s gaffes related to giving young people bracelets, making peasants chew gum instead of betel, asking people to vote on the 18th, instead of the 8th, and so on. The most serious gaffe attributed to Wickremesinghe was the comment on Thoppigala being just an unimportant patch of jungle. But even this was completely innocuous in comparison with the major gaffes made by Fonseka even before nominations were handed in. That comment of his, where he was captured on camera telling journalists that he needed money for his campaign and that he was willing to accept campaign contributions even from Prabahakaran’s parents would have floored a lesser candidate. Had Wickremesinghe made a comment like that, his presidential election campaign would have ended even before it had begun.

The only reason that Fonseka had managed to survive such a major gaffe was because of his credentials in having been a leader of the team that won the war. Fonseka began the week that ended, with an even bigger gaffe by telling the Sunday Leader in an interview that Gotabhaya Rajapakse had ordered the killing of surrendering LTTE cadres. Almost from day one, joint opposition speakers have had to do damage control operations on behalf of the general. With such ill-advised comments, Fonseka has sent the very constituency he had been wooing, into a daze. There’s around six weeks more to go for election day, and it would appear that by the time this presidential election ends, people will be screaming to have Wickremesinghe back – the gaffes he makes are much less serious.