What Sri Lanka just emerged from was not an election but the gravest danger to democracy that this country has faced since universal franchise was introduced around 80 years ago. Ironically, just weeks before Sarath Fonseka was anointed the common opposition candidate, UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe put out a 30 page pamphlet titled Anagatha Abhiyoga (Future Challenges). This pamphlet was released amidst much fanfare even though most people have completely forgotten about it by now. It was released at a time when speculation about General Fonseka’s impending entry into politics had reached a fever pitch. Wickremesinghe’s pamphlet contained a warning. He said that when on a trip to Germany, he noticed a clause in the German constitution which prohibited the using of democracy to undermine democracy. Upon making inquiries about this curious clause, he had been told that Hitler had first come to power through a democratic election and had then destroyed democracy completely and this was the reason for having such a clause in the German constitution.

Everyone knows that even though Sri Lanka has had autocratic leaders elected to power, none of them had destroyed the democratic system and they had relinquished power when defeated at an election. Examples would be Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike in 1977 and Chandrika Kumaratunga in 2001. So obviously Wickremesinghe was not referring to the past but a possible scenario in the future. If by mentioning this clause in the German constitution Wickremesinghe was trying to send a signal to his party, the import of it was lost in the headlong rush of the UNP (and its allies) to find a ‘winning’ candidate. With the UNP Chairman Jayawickrema Perera himself saying that 99% of his constituents wanted Fonseka as the presidential candidate, the voice of caution was lost and Anagatha Abhiyoga which looked for all the world like an election manifesto was relegated to the dustbin.

On the one hand, it is certainly true that Wickremesinghe did want to avoid contesting President Rajpakse in 2010 so that he could save himself for 2017 when Mahinda Rajapakse would not be able to contest anymore. But he may have had concerns about who the alternative candidate would be and as to whether he would be able to reassert control over the party after fielding such an alternative. In this context, Sarath Fonseka was Wickremesinghe’s worst nightmare come true. Once Fonseka offered himself as the common candidate, Wickremesinghe had two choices; to accept him and hope he would not win or to reject Fonseka and run the risk of being so soundly defeated that his future prospects would be blasted completely. Had he run against Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010, there was the distinct possibility that Wickremesinghe would poll less than Mrs Srima Dissanayake in 1994. So he took the risk of agreeing to Fonseka’s offer.

 Vulpine subterfuge

For Wickremesinghe’s good fortune the unease that he gave expression to in Anagatha Abhiyoga found an echo throughout society. From the very beginning, crucial segments of the population kept away from Fonseka’s campaign in a manner unprecedented at any previous election. Ninety nine percent of all artistes openly aligned themselves with Rajapaksa. The UNP always had their own artistes, but none of them were in evidence in Fonseka’s campaign. Even minor starlets kept away except for one teledrama actress. Others like Rukantha Gunatilleke, who had been long identified with the UNP, were seen on Rajapaksa’s stage. Also, not a single mainline Buddhist monk identified himself with Fonseka. There were no university dons or other intellectuals either. Not a single mainline astrologer came forward to predict a Fonseka victory. In this sense, a groundswell against Fonseka was evident from the moment he entered politics. Quite apart from the general unease that civil society would feel at a military man coming straight into politics and indeed handing in nominations as the occupant of General’s House, there was also the fact that people were neither deaf nor blind, even though some opposition politicians obviously thought they were. The people had repeatedly and resoundingly rejected the politicians and political parties that had made Fonseka their common candidate and it was silly to expect them to forget that fact merely because they had been able to persuade Fonseka to be their mascot.

There would have been some hope if Fonseka had been able to visibly reform these politicians and political parties and made their policies and outlook more attractive to the people. Instead, what they saw happening in front of their very eyes was Fonseka changing to resemble his new found friends. For months and years the people had heard these opposition politicians ridiculing, criticizing and making allegations against the president, defence secretary and army commander among others. After nomination day they saw Fonseka out-doing all those politicians in that activity. Earlier there was only envy and desperation at being outshone; now there was a new element of undisguised hate and malice, the likes of which no one has seen in politics in living memory. Then there were the threats following fast upon one another to, court martial war heroes in the army, to sack unpliant DIGs, and to put all and sundry into either Welikada or Bogambara. Never did any opposition in the post independence history of this country seek a mandate in this manner to sack, imprison and destroy.

The ‘revelation’ made by Fonseka to the Sunday Leader and later confirmed in his public speeches that Gotabhaya Rajapakse had ordered Shavendra Silva to kill surrendering LTTE leaders, also cut deep. You can’t really expect a turncoat openly ratting on his erstwhile superiors and subordinates to be popular especially in a situation where the people’s heroes were under the threat of war crimes investigations overseas. Besides, this mandate was being sought to destroy those the people had carefully and deliberately elected to power to fulfill a certain agenda. And on whose behalf was this destruction to be carried out but the very forces the people had repeatedly and deliberately rejected – the signers of ceasefire agreements, the ridiculers of the war effort, those perceived to be lackeys of foreign powers and the promoters of separatism (the TNA). It was incredibly naïve to expect the people to see only Fonseka and not the company he kept.

 Demonic frenzy

Every blood curdling threat uttered by Fonseka from the public stage was wildly cheered by the crowds at his meetings. Even the more level headed UNPers were caught up in the demonic frenzy unleashed. At offices and workplaces and in other gatherings, we began to hear comments from UNPers very similar to those emanating from Fonseka "We’ll see after the 27th!" "Balagannam!" and so on. During the past decade we have seen three shifts of power from Chandrika to Ranil in 2001, from Ranil back to Chandrika in 2004 and from Chandrika to Mahinda in 2005. At none of these changes of government did we hear one side threatening the other side openly with reprisals. No UNPer did that even in 2001 when reprisals against the Chandrika Kumaratunga government would have been justified, after seven years of relentless persecution. One may criticize Wickremesinghe for being weak, insensitive and downright foolish. But at least he’s not a raving madman. Indeed we never had a situation like this even in 1994, when the SLFP came back into power after a long period in the wilderness. For all practical purposes, it did seem as if the forces of darkness were gathering to destroy democracy through democracy as Wickremesinghe had ominously referred to in his pamphlet Anagatha Abhiyoga.

The UPFA’s propaganda campaign was a complete flop. There was no centrally managed propaganda thrust and what we saw was a lot of people doing their own thing, with little or no co-ordination between them. In this election campaign, the UPFA should have had the upper hand in the propaganda campaign from day one. But they were floundering helplessly without being able to even answer the false allegations made against the government. It was this visible chaos in the governing camp with people running around like headless chickens that gave the opposition candidate the smell of victory and having scented blood, the baying became louder and more unrestrained in expectation of certain victory. The ordinary voter in this country did his own home work and his own thinking without much help from the government and came to his own conclusions about the allegations of corruption made against the government and the risk to the country if Fonseka was to come into power. It is on this basis that they went in unprecedented numbers and voted for Mahinda. There was never a more genuine vote than this. It was clearly a vote for stability as against the reprisals, hate and anarchy promised by the opposition candidate.

 ECD targeted

Mangala Samaraweera held a press conference at his Rajagiriya office on Thursday. The gist of what he told the assembled media was that the election was rigged. He explained that rigging nowadays was not an unsophisticated operation where gun wielding goons invade polling booths and stuff the ballot boxes or switch ballot boxes in transit to the counting centers. What he said was that this time it was not goons who were involved but tie-wearing senior presiding officers of the elections office who in exchange for huge bribes had doctored the result. What he said was that at the counting centers ballot papers are divided into separate piles for each candidate and every fifty ballot papers are tied into bundles. In this process, he said, ballots cast for the betel leaf had been placed over bundles of ballots cast for the swan and in this manner a huge electoral fraud perpetrated. He also said that the results had been doctored on the computers as well.

 I do not wish to make any comment on what Samaraweera said at this press conference other than to say that listening to him, I realized why the long suffering elections commissioner is girding his loins and preparing to flee for dear life. At a press conference held before the election, the commissioner was scathing in his criticism of politicians who say they are definitely going to win before the elections and then when they fail to get elected, raise objections. The commissioner knows that since nothing happened at the polling booths or in transit to the counting centers, they are going to come for the elections department itself. The last time the UNP lost in 2005, the excuse trotted out by Wickremesinghe’s spin doctors was that Mangala Samaraweera and the JVP had got together and with the collusion of the grama sevakas, had removed many UNP voters from the electoral lists.

Now that both Samaraweera and the JVP are on their side, they can’t concoct a theory like that. The only target left is the elections commissioner’s department. The groundwork was laid for this by Janaka Perera after his defeat at the north central province elections in 2008 when he claimed that some hanky panky (unspecified) had taken place after the ballot boxes had been taken to the counting centers. What Samaraweera related last week was a more detailed version of the same story. The elections commissioner obviously saw this coming and this is a part of the stress that he was talking about. As a thirteen year old, I can still remember Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike’s speech after her humiliating defeat at the 1977 elections where she accepted the people’s verdict and bowed out gracefully. I can’t remember her saying that her defeat was due to electoral malpractices. Obviously we live in a different era when accepting defeat is seen to be unacceptable.

The present columnist said from the beginning of this election campaign that Sarath Fonseka was going to lose and that he would never get the same number of votes that Ranil Wickremesinghe got at the 2005 presidential elections. Both those predictions have come true. The grounds on which I made this prediction need not be repeated here; but let it be said that Wickremesinghe and Fonseka himself played a vital role in making my predictions come true – to a much larger extent than I could have anticipated. Even though Fonseka’s entry into politics appeared to generate a great deal of enthusiasm, those enthused were those of a UNP or JVP or anti-government bent anyway. Fonseka’s strength was in being able to galvanize and infuse hope into the anti-government voter. Where he failed was in frightening away the floating voter and the new vote and possibly a section of the anti government vote itself with his hate and fury.

Many people feel that Ranil Wckremesinghe may have tried to do to Fonseka what the Bandaranaike family did to Hector Kobbekaduwa because a victory for Fonseka would have ended Wickremesinghe’s own career. There’s no doubt that certain very subtle moves were afoot to undermine the ‘common’ candidate which the politically inexperienced Fonseka would never have detected as sabotage. One of the most immediate instances that comes to mind is that ill-conceived promise of a Rs. 10,000 increase in public service salaries. The UNP itself would never have made such a promise as they know that they would never be believed. In any case the UNP and Ranil personally would not want his credibility damaged by giving unrealistic promises. His pamphlet Anagatha Abhiyoga which was in effect his manifesto was a model of sobriety.

The dead ropes

But the UNP included this 10,000 salary increase in the common candidate’s manifesto. Any state employee, down to the humble peons are well aware that such a promise will never be kept – the end result was that the very target audience at which the 10,000 salary increase was aimed, was not in the least swayed by it. In contrast to this, the Rs. 2,500 pledge given by the president was perceived as reasonable and therefore achievable. The manner in which the Fonseka salary increase was going to be financed was by repossessing misappropriated government money. This too was easily seen through as a fairy tale by the public. The UNP would never have spoken of repossessing misappropriated money because they know that the general public knows them to be rogues and they will never be believed if they talk of repossessing stolen money. If one looks back at Fonseka’s ten point action plan, everything else was generally okay, except for this one unrealistic promise which stood out like a sore thumb and undermined the credibility of the whole document. So the UNP planted on Fonseka what they would never have used themselves.

There were other circumstances that helped Wickremesinghe to undermine the campaign without being seen to be sabotaging anything. The JVP had a problem in that they were unable to allow the public to think that the prime minister of the government that would be formed under Fonseka would be Wickremesinghe. For ideological reasons and because of a past history of killing each other’s activists, the JVP could not be perceived as helping the UNP to come to power. So when the JVP was asked by the press whether Ranil would be the prime minister, what the JVP said was there is no agreement as to who the PM is going to be. Seeing the opportunity, Wickremesinghe rushed in to say that he was not interested in becoming the prime minister of a caretaker government. With that single statement, he made this election completely irrelevant to the average UNPer. Some say that UNP organizers at the electoral level were inactive. That’s hardly surprising since nobody from the UNP was going to be the president or the prime minister after this election. Besides, many of these electoral organizers would not have even seen Fonseka at close quarters and they had no idea as to where they stood with regard to him. There was no organic link between the UNP’s anointed candidate and the electoral organizers who were supposed to campaign for him.

Then of course, there were deliberate acts of sabotage as well which I stopped writing about for obvious reasons. Early on, I made the bad mistake of counting the number of meetings attended by the UNP leader. Had nobody bothered to keep track of this, Wickremesinghe would have been his usual lackadaisical self attending perhaps only one in six or seven joint opposition meetings. When the joint opposition rally was held at Campbell Park in Borella, the JVP converged on the venue in a procession starting in Colombo Fort and what we saw was a river of red flowing along the road. The UNP came in a procession from Borella and they were sauntering along the road as if they were on their way for somebody else’s funeral, without green flags or banners. Yet everybody was present, Wickremesinghe, Ravi Karunanayake, Tissa Attanayake, Mohamed Mahroof and Borella organizer Jayantha Silva. Later I got reports from the provinces as well where I was told that there were joint opposition meetings where the bulk of the crowd was recognizably UNP but the colour green was nowhere in evidence. Upon making inquiries, I was told that instructions had come from ‘above’ not to bring green banners or flags to joint meetings. The ownership of those meetings were thus handed over to the JVP. How many UNP votes Fonseka would have lost as a result of this deliberate abandoning of the campaign to the JVP is open to conjecture.

Then there was the question of money. Each UNP electoral organizer was given Rs. 350,000 for Fonseka’s campaign while provincial councilors who were not electoral organizers were given Rs. 50,000 each with pradesheeya sabha members getting Rs. 20,000. Contrast this with 2005, when each electoral organizer was given one million each. Usually the party gives out money to electoral organizers in the expectation that they would spend at least an equivalent amount out of their own funds and indeed electoral organizers do spend their own money to score brownie points. But in this case, the candidate was an outsider and many UNP organizers did not know whether they would be ‘looked after’ if he came into power. In such circumstances, the electoral organizers should have been given more, not less money so that they would be motivated to work. If one million was given out in 2005, to work for their own party leader, the UNP should have doled out at least twice that amount to get them to work for an outsider. That however was not done.