Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake has spoken out at long last. Better late than never! Briefing the press at the Election Secretariat yesterday, Dissanayake vouched for the accuracy of vote counting at last week’s presidential election and the final result––six million votes (58 per cent) for the incumbent President and four million (40 per cent) for the runner up. He said anyone who had doubts about his decision could invoke the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

The Polls Chief thus nailed canards while the UNP-JVP combine was girding itself for a protest in Colombo against election results.

The Opposition has a right to protest but agitating against the outcome of an election, after the Polls Chief certifies its validity for a second time, is an exercise in futility. Instead of making a spectacle of itself by taking to the streets and reporting alleged polls irregularities to Buddhist prelates, the Opposition ought to take recourse to the law and try to battle it out in the temple of justice.

It is high time former army chief Gen. Sarath Fonseka came to terms with reality. He lost in the presidential race mainly because of his team. Before venturing into politics, he should have asked himself how a bunch of failed politicians would be able to help him win the coveted presidency.

UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe was shivering in his boots, unable to contest. JVP leader Somawansa Amarasinghe would have collapsed, if he had been asked to stand for presidency. How could such leaders shuddering at the thought of having to contest an election, help a complete greenhorn in politics win? Even a schoolchild would have had better judgment than Fonseka! Would a GCE (A/L) student ever go to a teacher for tuition who has failed that examination twice over and is scared of sitting for it another time? No wonder Fonseka has fared worse than Ranil in politics!

To expect Fonseka to win a presidential election at the end of a 40-day campaign against a popular President who had been campaigning for over four years since his first election, was the height of naiveté. Had Fonseka won, his victory would have been a miracle! That was why those who had stood by him during the war, including this newspaper, tried to dissuade him from entering politics and having a grand pratfall. Earlier, we had made a similar effort to prevent Maj. Gen. Janaka Perera from contesting the North-Central Provincial polls. He was warned that he was running high security risks unnecessarily to become an ordinary Provincial Councillor. But, contest he did. And the LTTEaccounted for him. All good soldiers, however well versed they may be in warfare, seem to be oblivious to political reality.

Gen. Fonseka's claim that he should have won the presidency simply because large crowds attended his rallies is laughable, to say the least. Crowds, as we argued in these columns the other day, are deceptive and do not necessarily translate into votes at an election. The General surely knew the ferocious Tigers but not the wily Rathu Sahodarayas adept at raising crowds with the help of their cadres ready to travel long distances at short notice.

On the other hand, President Rajapaksa had a mammoth rally at the Campbell Park in the run-up to the recent polls but lost Borella as well as other urban electorates in Colombo! The President's election rally in Jaffna was much bigger than Fonseka's but it was the latter who won there. In 1977, the then Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike's rallies were far bigger than those of J. R. Jayewardene. But, it was JRJ who won a five-sixth majority in Parliament.

In 1977, S. B. Dissanayake contested the general election from Hanguranketha. When he left for the counting centre, there were over one thousand supporters at his home awaiting the announcement of results. But, he polled only 435 votes! In the same year in Matara, a doctor in the fray fed over 5,000 of his ardent supporters on the election day, but he, to his utter consternation, received only a few hundred votes. So much for crowds and votes!

Gen. Fonseka's campaign was seriously flawed. It had a foundation of tall promises, venom and rumours. He banked on the charge of the Kata Katha Brigade to unsettle the government. Negative campaigns hardly win elections. When he promised a pay hike of Rs. 10,000 to government servants, he forgot that he was in the exalted company of the UNP and the JVP; the UNP had mercilessly crushed a general strike by public workers, who demanded a meagre pay hike of Rs. 10 a day, in 1980 and thrown over 50,000 of them out of jobs overnight, and the JVP had shamelessly pulled out from that joint trade union struggle at the eleventh hour betraying the working class. Would any government servant in his or her proper senses have expected Fonseka to grant such a huge pay hike in the event of his victory with the help of a government to be formed by the UNP? He also kept on contradicting himself on numerous occasions. First, he vowed to abolish the executive presidency but later he wanted to be the executive president with reduced powers!

Fonseka blundered by closing ranks with the TNA thus losing a great deal of public support in the southern parts of the country where the LTTE had unleashed unbridled terror. His crude threats to popular ground commanders who had spearheaded the war against the LTTE, risking as they did their life and limb in a hostile terrain for months on end and his venomous outpouring from the political platform many a time proved to be counterproductive.

The Swan Man, as we said the other day, cooked his goose in style. (Freudian slips on the part of his joint spokesmen Mangala Samaraweera and Anura Dissanayake during the final stage of his campaign to the effect that President Rajapaksa would certainly win were indicative of his trusted lieutenants' assessment of the situation.) Moreover, Fonseka’s campaign strategists sadly failed to penetrate President Rajapaksa's solid vote bank in the rural sector, where about 80 per cent of electors live. A massive swing for the President in those parts of the country as well as in semi-urban areas was something to be expected.