Believe, Behave, a Message for the Opposition, too

By N Sathiya Moorthy

For those familiar with Sri Lanka?s emergence as a major cricketing country would remember this oft-quoted anecdote from the previous century, whether true or not. The famous one-liner, ?This one here wants to play cricket? has stuck in the memories of that generation, not just of cricket players in the country but also for fans of the game ? and why, even the average newspaper reader from those days.

Years later, Kumar Sangakara, for instance, went on record as he recalled how everyone laughed when he said he wanted to play cricket. Not only did he play cricket, but he too, like the more famous ?this one?, captained the national team in his time.

Of course, this one is not about cricket but about politics, the way Opposition parties have been taunting President Anura Kumara Dissanayake from before the time he was elected to power. The message was/is here. Dissanayake does not have the ?political pedigree? to aspire for the presidency. Nor did his JVP-NPP combine had the elitist, intellectual wherewithal to be accepted as the government party in a long, long time to come.

This still seems to be dictating what essentially is otherwise the political posturing of multiple Opposition parties. They have a right to contest and win elections, they also have the right to form alliances, before or after elections to capture power, as they are attempting in many local government institutions across the country.

But they need to acknowledge that the present-day ruling party too has such a right, independent of multiple threats allegedly thrown by the President. The latter is a different story altogether. But then that is the kind of upper middle class intellectual arrogance or self-emanating perceptions of the kind that has been guiding and controlling much of the Opposition narrative from before the presidential election last year.

Those perceptions found a more honest / brutal expression ahead of the parliamentary polls that followed. The divided prediction, especially of the UNP, the nation?s GoP, and the breakaway SJB, was that even if elected, the JVP-NPP did not have the capacity and capabilities to run a government for full five years.

Some in the UNP even went as far as to claim that the nation will recall outgoing President Ranil Wickremesinghe to put the house in order. Shamelessly, they repeated the same even during the local government election campaign, as if the issue mattered.

Anticipated, experienced

Of course, this is not the first time that the Colombo elite have said such things. They did so when the upper caste / upper class UNP was in power, as the slain Ranasinghe Premadasa became President. A decade and more later, they said that of Mahinda Rajapaksa. Both came from a rural background, and were unacceptable to Colombo, which dominated not only politics but also the nation?s bureaucracy on those occasions.

In ways, Rajapaksa in particular clearly indicated that his choice of non-cadre persona for key appointments owed to the kind of non-cooperation that he anticipated first and experienced later. Yet, he outsmarted his intellectual saboteurs from within the system through his earthy actions, reactions and non-action that his ?adversaries? were untrained and ill-equipped to predict, for them to be able to counter them effectively.

It was even better in the case of Ranasinghe Premadasa, who outsmarted them all in their game, again through his seriously sincere approach to politics and political administration. Both Premadasa, Sr, and Mahinda Rajapaksa won wars, the former in the context of the Second JVP Insurgency and the latter, the more complex and much more serious ethnic war against the LTTE that was dreaded even more.

Winning a second term

Of course, incumbent President Dissanayake and his team may not be able to claim victories of the kind the other two recorded in their time. It is also because there is no war in the horizon. But they are out there to wage a war, on the economic front ? which is their political inheritance. The legacy issue that the economic crisis has been alone brought them to power. And there is no escaping this reality, for them to be able to prove their mettle and win a second term.

It is here the comparison with ?this thing? in cricket should end. For the months that they have been in power, the JVP-NPP government and President Dissanayake have not done anything extraordinary to put the nation?s economic house in order. Truth be told, they have, instead, been giving the impression that they do not still understand the complexities, and hence also do not know where to begin, and how. Or, how to begin, and when.

If ?when to begin? is the question, the answer for them is ?yesterday?. They have already lost months, unable to fix some of the basic problems afflicting the economy. The chief one pertains to the price of essentials. It also involves their traditional constituency, which multiplied manifold when the economic crisis hit their homes and hearths, and thus their hearts, too.

Any failure to control prices and ensure availability of essentials could imply that the ruling combine may lose the add-on constituency or constituencies from the past year?s twin elections. Already, the local government elections have shown that 18 per cent additional votes that had come their way between the presidential and parliamentary elections did go back into the common pool of ?swing voters? in the local government elections ? from 43 to 61 and back to 43.

The JVP-NPP combine thus have only what was the ?core? votes that came Dissanayake?s way in the presidential poll. Barring the traditionally committed three per cent vote-bank of the JVP, the rest of it all presumably came from the conventional ?Mahinda vote-bank? of two previous decades. They comprised mostly rural Sinhala-Buddhist voters but also included a substantial section of the urban middle class voters, who were not as elitist as they would have wanted to be.

Lessons for all

Yet, there are lessons for ?em all from this local government elections. Yes, the ruling combine has not lived up to the expectations that they had kindled in the masses especially at the height of the Aragalaya protests and later on. But the people are not yet ready to trust any or all of the Opposition parties which together continue to remain discredited.

The voter?s problem is that the JVP-NPP leadership has not shown them that they are ?different?. They were voted in because of their call for ?change? and promise for ?change?. Slowly but surely their institutional inadequacies are showing up. It is a structural problem that cadre-based parties suffer from, not being able to think and act differently than they are tuned to, for long.

At the same time, the voter is unhappy with the Opposition for reasons that are obvious. Even in these days and weeks after the local council elections, they do not seem to believe in themselves, jointly and severally. They still expect and want the present government to fail on all fronts.

That?s because the JVP-NPP combine?s votes came from a wide spectrum of people, whose individual aspirations and expectations they imposed on the other. Yet, the Opposition parties are also behaving as if they are the rulers of all that they survey, without being open about forming an alliance among themselves ? whether they succeed or fail is another matter.

There is fear among individual leaders that any new alliance with the old parties and leaders would threaten their own positions and roles at present and in the future, starting with the next presidential election. They are once again displaying that their concerns for the people are plain and simple sloganeering, unconnected to their awkwardly displayed personal ambitions.

That is where they have to begin, if the Opposition has to stand a chance the next time round ? first believe in themselves, and then behave. Or, the other way round, as their self-promotion, supposedly at the cost of an elected government, almost from day one, too, has not gone down well with the people. After all, the voter has the wonderful knack of recalling and remembering all wrong things at the right time!

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)