The MR Camp
We got caught in the thrill of the whole thing, that’s for
sure. We all operated on the basis of a
simple assumption: the President cannot lose.
For this reason, we were in a world where we felt we could do as we
liked. We cut loose. We went to town. But we are getting ahead of our story.
Let’s start at the beginning; not the first beginning, i.e.
when the boss first appointed (formally and informally) his ‘trusted men and
women’ but the beginning of this election campaign. As usual this glorified cheering squad made
sure the boss felt good. That’s
important since very few leaders want to hear bad news. Hangers-on, therefore, know that the boss has
to be kept happy.
Nothing to worry sir.
You will win and win big. We will do it for you.
All that was said are versions of the above three sentences.
The last was very important. Usefulness
has to be ingrained in the boss’ mind.
That’s called ‘investment’.
Now it is one thing to lie through your teeth but quite
another to believe your own lies. If
anyone of us thought that it was going to be easy, that’s reason enough to be
hoofed from the campaign headquarters and be asked to stay home until January
8, 2015. That didn’t happen. We not only joined the carnival, we even made
big bucks on the side. That now was a
win-win situation. We believed the boss
would romp home, so we took it easy. We
did a bit here and there. We were duly
rewarded. But it was one big party until
election day.
As the campaign progressed, this confidence manifested
itself in other ways. There was
bragging. There was arrogance. There was
contempt for the opponent and his supporters.
There were people taking the law into their hands, thinking that it
would help the boss and thinking even that this is what the boss really
wanted. It didn’t help of course that
the boss had turned a blind eye to this kind of stuff for many years, offering
silent approval and encouragement so to speak.
And there was advertising over-kill.
The worst thing was that it all rubbed off on the boss. It showed on his face. There was arrogance. There was bullishness. There was contempt for the opponent. There
was ungainly language. The people found
it hard to recognize in that face the man they’ve always admired and loved, the
man who after D.S. Senanayake was the most loved national leader this country
has known.
None of this helped the boss. It made what ought to have been a piece of
cake into a real contest.
The MS Camp
This was about change.
It was a long-felt need. We had
the arguments. We had the facts. We articulated. We substantiated. We forgot that we are also creatures of the
same political culture in which the people we want ousted operate in.
We began with a huge handicap. No, we are not talking about the fact that we
are in the opposition for that’s a given disadvantage. The biggest liability was the former president,
Chandrika Kumaratunga. She was the
living antithesis to what we promised, the lovely idea of a ‘maithree
paalanaya’. Rage seemed to be her middle
name. Revenge her one objective. We thought Ranil Wickremesinghe with his
usual foot-in-mouth ways would wreck the campaign, but this time he was
different. Perhaps he associated the
right people. Chandrika was what she
always was, an insecure, vindictive politician.
That cost us.
‘Maithri Paalanayak’ or ‘Compassionate Governance’ was a
beautiful tagline for a presidential campaign.
The only problem is that we are all pruthagjanas
or flawed human beings. It was an ideal
impossible to live up to. Given that our
opponents had no such pretensions, given that they acted as though the only way
to differentiate themselves from us was to live out the antithesis of our
tagline, they knowingly or unknowingly dragged us down to their level. Well, let’s say half way down to their level,
but down enough to make all our holier-than-thou statements hollow.
We found ourselves, especially in social media and on
television debates, using the same kind of language and promising
un-maithree-like retribution to our opponents for all crimes committed. This was wrong. So very wrong. We ended up sounding like our opponents and
we can’t blame people for thinking ‘so same lot, same bad-mouthing, uncouth
bunch of politicians’.
*In a parallel universe called 'Humility'
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