Maithripala Sirisena has been elected as the sixth Executive
President of Sri Lanka. A few months ago
few would have envisaged this result.
Indeed, a few months ago no one even considered Maithripala as a
possible challenger to the incumbent, Mahinda Rajapaksa. The not-thought-of happened. Some may say that this was less a vote FOR
Maithripala than a vote AGAINST Mahinda.
Some would argue that Maithripala was not Maithripala but a proxy for a
collective, a gathering of dissent and dissenting. At the end of the day, however, Maithripala
Sirisena is the First Citizen. He holds
the most powerful political office in the country. Congratulations are called for. Best wishes too.
It is easy to list reasons for victory (or defeat, in the
case of Mahinda Rajapaksa). It is harder
to assign value to the various factors.
At this point, definitive claims would be presumptuous. A few important factors could be discussed
though.
First the compositions of the two main camps. On one side there was Maithripala with a
significant section of the SLFP, Ranil Wickremesinghe with a UNP that might
have shown more enthusiasm had the party put forward a candidate but showed more
interest than they did in 2010 (even with Sajith Premadasa pouting), the JVP
‘supporting without saying it’, the SLMC and TNA tagging themselves to a
possible winner and the JHU providing in quality what they could not in
quantity. On the other side there was
Mahinda Rajapaksa. Isolated. Burdened by ills he could ill afford, the
ghosts of things not done and indeed things done (of the despicable kind),
fatigued and giving reasons to bolster regime-fatigue.
While track record had pluses to balance the negatives,
Mahinda had a handicap that proved to be fatal.
He was surrounded by (or he surrounded himself with) a bunch of
hangers-on who had hung around for so long and had fattened themselves to
slothfulness. They seemed to have a
simple formula: lokka cannot lose –
all we have to do is ‘something’ so that we can say, after he wins, ‘we did it
for you’. It is one thing to be
slothful when victory is assured, and quite another to fudge when the going
gets tough. The quite-another
happened. And so it was ‘Mahinda and his
Handicaps vs The Rest’ and that was always going to be tough.
What of the issues?
The talk was ‘good governance’.
Its Sinhala equivalent, ‘යහ
පාලනය’ (yaha paalanaya)
was for the Sinhala electorate at least as foreign as Patricia Butenis, Robert
O Blake, Navi Pillay or David Cameron.
Abolishing the executive presidency or, as Maithripala re-qualified it
to ‘abolishing the executive presidential system’ following his understanding
with the JHU was certainly not a widely held ‘concern’. Perceptions of misrule, arrogance,
extravagance, conspicuously lavish lifestyles of progeny and absolute contempt
for the rule of law may have been far more ‘real’ to the electorate.
It was
not that the voters did not love Mahinda.
In many elections they voted for his party even while cursing most of
these things. One reason was that there
was no one in the opposition they could trust to do better. Maithripala was different and so, even as
they felt sorry for Mahinda, they voted him out.
Mahinda
didn’t help his cause by moving so far away from the personality that endeared
him to wide sections of the electorate, that he became unrecognizable. There was hardly any humility in word, tone
and expression. There was anger, frustration, desperation and arrogance written
all over him. Had he given the voter
some reason to think that he was at the core the same accessible, one-of-us
kind of President it might not have come to this.
There
was also a non-issue which, in absence, is of remarkable political
significance. This is the first
presidential election since 1982 where ‘minority issues’ were not taken
up. There was no talk of devolution. No
talk of the 13th, 13-Plus or 13-Minus. The TNA didn’t make demands. Neither did the SLMC. While the SLMC had everything to gain by
backing a winner, the TNA had little hope of reward (of the kind it has always
wanted). This is why the TNA’s
intervention is significant. For the
first time, a Tamil communalist party put aside identity-related issues for
what has to be read as larger interests of the overall citizenry.
As
interesting is the absence and silence of the usually vociferous
good-governance peddlers who quite pompously call themselves ‘civil
society’. This time around, it was the
‘bad boys’, i.e. those they call extremists, hawks, racists, chauvinists etc,
etc, who not only talked the talk but walked it. In the end, it would seem, it’s those who
walk the earth and talk earth-talk at the right time standing with the right
people who deliver; certainly not the paid mouthpieces of that shady bunch
called ‘the international community’.
Speaking
of the international community, what of their constant battle cry for the past
five years: regime-change?
The
electorate has answered them: ‘Regime change, yes; but at our own pace, the way
we want it and with whom we want it.
These international thugs would think nothing of destabilizing the
country to the point where anarchy reigns just to get a point across and of
course to get a toehold onto the country.
Perhaps they’ll now learn that there are many ways to skin the
proverbial cat and that there are less bloody and more wholesome methods than
what they prefer. Let them also remember
that it is likely that the only part of this result they can be happy about is
the fact that Mahinda Rajapaksa is out of office. Other things are on hold.
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