‘Elpitiya’ as beginning and end

Elections to every single local government authority in the Galle District were held on February 10, 2018. Except Elpitiya. That was due to a petition by the United National Party (UNP) pleading relief over perceived error in their nomination list being rejected. Time passed. We had the parliamentary crisis at the end of that year. We had the Easter Sunday attacks a few months ago. Even people who were aware of that election or rather non-election forgot about Elpitiya. 

Not any longer. With the court directing the Elections Commission to hold elections for the Elpitiya Pradeshiya Sabhava immediately, we are seeing a rehearsal, a by-election of sorts and a referendum all rolled into one.  

Here’s what happened. The yahapalanaya regime went into strange contortions to postpone local government elections. Well, provincial councils too, but that’s another story. By the time elections were called, the yahapalana coalition had cracked. Corruption, nepotism and incompetence had become too apparent to hide. The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) was the clear victor. President Sirisena’s true strength was revealed (the Sri Lanka Freedom Party [SLFP] got less than 15% of the vote and the UNP’s vote bank had dwindled to around 30%. 

The outlook for the yahapalana group is bleak. The SLFP or rather Maithripala Sirisena would be forced to take a stand, i.e. whether to enter into a coalition with the SLPP, tag itself to the UNP (or a faction of that party led by Sajith Premadasa, if the internal crisis is not resolved) or go it alone. Unenviable. The JVP was not officially a member of the yahapalana coalition, but stood with Sirisena and later the UNP against Mahinda Rajapaksa and later the SLFP-SLPP ‘arrangement’ during the parliamentary crisis a year ago. The JVP has decided to do their own thing this time around. The risk is their strength being revealed, but it’s a risk they’ve embraced, for better or worse.  

The UNP has spared no pains to paint President Sirisena as the villain of the piece called ‘Yahapalanaya.’ The UNP is still ‘government’. It is not opposition. It had mandate and responsibility. The UNP failed to deliver on all counts. The UNP is directly implicated in nepotism and corruption. The UNP marked itself as ‘incompetent.’ Ranil Wickremesinghe is the leader of this incompetent and corrupt UNP and Sajith Premadasa his lieutenant — no one can claim ‘I was a peon’ in the yahapalana regime.   

All these parties fared abysmally in February 2018. The SLPP secured 50.57% of the total vote in the Galle District, the UNP got 26.65%, the UPFA got 11.65% and the JVP 6.27%. 

The numbers may have changed. For the worse. Impatience with the regime may have enhanced rather than declined disenchantment for reasons of incompetence, incoherence and of course the scandalous failures on the security/intelligence front that led to the Easter Sunday attacks. There’s a strong likelihood that most of the 75,827 votes the UPFA received would slide towards the SLPP if the SLFP decides not to contest or have a pact with the UPFA. Even if the SLFP contests on its own, it is highly unlikely that it will retain the 11.65% share of February 2018. That could be halved or worse with ‘defection’ to the SLPP. 

And so we have ‘Elpitiya’. Is Elpitiya a microcosm of Sri Lanka? No. The Tamil and Muslim communities are negligible in Elpitiya. They won’t be in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and in certain other parts of the country.  A UNP presidential candidate might be routed in Elpitiya (or in the Southern Province as a whole) but might win in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, although with a smaller margin than in 2015. 

Elpitiya is rural. Whereas the SLPP handsomely won all the pradesheeya sabhas in the Galle District, the UNP secured the Galle Municipal Council. In fact the UNP did better in the urban and municipal council elections than in the pradesheeya sabha elections in all parts of the country. 

This dissimilarity between the perceived urban and perceived rural gets smudged in important elections. For example, the tendency across the board was against the UNP in 1994 and clearly against Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2015. In 2019, we might once again see a ‘unity’ of sorts between the urban and rural in terms of a common need to show the yahapalanists the political door.  

Regardless of these realities, the result will most certainly reflect voter sentiment. It will be read by the victor as a reflection of national sentiments, especially if the SLPP wins as expected. The losers would be forced to come up with elaborate statistical analyses to demonstrate that things could be different in a presidential race. Nevertheless, a rout in Elpitiya would severely demoralize, say, the UNP loyalist in Elpitiya-like electorates throughout the country and even in less Elpitiya-like places. The ‘urban’ areas, for example. It would cost the UNP candidate, whoever it may be.  Elpitiya, in short, would not only be read as ‘reflection’ of general sentiment, but would be a momentum giver and wrecker, to winner and loser(s) respectively. 

The SLPP is ready, obviously. The JVP always has its ‘people’ on the ground. The loyalists will vote as they always do, never mind that they have struggled to win over people outside the party. The SLFP’s identity crisis (migrate to the SLPP, play bystander, contest?) will be resolved, one way or the other, but the outcome is unlikely to propel the party into believing that fielding its own candidate makes any sense. The UNP will have to contest.

The UNP will have to decide on who will lead the party’s efforts in Elpitiya. Will Sajith be asked to ‘put out or shut up’? Will the party have resolved the candidate-issue by then? It is not an election that the UNP wants to contest, but it is an election the party cannot avoid. If the UNP loses by a small margin there will be positives to carry to the presidential election. Ranil (or Sajith or both) could spur the loyalists to work harder. If they lose by a margin similar to that of February 2018 and the party can obtain the consolation argument, ‘we have not lost ground.’ However, if the margin of defeat is greater than those related to the other pradesheeya sabha elections in the Galle District, the UNP will have to stomach ‘done and dusted’.  

Obviously, the SLPP cannot sit on February 2018 laurels either. If there’s gain, that locks up the presidential prize and if there’s the slightest decline, then it means the fat lady is yet to sing.  

Either way, Elpitiya could very well be the place where the presidential election begins and ends. For all these parties. 

malindasenevi@gmail.com. www.malindawords.blogspot.com   

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A ‘cannot’ and ‘will not’ Government

When the Government’s staunchest apologists sound disappointment it is a sure sign that things are more than ‘pretty bad’.  According to one yahapalanist, Jehan Perera (see "Going back to an alliance that can win elections" published in 'The Island', February 14, 2017) the public perception is that the Government has not (cannot?) tackle corruption, has not (cannot?) deliver visible development and has not corrected war-related injustices. The last of these is of course of the easy-to-say kind, not because correction is hard but ‘injustice’ is poorly defined and in most cases slanted to the point of perversion.  

It’s a generous observation.  Someone raised a question about a high-ranking official on Facebook, clearly upset about the man’s performance.  The question was, ‘Is he a Mahinda loyalist?’  The issue was about a statement he had made.  But if incompetence, putting feet in the mouth, uttering anti-yahapalana statements, indulging in nepotism, being corrupt and unleashing thuggery makes people Mahinda-loyalists, then this is Mahinda’s government or rather an enhanced version considering the pledges made, the tears shed, the bleeding-heart rhetoric.  We have just passed the two-year mark; even the previous regime took longer to slip.  

There are two excuses offered.  The first is what we’ve heard more often: Mahinda left the economy is dire straights, put the country in a debt trap and as such we really can’t do any development.  Well, the grandmasters of economic management, celebrated and now even ‘doctored’, didn’t have the wits to read who has the bucks and who does not.  They believed the West would bail them out and indulged in quite a bit of China-bashing.  Someone is having the last laugh here and it is not anyone in this Government.  That’s regarding the economy.  

They talked of wastage.  They spoke of a burgeoning pubic service.  They talked of leakages.  What’s been done on these matters, though?  Well, more of the same; a ‘Mahindian’ approach if you will.  Mahinda-Enhanced, someone might add.  If debt was the issue, why add to the burden, someone might ask. If corruption and wastage was the problem, why not stop the leaks?  If nepotism was an issue, why is it still an issue in a Mahinda-less dispensation?  If thuggery was a problem, why do we still have it?

The second explanation is the less-mentioned (for fear of acknowledging cracks?) one about the glitches inherent in a coalition.  The truth is that we’ve had coalitions for the past 23 years.  If you can’t deal with the reality, then you are not suitable to govern, it’s as simple as that.  Sure, this is a coalition of the two major parties, but then why do people like Lakshman Kiriella say things like ‘ it was the government’s objective to bring forth the new constitution, followed by a referendum with the support of the SLFP’?  Is the SLFP not a part of the Government?  Is this not a coalition, then?  Are these people confused or simply stupid?  

If it’s about ‘cannot’ and not ‘will not’, we can sympathize.  If it is both ‘cannot’ and ‘will not’ (anyway), as a characterization less generous than that offered on occasion by yahapalana apologists would conclude, then it is serious.  

This brings us to the question ‘why?’  Why do we get a ‘will not’?  It implies that both system and personnel are flawed.  This calls for system-correction and that means constitutional and institutional reform, both of which requiring political will.  In other words we are talking about expecting flawed people to fix a flawed system or getting the ill-equipped to do what they would not dream of doing for the simple reason that it is against their self-interest.  

It is in this context that the Government needs to be applauded for having got the 19th Amendment through, flawed though it is.  The Government has to be applauded for getting the Right to Information Act through as well.  These are necessary but obviously insufficient conditions for a system re-haul.  

Interestingly, the apologists are already talking about alliances that can win elections, in particular a referendum on a new constitution.  The argument is that a referendum could force coalition-continuity.  That’s a pretty impoverished place to be politically, even if one were to stress the ‘reform project’ as the impetus for the wish.  

The problem is that the government has, by the admission of its own apologists, lost political credibility.  Forget a referendum, they are struggling to get the document into Parliament!  The more they talk of unity, the more apparent it is that there’s ‘kachal in the mandale' (internal strife).  The alliance is made of political parties.  Political parties are made of politicians.  Politicians are about power.  They assess political equations, they make ‘informed’ decisions, and they look to the future — the short-term, that is.  

More than anything else, all this is evidenced by the scandalous aversion to holding local government elections.  Even the apologists are not buying the excuses trotted out by various factions in this Government.  What is clearly apparent is fear to face the people in an engagement where true strength will be revealed.  

In fact, the Government’s biggest promise-break is about election reform — something that even the disappointed apologists are not talking about.  It is almost 2 years since the 100 day dead line that the Yahapalana Government set itself for reform expired.  That’s a long time.  In two years, i.e. since President Maithripala Sirisena thundered from an SLFP political stage at Town Hall that he will deliver on the promise of electoral reform.  A long silence, that.  

Under these circumstances, constitutional reform along Eelamist lines will run into serious political problems.  There will be protests.  Politicians will try to disassociate themselves from Eelamist moves.  Babies will be thrown with the bathwater.  That would be a pity indeed.

The solution is to build on what’s been done, i,e. the 19th and the Right to Information Act.  These enabling mechanisms need to be used and used frequently so that both people and politicians are aware of what these safeguards mean and how they empower the former and restrain the latter.  

That will obviously take time.  And time is what this Government does not have, and not because of Mahinda-remnants or alliance-hiccups, but bold, italic and underlined ‘CANNOTS’ and ‘WILL NOTS’.  

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer.  Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com.  Twitter: malindasene.  

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