The Island Editorial

Blues of the Blues

 

02 September 2016

 

The SLFP is celebrating its 65th anniversary while being in the throes of a deepening crisis. Its leaders are busy papering over the cracks. All its woes, in our book, boil down to longstanding, mutual hostility between President Maithripala Sirisena and the Rajapaksas. It is in the current predicament, struggling to avoid a debilitating break-up because President Mahinda Rajapaksa, during his second term, prevented Minister Maithripala Sirisena achieving his prime ministerial dream and the latter after becoming President ruined Rajapaksa’s chances of becoming PM.

When Prime Minister D. M. Jayaratne took seriously ill in the heyday of the Rajapaksa government, we argued in this space that the prime ministerial ambitions of several SLFP heavyweights were bound to threaten the party’s unity sooner or later. Sirisena, who fell from grace and was short-changed by the Rajapaksas, voted with his feet when the last presidential election was called.

The Sirisena faction of the SLFP blames Rajapaksa for two electoral defeats the party suffered last year. While its argument holds water to some extent it is also true that Sirisena was instrumental in bringing about those two crushing defeats which debilitated the SLFP and reinvigorated the UNP. He joined forces with the UNP, the TNA etc to defeat the SLFP’s presidential candidate Rajapaksa in January last year. He arbitrarily brought down the SLFP-led government by appointing UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe Prime Minister though the latter had only 46 seats in Parliament as opposed to the SLFP’s 126. (The SLFP-led UPFA had about 150 seats!) Thereafter, he unflinchingly engineered the defeat of the SLFP at the last general election by queering the party’s prime ministerial candidate, Rajapaksa’s pitch. He also, through political manoeuvring, deprived the SLFP-led UPFA of the post of the Opposition Leader so as to reduce his bête noire, Rajapaksa, to an ordinary MP. Thus, Sirisena has settled political scores with his erstwhile boss and the former ruling clan and achieved his goal at the expense of the SLFP, which he now leads and tries to steer to victory at future elections!

The blame for the sorry state of affairs in the SLFP should be apportioned to the Rajapaksas. Members of the party’s old guard grew resentful that newcomers, mostly UNP defectors, were given top ministerial posts besides special treatment. The Rajapaksas were accused of running the party as well as the government like a family business. They apparently cherished the delusion that the people had given them a mandate to do as they pleased because they had rid the country of terrorism. Their loyalists flouted the law with impunity and most of them became a public nuisance. Corruption became rampant and the rule of law suffered a severe beating. The Republic of Sri Lanka was on the verge of becoming a monarchy, for all practical purposes, towards the end of the Rajapaksa rule.

It is being argued in some quarters that Sirisena became the SLFP leader because the party constitution stipulates that the SLFPer who secures the executive presidency becomes the party leader. This argument is untenable in that Sirisena was not the SLFP presidential candidate. He contested on the New Democratic Front ticket while the SLFP fielded Rajapaksa. His appointment as the SLFP leader has created a bad precedent; any SLFPer is now free to leave the party in a huff, achieve his or her political goal with the help of political forces, both internal and external, hostile to the party and return to the party’s fold and, if possible, even secure its leadership. President Sirisena and his loyalists have no moral right to threaten disciplinary action against the SLFP dissidents for disobeying the dictates of the party leadership.

The next presidential election is likely to be a three-cornered contest with the main candidates representing the SLFP, the UNP and the political movement led by the Joint Opposition. Even though President Sirisena has publicly declared he will not seek another term, those who threw in their lot with him at the last presidential election are dependent on him for their political survival. They are sure to pressure him to change his mind. As for its presidential candidate, the UNP will be without an alternative to Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, who has consolidated his power in the party and neutralised those who strove for his ouster. Whom will the SLFP dissidents field at the next presidential polls in case of having to form a new party? The government seems to think it is former Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa if the selective efficiency on the part of some state outfits which have sprung into action against him is anything to go by.

The architects of the Jan. 08, 2015 regime change succeeded in cutting the SLFP in two in the same way as Zeus is said to have halved man to diminish the latter’s strength and turbulence. Now, the seemingly Sisyphean task President Sirisena is saddled with is to bring the two halves of the party together.