Daily News Editorial

A game plan that is a non-starter

11 October 2016

Much is being made of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa's claim in Ratnapura that defections are a very real possibility from the Government into the Joint Opposition fold and the coming months could well see a change in government. A highly upbeat Namal Rajapaksa too speaking to reporters asked the people to wait and see patiently what happens in the post budget period while JO front liner Dinesh Gunawardena says the statement made by Mahinda Rajapaksa of a regime change in the not very distant future was not made lightly.

This is not the first time that talk of a regime change through a change in the parliamentary composition was made by the JO. The first time such a conspiracy was alluded to was by President Maithripala Sirisena who went on to detail the ridiculousness of this attempt. The President pointed out that the JO would have to enlist the support of a whopping 70 MPs from the government in order to secure a simple majority in Parliament. Nothing short of a modern miracle could make this happen, as Rajapaksa himself is fully aware of. To begin with, the the UPFA members supporting the unity government are well rewarded with plum ministerial office and cannot be lured by lucre. Many of them were brought in through the national list and owe their gratitude to President Sirisena. Even those on the margins are not going to play ball knowing how impossible such a project will be.

There are claims being made that anything is possible in this country where even General Secretaries of the main political parties had switched sides. But that is in a situation where they risked being expelled from their parties as Lalith, Gamini et al. learnt to their cost. They had no other option other than form a new political party and all know the fate that befell that party and in fact all other new political parties formed to challenge the status quo.

In this instance too, any conspiracy to engineer defections, as happened during the Premadasa impeachment, by Mahinda Rajapaksa, will only result in mass scale expulsions of JO parliamentarians rendering them orphans in a new political party that has as much chance of scoring electoral victories as a snowball in hell. The fate that befell the Sri Lanka Mahinda Pakshaya, a breakaway from the SLFP, formed by Vijaya and Chandrika is a classic example of how even popular figures, as no doubt the superstar actor was, could fumble at electoral contests without the benign shade of the genuine article, in this instance the Sri Lanka Freedom party. In the unlikely scenario of MR cobbling together a simple majority in parliament by even roping in the JVP and TNA (for he can be certain that there will be very few takers from the SLFP) he still has President Sirisena to reckon with, given the latter's public declamation that MR would not be appointed PM even if the UPFA wins the election. But before this could happen all JO MPs would be ousted from Parliament for breach of discipline and going against the party's diktat.

Be that as it may, talking of toppling the government through a parliament coupe is a clear sign that the JO is getting jittery by the day. There is talk in the grapevine that some prominent members of the JO are already holding talks with the government to make the switch over. Even names are being bandied in the open. There are also the various corruption investigations against the Rajapaksa family drawing to a conclusion. What better strategy than send a message to the investigating arms and even the courts, of a very real prospect of a comeback. There was also an attempt being made to show that the recent cooperative society election victory notched by groups aligned to the JO has set the tone for the future, hiding the fact from the public that each such election had only some 200 or 300 persons who voted, most of them relatives of the Cooperative Society the candidates.

Public rallies like the one held in Ratnapura too is being added to the mix to show crowds as a sign of strength. The new constitution, the Wigneswaran protest are but grist to the mill of the JO campaign to incite the public. It was only the other day that Rajapaksa offered the olive branch to the Muslims, without so much as a mea culpa for being complicit in the attacks, by mollycoddling the perpetrators. There was also an attempt to remove the racists label from Wigneswaran, which all points to an attempt by Rajapaksa to win back the minorities for his new political project, albeit destined to go nowhere.

But as Rajapaksa well knows, none of this is going to make him President- the 19th amendment putting paid to all that - nor is he going to be made Prime Minister - whether he secures a parliamentary majority or not -with President Sirisena making his feelings plain on this score. What therefore is MR's game plan is anyone's guess, unless he someday wants to become the Prime Minister for a second time through the avenue of a new political party, defying mind boggling odds.