THE CHALLENGE BEFORE THE UNP

Ranil Wickremasinghe made, I think, what he thinks is a speech of statesman-like prophesy, not to mention dignified grace in the face of political cuckoldry, when Parliament reconvened this week following the reshuffle farce. In this he warned of dark times ahead, where “We will witness in the coming weeks an increase in the violation of human rights, deterioration of good governance, spread of corruption, undermining of democracy, and the rising cost of living.”

For all our sakes, and for the sake of democracy in Sri Lanka, we hope that Mr. Wickremasinghe sees his role as more than a mere Cassandra – with the Apollonian gift of prophesy but without the power to persuade – in the face of the insufferably Agamemnon-like hubris that increasingly characterises the Rajapakse presidency.

A perversity of Sri Lankan electoral politics has cast Mr Wickremasinghe and President Rajapakse in paradoxical roles. Mr. Wickremasinghe, as his record shows, is keen on government by technocratic elitism and macroeconomic ideas; he is disinterested in politics and in engaging with the chattering classes. Mr Rajapakse, on the other hand, is a rabble-rouser par excellence more at home in the Pada Yatra and the Jana Ghosha. If anyone should be in charge of the national interest, it is emphatically not him; or the filial coterie of Mini-Mes that has collaterally sprung up from our vote for him. He should be safely left to spend his life in harmless demagoguery in the streets, expressing solidarity with the Palestinians, demonstrating for human rights, agitating for labour rights of assistant librarians, or whatever. As his website proudly proclaims without a tinge of irony, in the 1980s he stood for sovereign Palestinian Statehood, and was the principal ally of the late Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu in her campaign against extra-judicial killings and disappearances. In government, he reckons these positions to be unnecessarily restrictive, and therefore rejects Tamil claims for federal autonomy and believes democratic opposition, journalists and civil society exist at his sufferance and pleasure.

In more ways than one, Mr. Wickremasinghe, if he truly enjoyed his vocation, has much to be excited about. In functioning democracies, hardly do parliamentary oppositions enjoy the luxury of such plum targets as this government presents. It is without doubt, the most intellectually bankrupt and talent-less government it has been our misfortune to suffer since independence. It has no ideas worthy of the label on anything ranging from conflict resolution to governance and the economy. It conducts the affairs of the State with much the same form and substance as could be expected of a particularly dysfunctional Pradeshiya Sabha.

The Rajapakse brothers have done Mr Wickremasinghe a favour by helpfully clearing his party decks of incongruous malcontents. President Rajapkase has embarked on a military solution to the conflict, which as any student of the Sri Lankan conflict or of any comparable intra-State ethno-political conflict can tell, has been tried before and failed. Democracy and human rights are under attack and there is every sign, as the gap between Rajapakse’s promises and performance widens in respect of peace and the economy that this will get worse, especially in the clampdown on dissent. The economy will go down in flames along with the protracted conflict. The JVP has withdrawn its support to the President for all intents and purposes, and the SLFP is already creaking at the seams. His brothers are a liability, not an asset; in all probability, the same goes for the UNP defectors. And Mrs Kumaratunga appears resolved to become as big a pain in the neck to the President as she can, which as we know, can be a very formidable nuisance indeed. As Wickremasinghe himself put it in Parliament, “The Cabinet of Ministers have become an international joke; democracy is weakened; the decision making in the government has been limited to few. The role of the Parliament has been de-valued…” although he must acknowledge his own culpability in respect of the latter.

As he is wont to do, Mr. Wickremasinghe appears to be patient to wait until the overweening arrogance or sheer incompetence of the Rajapakse administration overstretches itself and creates its own undoing. Unfortunately, this attitude of schadenfreude is not good enough. The JVP, to its credit, is poised to harvest the spoils of the wreckage of this administration. This is the time for Mr Wickremasinghe to give democratic political leadership to a country going nowhere; to reinstate Parliament to its central role in democratic politics; to build broad interest-based coalitions with civil society cross-cutting ethnic, religious, class and party-political cleavages; and to take the people into confidence and to use the time in opposition to do what he did not do in government: allay the fears of the South that federalism does not mean secession or a sacrifice of the Northeast to the Tigers. It is the time to resuscitate the enervated UNP, the Grand Old Party of Sri Lankan politics and the natural party of government in an essentially conservative, pragmatist and mercantilist society, into an election winning force. In short, he must demonstrate that the UNP is a credible government in waiting: energised with enthusiasm and hope, brimming with new ideas.

He cannot do this by continuing as he has. Fundamental changes are necessary to bring the UNP into democratic modernity, to inject fresh talent, and to offer the country a clear roadmap out of its misery in respect of peace, governance and the economy. This means seizing the political agenda from the government and shaping it to its own fashion, not passive complacence in the expectation of the government unravelling itself. This would require energy, courage, conviction and patience, but it is the only way out of the populist vortex down which Sri Lanka is now plunging towards tyranny and ethno-nationalist apocalypse. Sri Lanka deserves a chief executive who has Mr. Wickremasinghe’s lengthy parliamentary and ministerial experience, his sense of restraint, competence and integrity. If he is to ever govern Sri Lanka, however, Mr. Wickremasinghe must first confront his own limitations, and learn the brutal lessons of April 2004. As Napoleon said, “Le bon Dieu est toujours du côté des gros bataillons.”