Photo courtesy of France 24
Compared to the excesses of the good governance regime and the Gotabaya Rajapaksa raj that followed it, the omissions of this government seem trivial and innocent. The NPP is now two months in office and whether we like it or not, the excitement of those early days is fading away. One can almost see the end of the honeymoon around the corner. The cynics are, of course, growing louder. They are all speaking with one voice and in one tongue and they are all saying that the government is doing precious little.
The speaker of parliament must be beyond reproach. He must be like Caesar’s wife and above suspicion. It does not do for someone constitutionally bound to integrity to lie about his credentials as his critics allege him, and the government of which he is a part, as having done. Moreover the doctorate scandal highlights a bigger issue: the obsession that many Sri Lankans, in the public or private sector, have with their qualifications and the mad rush among many of us to award ourselves honours we either do not have or do not deserve. In this, for better or worse, the speaker is only too representative of many of his colleagues in parliament and many of the people he is representing.
Yet once we account for the fact that the NPP/JVP has never been in power before unless you count the coalition of 2004, once we acknowledge that the parliament is seeing a plurality of new faces for the first time since 1994, that the old faces have been wiped off from the face of the legislature and a new generation is in charge and once we get around adjusting ourselves to these realities, then we must realise that this too is an elected government which, like its predecessors, needs to be kept in check.
Much of the criticism of the NPP’s actions and inactions come from those who have sinned for far too long to have any semblance of credibility. These are the Ranilists, the Rajapaksists and those who are glad the NPP is in power because that gives them the perfect opportunity to exact revenge on their rivals. The NPP, we must remember, has been in opposition for too long. They have, at every step of the way, pointed out the errors of those in government and the opposition. When Harsha de Silva questioned the NPP’s ability to lead, Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s response was to band him and Ranil Wickremesinghe together, to liken them to birds of the same feather. Today, however, Dissanayake is president.
If the rise of the populist left hasn’t (yet) united the right, it appears to be doing so. True, the SJB and UNP – or the New Democratic Front (NDF) – don’t seem to be getting together. But some MPs, including certain bigwigs from the SJB, have hinted that they would be open to Ranil Wickremesinghe joining the SJB. These are, to be sure, minority voices. But they can well grow louder if the NPP fails. And the way things stand, the NPP can fail in two ways: it neglects its radical mandate and caves to the right or it commits the same errors it accused other parties, both in government and opposition, of doing.
On both counts, the NPP is playing with fire. It has opened itself to misinterpretation and critique from both the left and right. A good example, perhaps the best one, is the IMF agreement. It is not true that the NPP said at the outset before it assumed power that it would exit the IMF. That was never its promise and to pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. Yet the NPP did give rise to expectations that it would at least talk to the IMF on a possible renegotiation of the terms.
President Dissanayake did stress on the importance of social protection during a meeting with the IMF delegation. Yet the situation has become so complicated that both Sajith Premadasa, the leader of the centre right opposition and Ravi Karunanayake, the former Finance Minister who was at the heart of a financial scandal a decade ago, have questioned the NPP for continuing the reforms of the previous administration. “Don’t signal to the left and then turn right,” Karunanayake recently advised the NPP.
In this, officials of the Wickremesinghe government have had it both ways, praising the NPP for continuing their reforms while eviscerating them for their hypocrisy. The People’s Struggle Alliance (PSA) has emerged as the NPP’s critic on the left and it too has been vocal in its denunciations. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from all this is that no party can escape the allure of parliamentarianism. As a friend of mine put it, in Sri Lanka it is impossible to do politics without accounting for the vote. And as far as the NPP is concerned, even if they have not entered coalitions with other parties, they have come to power on the strength of the broadest electoral alliance in Sri Lanka’s post-independence history: an eclectic mixture of different, often divergent, class interests.
It is ironic for a party that called both the UNP and SLFP bourgeois formations in the 1970s, without appreciating the fundamental differences between the two, to cave into the same bourgeois democratic structures it sought to transcend. But this would be a gross misinterpretation of the NPP’s or rather JVP’s history. The JVP did make attempts to re-enter the democratic mainstream – prominently in 1982. But for close to a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s it toyed with the idea of going beyond that framework, provoked by the most right wing authoritarian government Sri Lanka ever elected. Since 1994, it has been trying to course correct and have it both ways – regain credibility among the masses without going down the route of coalitions and alliances with other formations.
None of this absolves the NPP. It is difficult to defend a government when it falls headlong into one scandal after another. The NPP’s leading faces have all grown silent. Perhaps they have no other choice; they have come to power on the most radical political agenda Sri Lanka has seen since 1970. Does that justify its recent failures, prominently the issue of the speaker of parliament? Probably not. As its critics and rivals get together to trip it at every corner, the NPP must realise that it cannot shield itself from censure for long. It must either respond to criticism as it did, even if half-heartedly with its statement on the PTA or it must take decisive action as it has so far failed to with the speaker. The NPP must realise it is no longer in opposition. It must stop pretending that it is.