Fortune does favour the daring as Sajith grabs UNP crown from Ranil
If he wins the presidency, he’ll be the first elected UNP president since his father President Premadasa
As Shakespeare would have put it, there was a tide in the affairs of Sajith which he took at the flood and which led him on to challenge the leadership whose shelf life had long since expired and to emerge triumphant at the end.
Had he waited for the fossilised Working Committee to hand him the nomination on a platter to him to lead the UNP to a presidential triumph in November this year, both he and his party’s fortunes, most probably, would have been bound to lie in the shallows for the next five long years.
But Sajith discerned the current and was brave enough to take it, even though for a while it embroiled the UNP in a bitter internecine war from which, it seemed, they would lose their venture, with the entire ship going down, to the cacophony of bellicose clamour as those aboard, oblivious as to their fate, continued to hurl barbs at one another.
Luckily, fortune favours those who dare; and Sajith won the day. At the eleventh hour, both sides did realise that if they ventured forth on this suicidal course, they will all wittingly perish, leave none to mourn. The truce bell was sounded and all rallied around its call. Compromises were made, conditions were met and the Old Guard surrendered the torch to the New. The unity of the party was saved in the nick of time; and the party survived to fight another day.
The terms of the deal were that Sajith Premadasa would be the party’s presidential candidate whilst Ranil Wickremesinghe would retain his mantle as leader of the UNP and continue to wear the prime ministerial cape. The unity of the party, too, was preserved. New blood, though known, had been infused and the party had a new face, though well familiar, to face the presidential hustings.
And, above all, the party’s spirit had been uplifted, its morale raised to a new pitch. Suddenly the UNP seemed on a high and raring for battle. And the public’s interest, too, had been revived and raised. The party’s internal war had become a spectator sport and, for the last few weeks, the question on people’s lips was not ‘who will win the election’ but who the UNP will nominate as its presidential candidate.
And for all that, credit must go to 52-year-old Sajith. He had shaken the plum tree and brought down the over ripened fruit that stubbornly held on to its stem and refused to fall.
By storming the citadel and demanding the knights to consider his candidature and threatening he will take his battle elsewhere if they did not, he broke the staid laid back image the UNP had possessed for so long and turned it into a fighting force with the motto tattooed on their forehead: ‘Ask and thou shall be given.’
And given, they were. But not before Sajith took his campaign to the streets where massive crowds came to witness and hear the rising son of a former president R. Premadasa. His speech in Badulla and his speech in Matara where he tossed his hat onto the presidential ring and his speech at Matugama shook Sirikotha to its foundations; and when the usurper banged on its door, it was meekly opened. And what he asked was readily given.
Alas, for Ranil. For twenty four years he had steered the party through thick and thin and brought it safe ashore through every storm that blew. But the vessel he captained had always returned to port without the precious cargo in the hold he had been in quest of. The Holy Grail of the presidency had always eluded his reach.
Three months ago he had been sauntering jauntily atop his elephant towards the starting stall when his merry ride had been stopped in its track.
True, he had been able to keep the sceptre and the throne but had been forced to place the crown on another’s head; and the heady dream he had entertained of becoming Lanka’s President had now vanished into the hopeless night with his aspiration to reach the upland of power now turned to dust.
The one consolation he can find to keep his gloom at bay, perhaps, lies in the words of Harold MacMillan who told his Prime Minister Anthony Eden shortly before ousting him from power and becoming Prime Minister of Britain himself in 1957: “You know as well as I do, Anthony. There’s no justice in politics.”
And, perhaps, realises, too, there is no room for gentlemen in politics anymore either.