NOTES FROM AN ELECTION: CUTTING DOWN SAJITH
SAJITH PREMADASA IS THAT RARE CANDIDATE WHO PROMISES EVERYTHING. TAKE ANY TOPIC OR THEME – WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, THE 13TH AMENDMENT, THE SECURITY OF THE COUNTRY – AND HE TRIES TO PERFORM A BALANCING ACT ON A TIGHTROPE. HE MAKES TOO MANY GAFFES, COMMITS TOO MANY BLUNDERS, WALKS INTO TOO MANY WALLS, AND TRIES TO PLEASE TOO MANY PEOPLE WRITING TO THE PACIFIC AFFAIRS, BRUCE MATTHEWS CONTENDED THAT THE UNP UNDER JAYEWARDENE HAD BEEN ABLE “TO INCREASE BY 14 PER CENT ITS SHARE OF THE POPULAR VOTE, WHICH IT WRESTED FROM MRS. BANDARANAIKE AND THE MARXISTS, PRESUMABLY BY CAPTURING VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE ONE MILLION FIRST-TIME VOTER.”
UDAKDEV1@GMAIL.COM Michael Patrick O’leary, Padraig Colman to me and most of us, once wrote that more than anything else, what prevented Ranil Wickremesinghe from winning the presidency was the insularity of those who believe Colombo represented the country. He called them Colombans, a term coined as Kolombians by Malinda Seneviratne and the more neutral Colomboans by S. L. Gunasekara. In hindsight, the contention is correct.
After losing close to 30 elections over a period of 25 years, Ranil
Wickremesinghe, one of the few intelligent people unfortunate enough to be in national politics, has turned
Colombo into the UNP’S heart and soul. More at home among the “chattering classes” (a phrase Razeen Sally, hardly a Ranil critic, came up with) of the city, Ranil and his regency inadvertently reversed a process of transformation begun by his uncle in the early and mid
1970s. Under J. R. the UNP was turned into a petty bourgeois outfit. Premadasa took it to the village, or at least tried to.
Premadasa’s successor, after 1994, took it back to Fifth Lane. He’s been “living there” since 1994.
And now they’ve chosen Sajith Premadasa. “Chosen” isn’t the correct term of course: “been forced to select” is more accurate. He is not the preferred candidate of the chattering classes, but they will vote for him, because he represents a party that is much, much more than he is. In any case, the choice these classes face, as I pointed out before, is between a hard place and a rock. They much rather prefer the rock, because the chattering classes, again as I’ve pointed out before, it is the party, and not its leadership or the country it promises to lead, that they think of. If voting patterns in Sri Lanka remain inscrutable and confusing, the voting patterns of the Kolombians are probably the most inscrutable and confusing. Consider that even after all those walkways, they rejected
Gotabaya Rajapaksa. They chose A. J. M. Muzammil over the SLFP’S candidate as Mayor of Colombo. If they don’t quite get the irony of Muzammil extending his support to Gotabaya now, it’s because they are impervious to political irony. In that sense Sajith
Premadasa is a decoy: they will vote for him, but they will want someone else to call the shots. As of now, it’s
Ranil that they want.
Sajith Premadasa is that rare candidate who promises everything. Take any topic or theme – women’s representation, artificial intelligence, rural development, the 13th Amendment, the security of the country – and he tries to perform a balancing act on a tightrope. He makes too many gaffes, commits too many blunders, walks into too many walls, and tries to please too many people. He also refers to himself in the third person, which, I am forced to admit, smacks of an authoritarian streak, if not an egotistic one. His tweets, extolled for its clarity by those who look up to him as THE alternative to Rajapaksa, are exercises in circumlocution; to raise one point, just what are those “relevant substances” which he will use as “important ingredients” in his “policy making decision process”?
All this merely belabours the point. In the history of elections in this country the competition has been between a demagogue and a louder demagogue.
Sir John and S. W. R. D., Dudley and Sirimavo, Sirimavo and J. R., J. R. and Hector, Premadasa and Sirimavo, Chandrika and Gamini, Chandrika and Ranil, Mahinda and Ranil, Mahinda and Fonseka, Mahinda and Maithripala, and now, Gotabaya and Sajith. The choices aren’t tempting, nor are they easy to make: elections and campaigns in Sri
Lanka have typically been between a government that promises continuity to stay in power and an opposition that promises everything to get into power. Where the government or the opposition has had to resolve a split within its own ranks before putting forward its candidate, that candidate has always
been marketed as the new face of an old regime. In the 1970s it was J.
R., in the 1980s it was Premadasa, in the 1990s it was Chandrika, in the 2000s it was Mahinda, and in
2019, it is Sajith.
In 2015, Maithripala Sirisena ran on a platform which promised “change without continuity”, reduced presidential powers, constitutional amendments and reforms, and reconciliation, among other pledges. He appealed to a wide floating vote base which reduced the government’s margins of victories in seats Mahinda Rajapaksa had resoundingly won before. At the same time, however, his UNP Prime Minister was promising tax benefits and a liberal investment and regulatory environment at seminars organised by the Chamber of Commerce. Mahinda’s regime had wooed the echelons of the business world in Colombo, but the tycoons couldn’t resist Ranil Wickremesinghe. They gave him a chance, and they lost. They needed an alternative, badly. That alternative came up in the form of Viyath Maga. The MR-GR-BR camp, having learnt the hard way how to make themselves palatable to the tycoon class, began marketing Gotabaya Rajapaksa because he was the most establishment candidate they had after Mahinda, who in any case could not contest again.
Sajith Premadasa is trying to do what his father and his father’s predecessor a full decade to accomplish: turn the UNP on its head. In the 1970s
J. R. resorted to a crude, unique mixture of sustained vilification, overtures to Buddhist tenets, and kala paththara to woo a (mostly rural) middle class which was getting tired of Sirimavo’s autarkic policies. At the time the political, economic, social, even cultural environment was right for the UNP to bring about such a transformation, which is what it did despite several high profile, though toned down leadership tussles among Dudley, J. R., and Premadasa (who, in defiance of the party elders, formed his own Purawesi Peramuna or Citizens’ Front and embarked on a short-lived campaign that he would, in a way, revive in the late 1980s).
J. R. “spared” no class when the UNP went out campaigning. The bourgeoisie had now become a waning influence; the petty bourgeoisie, thanks to the democratisation of institutions after 1956, was aspiring upward and beyond. Shrewd as he was, J. R. targeted them and won comfortably.
The extent to which the man succeeded in bringing about this transformation can be gleaned not only from the results of the 1977 elections but his party’s subsequent electoral successes also. In 1970 Sirimavo Bandaranaike was able to harness the swing in the rural vote to her advantage, making use of a rural drop in popularity of a mere 1.8% for the opposition and winning 105 votes, despite polling less votes than the UNP. In 1977 the UNP, with only 51% of the vote, gained 85 seats in parliament, reducing the SLFP, which won 29% of the vote, to a paltry 8 seats. Writing to the Pacific Affairs,
Bruce Matthews contended that the UNP under Jayewardene had been able “to increase by 14 per cent its share of the popular vote, which it wrested from Mrs. Bandaranaike and the Marxists, presumably by capturing virtually all of the one million first-time voter.” There was, in other words, a “mass desertion” of the left wing: not all of it to J. R. perhaps, but definitively away from the Sirimavo. It was thus, by all means and accounts, a political and electoral transformation.
J. R.’s successor went deeper, combated class and caste prejudices in the party, fought against Lalith, Gamini, and Ranjan, and ended up taking the UNP to the village. More than any of his predecessors he tried to establish industry outside Colombo, though he undid himself by a massive island wide housing project the costs and benefits of which are being hotly debated even today. “To poor rural folk, a visit to the Gam Udawa Exhibition is like going to heaven and coming back,” R. W. Perera wrote in his book Premadasa of Sri Lanka.
If the accusation sounds elitist and condescending, it’s probably because it was: the establishment UNP and the oppositional SLFP alike tended to look down on him, the first outsider who had made it to the political stage. By trumping both the establishment and the opposition, both J. R.-lalithgamini-ranjan and Sirimavo-anura, he had hence trumped everyone.
The problem with his son is that he seems to think he is repeating what his father did. He is not. Sajith by no stretch of the imagination is the outsider his father was. It is true that he was forcibly repressed by the party, but that is not saying much. He does not have the equivalent of a Bradman Weerakoon or Susil Siriwardena for his campaign; he has Mangala and Malik, but they are poor substitutes. Sajith got to lead the UNP campaign last month, while his father had a full decade and a half of open hostility with his party leaders to back up his presidential aspirations in the late 1980s. Sajith is loud and intemperate where his father was calm and nuanced. Sajith’s garbled English a far cry from the eloquence of his father’s, though perhaps that’s just as well: in a country where garbled circumlocution is taken to be a sign of genius by those who either can’t access the language of privilege or believe that proficiency in it is a must for presidential candidates, he is the ideal UNP candidate. For all the others, in the UNP and outside it, he is not. Sajith, in that sense, is not who he lets others think he is.