SLFP’s Charge of the Light Brigade
Chandrika flies home from London base, desperate to salvage besieged party by hitching its bandwagon to Sajith’s rising star
The Patron Saint of the SLFP chapter and the Party’s former President of Sri Lanka twice over, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga flew home from her London base last week after receiving an SOP – Save Our Party – text message from senior party stalwart, Kumara Welgama.
The man from Kalutara, the 68- yearold Welgama had been keeping the onerous problems that had been plaguing the SLFP in these recent months on his shoulders like Atlas keeps the sky on his head, but the mounting weight of it had been far too much for one man to bear alone.
With members fleeing in droves to hitch a ride on the new Rajapaksa vehicle to El Dorado, Welgama had found strength in numbers depleting by the hour, and now his last hope to save the party he loves from the disintegration and doom that awaits it, was for the return of the scion of the party’s founder, now the matriarch of the SLFP, Chandrika Bandaranaike, the mentor of the Old Guard.
Welgama’s stance was simple. ‘I have been a member of the SLFP for the last thirty odd years,’ he declared, ‘ and I have no intention of joining the SLPP and neither will I join the UNP’. His only intention, he said, is to remain and fight to the end even though the party seems to have given up its ghost.
Since the Pohottuwa Party anointed Gotabaya Rajapaksa as its candidate for the Presidency and his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa as its leader, it has become emboldened to expand its horizons and launch a major takeover bid of its parent company which though reduced to a shell of its self today, possesses a vast reservoir of goodwill which can be tapped easily and exploited usefully for its future advancement.
For take the parent company: 68 years of history behind it. History that changed the course of this nation and the lives of its people when S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike took the dramatic step that day of September 2, 1951 and resigned as Minister of the ‘ United National Party’, which held the monopoly of power in post- Independent Ceylon, and broke away to form the ‘Sri Lanka Freedom Party’ to establish a credible alternative government.
Shedding long donned western attire and suavely slipping into something more comfortable like the indigenous wear his people wore, the Oxfordeducated Bandaranaike made the new formed party, the SLFP, shun western and colonial interests and instead to follow left of centre socialist policies on home ground; and, on the international front, abandon the UNP policy of being aligned to the West; and in its stead to pursue a policy of non-alignment. With the SLFP coming into existence, the mould of a two-party system was born, and was here to stay.
No wonder the Pohottuwa Party, which has still not bloomed to bask in the power of the sun’s starry light, seeks substance to its hot air, gravitas to its light headedness and an impeccable pedigree behind its birth as befits one to the manner born. Look at what state the Pohottuwa is in today. True it has a massive, exuberant following who may well get down on their knees and worship the ground their leaders walk on, but its candidate for the presidential election, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, it seems to be, is not a member of the party since under the Constitution one can be nominated as a candidate by a political party even though he or she may not be a member of it.
And neither is Mahinda Rajapaksa along with well- known figures passing off as card carrying members of the SLPP for the simple reason that if they do join the SLPP as card carrying members, they are at risk of immediately losing their seats in Parliament as UPFA members -- the grand alliance of which the SLFP is the major constituent party under which they contested the 2015 elections - and be forced to be exiled from Parliament till the next General Election results are announced.
In short, they are de facto members of the SLPP whilst never letting go of their de jure status in the SLFP. Merging with the SLFP, docking with and becoming part of the mothership under a new party umbrella would be the obvious solution to blur the divide and emerge as one.
When the proposal was mooted, presidential hopes of contesting for a second term hadn’t still died out in Sirisena’s breast and thus it was dismissed out of hand but the SLPP pursued the quest ruthlessly without relent.
As the pressure mounted on Sirisena to forsake his right to go for gold and dark clouds appeared to dispel his beliefs of a second coming, the President opted to soft pedal the issue and gain more time to determine which way the wind was blowing by sending his representative to conduct negotiations. The man he chose to broker these talks was the accomplished pole- vaulter in the political arena, Dayasiri Jayasekara. His track record held that he had been an SLFP member for a brief stint during Chandrika’s time, then joined the UNP, advocated its policies most vociferously and, when the chance came, crossed over to the SLFP in July 2013 to receive the embrace of President Rajapaksa who was waiting for his arrival at Temple Trees to nominate him as the SLFP’s Chief Ministerial candidate for the Vayamba Province at the Provincial Elections that were to be held in September that year.
He won but within one year and three months was busy accompanying Rajapaksa on the campaign trail as the purveyor of choice Sinhala words to attack the common candidate, Sirisena on every stage, hand in hand with his friend and counterpart Wimal Weerawansa hotly vying with each other for the most foul speech delivered at the Presidential Election 2015.
When abject defeat lay his hero Mahinda, whom he had praised so much and so oft, bereft of the glitter he exuded in power, Dayasiri Jayasekara was found the following day worshipping at Maithri’s newly erected temple atoning for his sins and groveling prostrate to rise to new plains using flattery to give him the necessary turbo boost for liftoff. His efforts payed off and soon the man who had scurrilously attacked Sirisena when he had been out of power was now scurrilously attacking Rajapaksa when he was shorn of it.
How artfully he had wriggled himself to occupy the trust and confidence of the erstwhile subject of his venomous attacks is revealed by the fact that Sirisena sacked Duminda Dissanayake as Secretary of the Party, the man who had placed his neck on the line and crossed over with Sirisena on November 20 2014 to take on the might of the Rajapaksa juggernaut and instead appointed the man who had at that very same time been on the opposite Rajapaksa camp degrading Sirisena with fulsome calumny as the new Party Secretary.
When the exodus of the SLFP Parliamentarians began, Dayasiri the consummate pole- vaulter who had the knack of jumping to the pastor that appeared green in colour and yet didn’t do he succeeded in making himself indispensable to Sirisena and soon became his Man Friday entrusted with the task of joining hands with the SLPP but in real fact amounted to deciding on the terms of its surrender. The Trojan Horse, it seemed to some, had returned to its stables.
The Pohottuwa’s covert campaign to snare the SLFP leadership into its orbit; to entice the SLFP members to seek solace and find refuge in its bosom, to covet the SLFP’s hard earned goodwill and make it its own and force it to forego its own ‘ chair’ symbol and come under the banner of the SLPP’s ‘pohottuwa’ symbol, started roughly around three months ago in August.
In the early stages of the discussions both parties were deadlocked in reaching a consensus on several issues and for a while it seemed that the talks would breakdown. A main contention was the issue of the symbol. Whilst Sirisena was insisting that the SLFP Party symbol of the ‘ chair’ should be the symbol of an alliance between the two parties, the SLPP leadership could not budge in having its own ‘pohottuwa’ symbol on the mast head of any joint venture.
But as many announcements made by the two parties that an MoU will be signed between them were mutually postponed to another day and tension mounted in both camps. The first to blink was Sirisena who finally cracked under pressure and succumbed to the Pohottuwa thrall.
Throughout these negotiations, Sirisena was publicly making announcements that surveys had revealed that both the SLPP and the UNP would only receive 40 per cent each of the total votes polled and that as a result it was he, Maithripala Sirisena as the leader of the SLFP, who held in its hand the magical ten per cent of the votes that would make either party from the knave to a King.
But the magic in his statement soon turned threadbare with constant wear and the day dawned when Sirisena, though promising to remain independent and not be a party to any form of horse dealing, finally bit the dust, leaving him with no leg to stand on or a chair to sit on.
Especially since the SLPP had stolen a march over SLFP’s objections when on October 7, the last day of nominations, it made its deposit and filed its papers at the Election Commission’s Office along with the ‘pohottuwa’ as its declared and irrevocable symbol and then Mahinda Rajapaksa proceeded to tell the SLFP that since the ‘pohottuwa’ had been accepted as the registered symbol of the SLPP nothing could be done to change it to another without inviting long and delaying legal complications.
Now only the last rights of the SLFP remained to be done. This Monday, SLFP Secretary Dayasiri Jayasekara announced that the Constitution of joint alliance between the SLFP and the SLPP would be declared and an MoU between them would be signed on Thursday. He also announced that another agreement to form an alliance will be signed by the Sirisena-led SLFP and the Rajapaksa-led SLPP and several other parties on the same day whereby Sirisena and Mahinda would be appointed co- leaders in the new alliance. On Thursday, the signing ceremony duly took place at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. The members of this new alliance called the ‘ Podujana Nidahas Alliance’ include the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the Eelam People's Democratic Party, the Ceylon Workers’ Congress and, the breakaway LTTE fraction, the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal which was formed by Karuna Amman, a former leader of the Tamil Tigers.
The new alliance also signed an agreement to contest the 2020 Parliamentary Election under the ‘ chair’ symbol. It is not clear whether the SLFP with its entire Parliamentary membership save one, namely, Kumara Welgama, having already decamped from the ancestral manor will survive the night with its virtues intactin the SLPP annex. Their initiation ceremony itself to gain a place on the SLPP stage raised many an eyebrow. They had to walk the gauntlet of humiliation, given a guard of dishonour a rousing welcome attendant with a twenty-one ‘ hoo’ salute and senior SLFP members like John Seneviratne, Nimal Siripala De Silva and others of their ilk had to suffer the humiliation doled out to them by pohottuwa supporters.
Perturbed over the events taking place in Colombo and anxious about the doom that awaited her party her father had founded and she too once led twice to victory, Chandrika Bandaranaike
Kumaratunga pledged to give leadership, pledged to give protection to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party from the grave threat facing it after the current leadership had announced plans to sign an MoU to form an alliance with the SLPP. In a statement issued on October 14, she called all the remaining SLFPers to use their vote rationally in the forthcoming elections. Chandrika said; ‘’ Conspirators are out to destroy the party which has ensured the democratic rights of the people’’.
The former President vowed to lead the charge of the Light Brigade where she and the SLFP diehards will gravely do battle with the SLPP to safeguard the party and the country. “It's not too late to wage a crusade to save the party from extinction. The SLFP had been handed over to the conspirators just for his personal benefit by a leader who came to power with 6.2 million votes. Don’t forget though the top level SLFPers may have fled to the opposite pohottuwa camp, 95 per cent of the SLFP camp are with us and are against the SLFP decision to join the SLPP’’.
‘’The SLFP is a party which had been victorious and democratic. But now SLFP had fallen to a state where it cannot field its own candidate at the forthcoming presidential elections,” former President Chandrika said. “I vow to lead the forces and to protect the SLFP even at the expense of my life, if need be, even as I led the party to victory in 1994 after 17 years of misery’’.
She vowed to give leadership to the battle begun by party members for the protection of the party and said that the party had been the victim of a great betrayal to achieve narrow and petty objectives of several individuals in a sellout disguised as “an agreement’’.
Her ultimate aim was to defeat the pohottuwa upstarts who dared to hijack the mother party and drape themselves with the SLFP blue. And how was she going to decapitate the tentacles of this rapidly growing political octopus and save the SLFP from its paralysing grasp?
It was far too late in the day to field a Presidential candidate of its own, the time for that had long passed. It was something that a major political party worth its salt should have done at such at an early stage of the game. But a new and vacillating party had sealed the SLFP fate by granting a walkover to its breakaway faction even before play had commenced. In her view, the alternative lay in the extreme: and that was to request the SLFP rank and file not to seek refuge in that traitorous brethren who had crossed over to the SLPP and now sought to gobble the party up but to instead ask them with a straight face to vote for their traditional opponent to convince them that the party’s future survival lay in their hands.
Arriving in Lanka from London late last week, she plunged herself into the thick of the action and organised opposition to the SLPP. On Thursday, even as Gotabaya Rajapaksa was signing the MoU with the SLFP Secretary to form the Podujana Nidahas Alliance to strengthen his position against the UNP, former President Ch and rik a Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was busy signing an MoU at the Taj Samudra with the UNP’s Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe – with the UNP Presidential candidate Sajith Premadasa in attendance – to form an alliance to defeat Gotabaya’s SLPP by damming the SLFP tide presently flowing towards it.
She did not come alone to express her displeasure over the SLFP’s official decision to join with the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna. She arrived with a contingent of over 17 parties which comprised, amongst others, of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, the All Ceylon Makkal Congress, National Unitary Alliance and the Chandrika-led Api Sri Lanka Party.
Events have already demonstrated that Chandrika is deadlier than Maithri, but only time will tell on this 17th morn whether her long shot hope of channelling the water’s dam in the favourable direction of the UNP’s Sajith have reached him and bathed him in triumph or not.