Sri Lankan Election

Give it to one-time Army chief Sarath Fonseka and one-time Tamil militant, M K Sivajilingam, to shoot himself at the feet. By shooting his mouth off on the clouded ‘Nandikadal episode’ during the end-game of the ‘ethnic war’, the former may have made things that much easier for the campaign managers of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. By contesting the presidential polls against the advice of the TNA leadership, Sivajilingam may have contributed to an inevitable split in the four-party alliance, which it can ill-afford ahead of the parliamentary polls in April.
The list is long, a total of 22 candidates are in the fray for the presidential polls. Only the three of them will remain in the reckoning, with the Left-leaning Wickramabahu Karunaratne too being heard from time to time. While President Rajapaksa and Candidate Fonseka would sweat it out for the winning-post, the losing side between them would dub Sivajilingam the spoil-sport, and divine reasons to argue why it was so.
Against this, the Tamil Diaspora, or at least sections thereof, would want an occasion to celebrate. Their day would have been made if the Tamil votes for Sivajilingam pushes the presidential polls to the ‘second preference vote’. Some among them could still have cause to call Sivajilingam the spoiler. Just as they continue to dub the LTTE the spoiler from 2005 presidential polls that the Tamil community was forced to boycott -- and UNP’s Ranil Wickremesinghe lost.
As the common Opposition candidate, Fonseka can hope to get a substantial share of the traditional UNP and JVP vote-banks. A cadre-based party like the JVP still has a better chance of delivering on the promise than a mass-based outfit like the UNP. Both parties are battered beyond recognition from the past elections, owing to splits and election defeats. That cannot be overlooked.
Yet, the hope of seeing Ranil back in power, albeit as Prime Minister, may still bring around demoralised UNP voters, as against disgruntled party leaders, many of whom are still simmering from within. The JVP too has been singing a different tune on the Prime Minister question, and Fonseka has not been called upon to comment on the question.
If the UNP voters thought that with no party to call his own, Fonseka in power would be under the mercy of their party to get things through in Parliament, they may be wrong. With no party to represent him in Parliament, Fonseka could well consider all parties to be his own – and poach on them, or whatever is left of them. The rump UNP would be a sitting duck.
Even Fonseka’s conditional endorsement about the abolition of the Executive Presidency should confuse the UNP voters. It should be so with the intellectual class, too. They have all along adopted the UNP as their own. Maybe, the Rajapaksa presidency may have given them greater justification for them to remain so.
Yet, not many of them have been heard after the UNP endorsed Fonseka’s candidature. Earlier, they used to say that under the Rajapaksa dispensation they were not able to open up their minds – and speak out. Will Wickramabahu K be their choice is the question.
In this background, Fonseka’s faux pas over the ‘end-game’ of the war has the potential to torpedo the limited personal vote-bank that the victory in the ‘ethnic war’ might entail him. The world is as serious as it is curious to know what happened at Nandikadal, when and how – and justifiably so. But in terms of politics and elections, it can lose him more Sinhala votes than win as many Tamil votes.
The gap in Fonseka’s script is showing even otherwise. He made a pointed reference to India’s ‘Bangladesh War’, and claimed how the Indian political leadership did not rob the armed forces of all the credit that was due to them for the war victory in 1971. The comparison was as odious as it was obvious.
At the successful conclusion of the Bangladesh War, President V V Giri conferred ‘Bharat Ratna’, India’s highest civilian honour, on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had lent political leadership to the war-effort. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Leader of the Jan Sangh Opposition, equated Indira Gandhi to ‘Goddess Durga on the Lion’, ever ready to destroy the Evil.
After the dust had settled over the war and victory, the Indian President created Gen Sam Manekshaw, the Army chief, the first-ever Field Marshal. Earlier, during the momentous end to the war, Manekshaw had allowed history pass by him when he had his field commander, Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora, to sign the surrender treaty with Pakistani counterpart, Lt Gen A A K Niazi. It is a picture that is etched in the mind of every Indian – and will remain so for ever.
If Sivajilingam is serious about his candidacy, it is not known how he is going to manage a joint campaign with Candidate Karunaratne, as he has said. His announcement has robbed whatever seriousness that could be attached to Sivajilingam’s candidacy. Sivajilingam’s message from the election may be limited to proving that the Tami votes, and hence the Tamil community’s legitimate political aspirations, could not be over-looked. But how that purpose would be served by his campaigning alongside Wickramabahu Karunaratne is unclear, as yet.
It is one thing for the Tamil polity to endorse a single candidate, and send out a message of its own. It is another thing for the TNA, given the acknowledged credibility of the outfit under the circumstances, to field a ‘Tamil candidate’ of its own. It is an entirely different thing for an independent Tamil candidate, particularly with a TNA link, to contest as an independent – and expect neither the party, nor the community to split.
Having unilaterally floated the idea of the Tamils casting their ‘second preference’ vote for Fonseka – and extending the argument to cover the imminent return of Wickremesinghe to the helm – sections of the pro-LTTE segment within the Tamil Diaspora cannot escape responsibility for precipitating a non-existing and unwelcome crisis with the Tamil polity and society. It was the way the LTTE used to operate, and the entire Tamil community paid a heavy price for it.
It is not as if this were a one-pit stop. The presidential polls are to be followed by the parliamentary elections. Then, they may have the Provincial Council elections in the North. Contesting it with or without re-merger (at least as a demand) would be a question that’s already haunting the polity of the Sri Lankan Tamil community, only that no one wants to think about it. The Sivajilingam candidacy, thus, has the potential to weaken, not strengthen the Sri Lankan Tamil voice, and by extension, that of the Tamil-speaking people as a whole.
The presence of Sivajilingam by itself is not going to make it a three-cornered contest in the traditional sense of the phrase. Yet, the nation’s focus would be as much on the number of votes that he would poll, as on the final outcome of the presidential elections. The advent of Fonseka as the common candidate of an otherwise divided Opposition and the dramatic entry of Sivajilingam, if taken to the logical conclusion, have made the election as much interesting for the nation to watch, as they have made it as much challenging for the incumbent.
It is too early to say if there is anything more to this election than the media event that it has become. It has as much potential to divide the nation -- as the war that is at the centre of the campaign had purportedly united the nation. Worse still, apart from the unanswered Tamil aspirations, this election has the potential to divide the majority Sinhala people too along lines that they are not accustomed to – and thus do not know of ways to mend and repair the damage that this election would have wrought on the society and psyche, down the line.