Sri Lanka’s incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa won an emphatic victory over his former Army chief General Sarath Fonseka in the January 26 Presidential election. In 2005, Rajapaksa had won by a very narrow margin, primarily because an Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)-enforced boycott in the Tamil areas had adversely affected the prospects of his rival, Ranil Wickremasinghe of the United National Party (UNP). This time around, there was no LTTE to influence the poll; it was rather the total defeat and decimation of the LTTE which was the key issue of the Presidential election. In fact, even though the election was constitutionally due only in November 2011, Rajapaksa had advanced the elections by two years precisely to cash in on the post-LTTE dominant national mood in Sri Lanka ranging from chauvinistic triumphalism to a widespread sense of relief and respite after more than two decades of intense civil war.
The mandate, though emphatic, is marked by accusations of massive misuse of the state machinery and media. It also reveals deep divides in the Sri Lankan polity – while Rajapaksa bagged majority Sinhala votes, his opponent led in all ethnic minority areas. Reinforcing this ethnic divide is a wider rural-urban and class divide – even in Sinhala-dominated areas Fonseka had greater support among the urban elite while rural Sinhala voters voted overwhelmingly for Rajapaksa.
Both Rajapkasa and Fonseka camps had projected their candidates as ‘war heroes’ and sought to win the polls by whipping up competitive waves of Sinhala chauvinism and triumphalism. For Rajapaksa supporters, the President had become Maha Rajanani (the great king), and State-run television channels and radio stations regularly played a song that hailed him as the great king who united the country. The Fonseka camp, on the other hand, hailed Fonseka as the real decimator of the LTTE. In his resignation letter Fonseka openly attributed the victory over LTTE to his own “vision, command and leadership” while charging Rajapakse with undermining the army, mismanaging the economy and promoting corruption and cronyism all around.
Using an analogy from cricket, Fonseka supporters claimed that just as in Cricket matches selectors and coaches could not claim to be the ‘man of the match’, the credit for the military victory should also go to the actual Army chief and not the President who was nothing more than the constitutional head of the armed forces. Victorious Rajapaksa now retorts by arguing that people remember the emperor who built the Taj Mahal, not the mason or chief engineer who led the construction work!
In their political views, both Rajapaksa and Fonseka are unabashed votaries of Sinhala majoritarianism. In an interview published in the Canadian magazine National Post on September 23, 2008, Fonseka quite bluntly advocated his “Sri Lanka for the Sinhala” line: “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people. … They can live in this country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things.” Rajapaksa now talks of addressing minority grievances, but only from the position of a victor who demands the allegiance of his subjects, as was evident from his interview with N. Ram of The Hindu: “They (Sri Lankan Tamil leaders) were not interested in solving this problem as long as Prabhakaran was there. Now they must understand that there is no option for them but to talk. I’m the President of the country, I’m the leader of the country, they must come and negotiate with me, have a dialogue with me. If they think they can’t cope with me, new leaders will come up and I will have to deal with them.”
During the Presidential election, most of the opposition parties in Sri Lanka had come together to support the candidature of Fonseka. But now that Fonseka has been charged with sowing dissension in the Army and is facing court martial, opposition parties will have to reposition themselves for the impending parliamentary elections.
In a way, Fonseka’s defeat marked a popular rebuff to the Army elite’s attempt to meddle in politics. In popular perception, Fonseka was also perceived as an American protégé even though Rajapaksa’s brother and defence secretary Gothabaya Rajapakse who is credited to have mapped out the strategy of the war on LTTE was also a long-time resident in the US and Rajapaksa too took full advantage of the American discourse of war on terror to step up the military offensive against the LTTE. The US is however wary of the Rajapaksa regime’s growing economic and political ties with China and may well find it convenient to invoke the slogans of human rights and democracy to tighten pressure over Colombo.
Rajapaksa flaunts his good ties with key Asian countries – India, China and Japan in particular – to ward off US pressure. To keep India in good humour, he has even made a distinction between India and China or Japan. In the aforementioned Hindu interview he described India as “relation” and others as good friends!
For the overwhelming majority of the Sri Lankan population – Tamil as well as Sinhala – life has indeed become quite harsh. Sri Lanka’s once celebrated model of social welfare has crumbled under the growing burden of militarization of the island’s economy and polity. Contrary to the empty promises of greater devolution of power, hundreds of thousands of Tamils find themselves herded into refugee camps (ostensibly called ‘welfare villages’) in miserable conditions and the media and international relief organizations have very little access to these camps. In such conditions it is difficult to think of any meaningful national reconciliation between the Sinhala and Tamil peoples. Democracy and social welfare have been the biggest casualties of the Sri Lankan state’s war on LTTE, and the people of Sri Lanka will have to wage a determined and protracted battle to improve their conditions and secure their rights in the war-ravaged island.
Liberation, March, 2010
Sri Lanka: The Message of the Election
Those aware of Mahinda Rajapakse’s post-war popularity in the Sinhalese villages were not surprised by the outcome of the presidential election. Yet, methods used by his camp to secure his second term seem illegal and irregular. The reality is that, over the years, people have got used to such methods. General Sarath Fonseka was fielded as common candidate by the United National Party (UNP), People’s Liberation Front (JVP) and allies to steal the thunder from Rajapakse, whose main claim was that he led the “War against Terrorism” to victory. Thus the election campaign was mainly about rival claims to the credit for winning the war. There were of course charges of corruption, nepotism, rise in crime rate, social violence, denial of democracy and abuse of power against Rajapakse and less well founded counter accusations against his main rival. But in matters of policy there was no visible difference between the two.
The UNP-JVP alliance was somewhat a frog and rat alliance; and nothing good could emerge from it regarding a solution to the national question. Sarath Fonseka made no pledge that appealed to the minority nationalities, and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) offered him support for very weak reasons. But JVP dissenter Wimal Weerawansa and the Jathika Hela Urumaya pounced on it to claim that there was a secret deal between the TNA and Fonseka, and used faked documents to support the claim. In all probability, TNA support secured for Fonseka far fewer votes than fear of a Fonseka-TNA deal did for Rajapakse. An analysis of the results suggests Fonseka’s performance among minority nationalities was poorer than that of the UNP candidate Ranil Wickramasinghe in 2005.
While the Sinhala and English news media, including the state-owned which indulged in distasteful mud slinging, sided strongly with Rajapakse, the Tamil print media (excluding the hardly read state-owned Thinakaran and a Muslim weekly) carried out a vigorous campaign for Fonseka. Even the call by the Tamil Congress (TC) to boycott the elections was given little prominence. The TC went quiet when the spokesperson for the TNA declared support for Fonseka, to avoid a further split in the TNA, but did not retract its call for a boycott. The New Democratic Party stood by its call for spoiling the ballot papers as the election offered no real choice, especially for the minorities, and actively campaigned in the Jaffna District.
Fear was strong among TNA leaders as well as Tamil media bosses that the Tamils could reject the elections. Two popular weekly columns in one Tamil newspaper, one in its Sunday edition and another at the weekend, and two articles by me in the same newspaper advocating rejection were countered by numerous statements and articles by personalities including Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), academics, a former Supreme Court judge and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Jaffna, appealing to the people to join the mainstream of politics by voting and not to be misled by calls to reject. Many of the published items explicitly supported Fonseka.
The TNA leader Sampanthan who supported Fonseka was given great province, while Vickramabahu Karunaratna of the ‘Left Front’, the darling of the Tamil media until Fonseka handed in his nomination papers, was almost shunted out. The Tamil candidate Sivajilingam MP, who contested in defiance of the TNA, was particularly targeted for attack by a leading newspaper in the North, which even avoided publication of an interview that it obtained from the leader of the NDP, because he refused to single out Sivajilingam for attack.
Efforts to secure Tamil votes for Fonseka and to prevent a repeat performance of the boycott of the Jaffna Municipal Council elections months earlier failed. Only around 20% voted in the Jaffna District, with 3.5% of the ballot papers spoilt compared with a figure of 0.8% on average for the South. Voting in the Vanni, also in the north, was poor at 40%, not counting the near total boycott in the Mullaitivu district. The Eastern Province with Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese in comparable numbers had a polling rate of 62% in all electorates but Ampara, with a Sinhala majority, compared with 70 to 80% in the rest of the country. Over 2% of the ballots cast were spoilt. Also, in the predominantly Tamil electorate of Batticaloa in the east, polling stood at 12% at noon and eminent persons including Catholic priests and Muslim preachers were called into service to boost the voting to 62% when voting ceased at 4.00 p.m.
Enthusiasm for the election was low among the Muslim and Hill Country Tamil voters too, but not as low as among the Tamils of the North-East. In electorates with a significant Tamil and Hill Country Tamil presence, spoilt votes amounted to 2% of the votes cast. Interestingly, the three Trotskyite candidates who rejected the idea of a third common candidate had less than 20,000 votes between them, fewer than a fifth of the number of spoilt ballot papers. Those who claim that the minority nationality votes cast for Sarath Fonseka were twice that for Rajapakse avoid reference to the boycott by the Tamils. It seems that the Tamils chose not only to reject all presidential candidates but also the prescriptions of their political and community leaders, and the news media.
The day of the election seems to be the eye of a hurricane separating the pre-election violence and breach of democratic norms from the ominous developments that followed the election. While the boycott of the elections by a majority of Tamils in the North-East marked the exercise of the democratic right not to vote and thereby sending a strong political message, developments in the South are turning nasty and things are likely to take a turn for the worse after the parliamentary elections, to be held a few months prematurely in March or April.
Fonseka has refused to accept the results and has accused the government of a massive fraud, pointing to evidence of stealing of ballot papers. Charges of electoral fraud by his allies are supported by a few other candidates too. The government is out to harass Fonseka and rationalise its conduct in terms of a possible coup planned by Fonseka’s camp. A hotel, located close to a major army camp in Colombo, where Fonseka’s team was based was surrounded by soldiers even as counting was in progress. While charges mount that the government had stolen the election, the government has responded with the charge that the Fonseka camp was planning a coup, with the JVP as a key player.
Claims by both sides have little to do with protecting democratic institutions. It is generally believed, and with good reason, that India favoured Rajapakse while the US was behind Fonseka. While that does not mean that Rajapakse would antagonise the US or for that matter Fonseka, if elected, would have dared to cross India’s path, signs had been ominous for democracy, irrespective of the outcome of the election. Only months before the election, Rajapakse was alerted to an attempted coup and the Indian High Commissioner rushed to his rescue with the backing of Indian security forces. Although the alleged attempt turned out to be false alarm, no information has been forthcoming about the source of the mischief.
Meanwhile, plans for a sustained mass campaign by the Fonseka camp to nullify the elections besides legal action to the same effect are likely to heat up the political climate and lead to a counterattack by the government by means fair and foul. There are now threats to try Fonseka by a military court for attempting to stage a coup.
The US is now increasingly aggressive worldwide towards what it sees as hostile or less supportive governments. Its once overt and now covert support for the movement to reject the presidential election of Iran, its connivance in the coup in Honduras and sending troops in large numbers into earthquake hit Haiti are things to bear in mind. Equally worrying is Indian conduct in regional affairs, notably Nepal.
Just now, things do not look bright for democracy in Sri Lanka. But worse is in store after the parliamentary elections, irrespective of the outcome.
S. Sivasegaram