UNP - duplicate of ruling political alliance?

by Dr. Vickramabahu Karunaratna

(January 04, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) On December 4, 2008, Mano Ganesan issued a statement under the title “Thoughts to share” which concluded with the following paragraph:

“UNP is the party which proposed peace for this country while in government. It is the party which brought the one and only power devolution law (13th Amendment) in the history of Sri Lanka. But look what is happening, today?

No guts

The UNP today has no guts to challenge the fruitless war. It has no guts to say that the war will neither solve the ethnic issue nor finish terrorism. It has no guts even to tell the government to implement what is already law in the country to the letter. It has no guts to tell the government to provide all the powers to the provincial councils listed in the 13th Amendment including the land and police powers. It has no guts to tell the government that the need of the hour is not the war but winning the minds and hearts of the Tamil speaking people with a substantial package well beyond the 13th Amendment. It has no guts to tell the government ‘very loudly’ not to antagonise the international community.

Instead, the UNP is singing the war chorus and playing a supportive role to the government with very little or small slogans, sometimes contradictory to each other. And pathetic it is, the dream of the UNP. Dreaming of the people putting it into power at election after election.

Why should the people do that when the UNP itself is endorsing the very lifeline of the very government it wants to defeat? People are not that foolish, eh?’’

Mano makes this criticism while he is technically a UNP MP. Hence it is a serious criticism of UNP politics. The UNP supported the war budget and openly claimed that war should be continued with much vigour. The late General Janaka Perera was introduced as a better substitute to Gotabhaya as director of the ‘patriotic war’ of the Sinhalese. Karu Jayasuriya claimed that he joined Mahinda because of his war policy and nothing else, and that he will continue to support the war while supporting Ranil’s open economic policy. After visiting the Dalada Maligawa a few days back, he said with much certainty that the war to eliminate the Tamil uprising before a political solution has been the policy of the UNP and it will be so in the future too. As Mano aptly says, the UNP is endorsing the very lifeline of the Mahinda regime. Nay, it goes further for it is taking back from the Mahinda regime the best of the Sinhala chauvinist leaders into its central leadership. It is becoming a duplicate of the ruling political alliance. The alliance with Mangala is not important as such people are still available within the government as well. Tissa Vitharana, Dew and Dilan are a few of them. Mano says that it is a pathetic dream of the UNP to expect people to put it into power with this kind of policy.

Global capitalism

I think, though it is contradictory to popular politics, that Ranil’s thinking is rational from the angle of conservative capitalism. He knows Mahinda is better equipped to crush rebellions both in the South as well as in the North and also to consolidate the bourgeois state power under the banner of Sinhala Buddhist patriotism. Once that is done, Ranil, if and when he comes to power, could use the setup to implement the economic agenda of global capitalism. The UNP stands for liberal democracy, at least when it is in the opposition. But its economic policy tied to open economics or neo liberal economics, bonds it to the brokering elites of global capitalism. Ranil with his Western style is the very personification of this political content. Perhaps Karu could soften this image but he is too bourgeois to introduce a radical change. The only thing that he could really do is to enhance the suspicion of the oppressed nationalities. It is a great tragedy that the image of Buddha, the one who preached Mettha Karuna, Muditha and Upekka for human coexistence, is used by both bourgeoisie parties for the escalation of a barbaric war that has made the country a massive funeral house.- Sri Lanka Guardian