Of those political 'three wheelers'

By Prabath Sahabandu

(November 06, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The realignment of political forces following the Southern Provincial Council election has taken an interesting turn. Almost all small parties have been attracted to either the UNP or the SLFP as pins to a magnet, the JVP and the TNA (which is also a collective of a few Tamil parties) being two glaring exceptions. Having burnt bridges after making a hasty exit from the UPFA in a huff in 2005, the JVP has no way of coalescing with the ruling party again. Nor can it join forces with the UNP for ideological reasons. As regards the TNA, the gravitational pull comes not from the two main parties at home but the Tamil Diaspora outside.

The dilemma of the JVP and the TNA is whether to contest the next presidential election or not.

The government will opt for a snap presidential election before dissolving Parliament as the JRJ government did in 1988. The JVP and the TNA will have to field presidential candidates if they are to prevent the two main parties from eating into their vote banks at that vital election where everybody will want to exercise his or her franchise. In the alternative, they will have to opt out of the race and support either of the two main parties indirectly. It would be a supreme irony if the TNAand the JVP––the former is sympathetic to the LTTE and the latter dead against it––were to support the same candidate.

The Proportional Representation (PR) system has stood small parties in good stead as they can garner votes scattered throughout a district and gain representation, which is an advantage that the first-past-the-post system denies them. But, the PR system has also brought about a peculiar situation where every Tom, Dick and Harry is in a position to form a political party with or without votes and be on par with the two main parties by joining coalitions led by them. The SLFP and the UNP with a host of tiny coalition partners trailing them have come to look like two hens surrounded by chicks. Political Lilliputians who throw in their lot with the main parties can rest assured that they will get cabinet posts if the coalition they back wins.

The government has sought to pooh-pooh the formation of the United National Alliance (UNA) because of the electoral strength of its allies. Media Minister Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena boasted at a press briefing on Wednesday that unlike the UPFA, the UNA consisted of 'three-wheeler' parties. It was a case of the pot calling the kettle black! Our representative covering that event promptly corrected him and pointed out that most of the UPFA coalition partners were also political 'three-wheelers'.

The predatory instinct of the two main parties, so to speak, has helped control the exponential growth of minuscule political parties to some extent. While engineering defections from each other, they have swallowed up several political dwarfs like the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party, the Bahujana Nidahas Peramuna, the Sri Lanka Progressive Front and the Democratic United National Front. The SLFP has bitten chunks off the JVP and the TMVP. The National Freedom Front (NFF) is very likely to end up in the SLFP after the next parliamentary election. It was reported at the time of writing that General Secretary of the NFF Minister Nandana Gunathilake had resigned from the party. The UNP Democratic Group has already been dissolved in the SLFP. The SLFP (M) led by Mangala Samaraweera will get absorbed into the UNP.

The JVP's original plan was to gobble up the SLFP, oust the UNP and capture State power. When the SLFP and the JVP coalesced in 2004, some of the SLFP stalwarts protested claiming that the JVP would eat into the SLFP's support base. But, the opposite happened and the hunter became the hunted!

After the next presidential election, some of the political Lilliputians are likely to switch their allegiance to the winner as politics is a question of power and it is the Executive President who will secure the control of Parliament and decide who gets what.

(The writer, Chief Editor, the ‘The Island’, daily news paper based in Colombo, where this piece appears. He can be reached at prabhath@unl.upali.lk. )

-Sri Lanka Guardian