The season of thalagoyas and kabaragoyas

By Malinda Seneviratne

(November 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Politicians rarely get rattled as much as they do when elections are around the corner. Parliamentary elections have to be held by April 2010 and the presidential affair was always a possibility anytime after Mahinda Rajapaksa completes four years in office. It is of course a monumental flaw in the constitution that a man can call elections at his choosing and therefore able to pick a date that is best suited for his re-election - thanks to JRJ of course, and all the UNPers elected to Parliament in 1977 who voted for the 1978 constitution.

Ranil Wickremesinghe must cringe now, but then again he was a very young man then, just out of university, in power not due to any proven skills but family ties.

Not much can be done about these things at this point of course. People can complain about the constitution and pledge to change it but the fact remains that they will have to live with it and perish in it. What is pertinent to all politicians at this point is that there will be elections soon. These are days, then, of unending headaches for all politicians and it does give me a kick to see people tearing their hair out, spitting venom, crying foul and these and other ways doing the headless-chicken number.

There was a lot of speculation about which would come first, the Presidential or the General Election. It seems now that the JVP, in considerably reduced circumstances, was trying its best to frighten President Mahinda Rajapaksa into holding the latter first. A lot of hype was built up around Sarath Fonseka coming forward as the Common Candidate of the Opposition (CCO).

The name of this national hero was shamelessly prostituted to achieve the narrow political objectives of politicians whose expiry dates have come and gone. The United National Party and its leader have appeared to be dead scared of taking on Mahinda Rajapaksa and the fact that they have been talking of a CCO itself is a sad indictment of the party’s assessment of its popularity. The JVP needs a big leg-up to lift it from the political morass it has got itself into and Sarath Fonseka is certainly a big enough name to piggy-back on.

Today, Sarath Fonseka has to sort out the issue of how to nominate himself. He is not a sitting MP or an ex-MP. He needs a recognized party to nominate him. The UNP will never nominate him because that would bury Ranil Wickremesinghe (the man is yet to say he will not contest; that alone speaks about what he plans to do). Fonseka can’t join the JVP because that would be akin to throwing all his medals into the gutter. He has to use the vehicle of a lesser party and that itself would be a severe come-down.

He said he was going to announce his retirement plans within 48 hours. That deadline passed 48 hours ago and Fonseka is still silent. Perhaps he is having second thoughts. He must wonder what Ranil Wickremesinghe plans to do in this cut-throat, trust-no-one game called politics. He must understand now that he would be staking his hero-status in a winner-takes-all-loser-gets-nothing election. Someone must have told him that it is going to be an uphill task without any guarantees.

At the back of his mind he knows that he will be asked what he has to say about what Ranil Wickremesinghe and his right hand men said during the last stages of the war. Those statements will come to haunt him and he has to find a way to call a kabaragoya a thalagoya. He of course has the option of coming as a third candidate and at some point withdrawing from the race and say he’s supporting Ranil Wickremesinghe. That would also amount to shooting himself in the foot.

Throw into this political mess the fact that the UNP and JVP are now talking about alternative CCOs and that’s a lot of egg on Fonseka’s face. He never would have expected to be treated like some wannabe CCO waiting expectantly in line with a bunch of others to be vetted by a set of politicians who have gone on record to say he was unfit to lead even the Salvation Army.

Perhaps the JVP didn’t think things through and believed that Fonseka would have a clear path to the CCO position. Perhaps they calculated that this would turn a one-horse race into a two-horse one and that Mahinda Rajapaksa would blink and go for the Parliamentary election, in which case they would go into a coalition with the UNP with Fonseka elevated to the post of Campaign Chief.

Indeed, Mahinda Rajapaksa himself seemed quite rattled when the CCO circus came to town. That he had spent some sleepless night showed on his face when he addressed the SLFP Convention last week. He has since sobered up and appears to have recovered his composure. He is now ready to take on any CCO, Ranil Wickremesinghe or both at once, since Fonseka’s theatrics (further compromised by Mangala Samaraweera’s mischief-making including the cooking of his letter of resignation) has diminished the man’s political stock considerably.

Once Ranil Wickremesinghe announces that he will contest (and I have no doubt that he will), Fonseka will be reduced to a kumanthranakaraya (conspirator) or worse, a konthrathkaruwa (contractor) for the UNP. ‘Hatchet-man’ is hardly a tag he will embrace with open arms but that’s what awaits him.

There will be a lot of name-calling. Both ways. Mahinda Rajapaksa will be accused of all kinds of things, acts of omission and commission. He can’t hide the fact that as Executive President the buck really stops with him. He will have to accept the karumaya. By the same token, he has the right to the urumaya. He will have to take responsibility for everything yet unresolved and by the same token the accusers will have to concede that he has the bragging rights to the victories.

As the Executive President and as a man protected by a constitution written by Ranil’s uncle, Mahinda Rajapaksa will have the power to complete half the tasks that Ranil Wickremeisnghe in his new party manifesto promises to do. That will undercut Ranil and Fonseka (IF he ends up contesting). He can choose to do nothing and depend 100% on Ranil Wickremesinghe shooting his mouth, we must not forget. Ranil can be counted on for this.

In any case, there is nothing to stop anyone from believing that he/she has more than a fair chance of becoming President. Dreaming is not outlawed and cannot be. This is why it is going to be fun to watch. The JVP will have to turn the UNP karabagoya into a thalagoya. The UNP, likewise, will have to turn the JVP kabaragoya into a thalagoya. Fonseka will have to share the political platform with political kabaragoyas such as Lakshman Kiriella, Mangala Samaraweera, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Ravi Karunanayake and tell the people, ‘no, they are all thalagoyas’. Mahinda Rajapaksa has already turned quite a few kabaragoyas into thalagoyas. All these people will have to decide whose thalagoyas and kabaragoyas they want to be; the winning name-giver’s or someone else’s.

As for the people, let us reconcile ourselves to the fact that politicians are all slimy creatures and it doesn’t matter whether they are called kabaragoyas or thalagoyas because in the end they are actually crocodiles because we don’t do the eating, we just get eaten!

-Sri Lanka Guardian