Towards an unfree election

By Tisaranee Gunasekara
Courtesy: The Sunday Leader

“When the truth of your life is too terrible, that truth becomes your enemy.”
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.(Between Time And Timbuktu)

(January 21, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The presidential election claimed its first victim last Tuesday, in the Rajapaksa stronghold of Tangalle. A bus on its way to a UNP meeting came under gunfire, killing 55 year old Kusumawathie Kuruppuarchchi, a mother of five. On the same day, an exasperated Election Commissioner threatened to withdraw from presidential poll duties, if his orders continue to be ignored by the powers that be. These two incidents are symbolic of a portentous acceleration in electoral violence and malpractices. If this trend continues unabated, on January 26 Sri Lanka may witness an election as unfree and unfair as the infamous Referendum of 1982.

The lawlessness permeating the presidential election campaign is a function of the gap between the astronomical expectations of the regime and the far less lofty reality. The UPFA believes or purports to believe that its landslide wins at the recent provincial council polls were caused by a mammoth electoral swing in its favour. The reality is far otherwise; the UPFA won massively because almost two million UNP voters abstained from voting. Even in the Sinhala majority areas of the country, there was no tectonic shift in favour of the Rajapaksas; there was just an elephantine drop in the UNP vote. And, contrary to popular myth, these UNP voters did not desert the UNP and join the UPFA, in an outbreak of ‘patriotic’ fervour; they simply abstained from voting, due to a sense of hopelessness.

The arithmetic is stark and non-negotiable. At the presidential election of 2005, Mahinda Rajapaksa obtained 4,661,143 votes in the seven Sinhala majority provinces (outside the north and the east). At the 2008/9 provincial council elections, the ruling UPFA obtained 4,828,284 votes in these seven provinces. Therefore the UPFA vote in the Sinhala majority provinces increased by a paltry 167,141 between 2005 and 2008/9; this meagre performance was despite winning the war and abusing state resources on an unprecedented scale. Consequently, the UPFA’s massive victories at the PC polls were caused not by an electoral tidal wave in its favour but because 1,903,482 UNP voters abstained from voting. If those UNP voters did vote, the UPFA would have won moderately in five out of seven provinces and lost moderately in the other two (Central and Sabaragamuwa).

Given this not so favourable electoral balance, why did Mahinda Rajapaksa call for a premature presidential election? Was it the stars, an important factor in Lankan politics? Did he believe in his own propaganda of a patriotic landslide in his favour? Or did he bank on almost two million UNP voters abstaining, as happened at the provincial polls? That calculation may have worked, had the much defeated Ranil Wickremesinghe entered the fray, as the UNP’s presidential candidate.

In that event, the JVP would have fielded its own candidate and a wave of apathy (born of a collective premonition of defeat) would have swept over the opposition ranks, causing political despair and organisational paralysis. Such a situation would have enabled Rajapaksa to score another impressive victory, without making economic concessions to the majority community or political concessions to the minority communities.

The regime’s sanguine expectations of a massive victory at the end of a one horse race were shattered by the Fonseka candidacy. Gen. Fonseka’s entry into politics as President Rajapaksa’s main challenger caused consternation in the Sinhala supremacist camp and impeded the incumbent’s plan to monopolise the ‘patriotic’ space. It also gave a new strength and a new hope to an enervated opposition. In the resultant new conjuncture, the President is being compelled to fight for every vote, including the votes of the defeated and ignored Tamils. The election has become a do-or-die battle, a contest the regime must win, at whatever cost, with whatever means.

When Defeat becomes Unaffordable

Mahinda Rajapaksa was the first ‘Sinhala Only’ President of Sri Lanka. In 2005 he won the Presidency by winning the south – because Velupillai Pirapaharan kept the Tamils away from the polling booths with a boycott order. Acutely aware of his dependence on Sinhala voters, President Rajapaksa felt he could afford to ignore Tamil interests and Tamil concerns: “You must remember my political legacy and constraints…. I was elected primarily by a Sinhala constituency…” (Friday – 13.9.2007). This self-perception made him do what his predecessors did not want to or felt unable to do – respond to the LTTE’s total war with a more devastating total war.

He consciously aimed at and worked towards defeating the Tigers without making any concessions to Tamils, either in terms of their safety or in terms of their political rights. The belief that a tough policy on the LTTE/Tamils would be popular with the Sinhala majority (and guarantee future electoral victories) was an added fillip to the Rajapaksa strategy of waging a total war relentlessly, irrespective of the cost to civilian Tamils, and without conceding a political solution to the ethnic problem.

The Rajapaksas’ belief in their overwhelming popularity in the Sinhala heartland was such that they made no effort to win over Tamils, even post war. Instead, the Tamils were treated with a combination of arbitrariness, injustice and condescension. Counter to electoral arithmetic, the President seemed to have believed that an absolute majority of the Sinhalese (more than 60%) would vote for him out of a sense of gratitude for winning the war. Perhaps he also believed that an absolute majority of the Tamils would either stay away out of a sense of despair or could be made to stay away via excessive security measures. Believing that his victory was a foregone conclusion, he saw no reason either to woo Sinhala voters with salary increases and price reductions or to woo Tamil voters with political and security concessions — until the advent of the Fonseka factor turned the election into a veritable battle for survival.

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s elevation to the most powerful job in Sri Lanka enabled his brothers and his sons, his nephews and his cousins to make great leaps, from obscurity to fame and fortune. The Rajapaksa Family’s continued occupation of the commanding heights of the state depends on the outcome of the presidential election. If the President wins, the Family fortunes are safe; if he loses, the Family will lose all. Consequently, for Rajapaksas, young and old, big and small, losing is not an option. With so much at stake, the election has become a family affair.

The best case in point is a mega advertising campaign featuring artistes and sports personalities, conducted by Tharunyata Hetak (A Tomorrow for Youth), an organisation created and headed by the eldest of the three presidential offspring, Namal Rajapaksa. Even if the stars appeared free of charge for these ads, even if the state TV channels are accommodating them gratis, their incessant airing on private TV channels should cost a fortune. How an organisation, which came into being just four years ago and is headed by an as yet unemployed law student, can have access to finances adequate to handle a saturation media campaign is worthy of a parliamentary investigation.

That apart, the fact that the President’s son is playing such a key role in his re-election campaign (the younger Rajapaksa addresses political meetings in the company of senior ministers) is unprecedented in the history of Sri Lanka, at least since 1977. It is also indicative of the degree to which the Rajapaksa family members have become stakeholders of the Rajapaksa presidency.

Nil Balakaya (Blue Battalion) is another invention of the Rajapaksa offspring. Billed as an affiliate of Tharunyata Hetak, it too carries out costly propaganda campaigns for the President in addition to organising meetings at district level, with the participation of ministers. According to media reports, the second Rajapaksa son, a low level officer in the Sri Lanka Navy, has also addressed political meetings in support of his father.

Politics of salvation

These developments indicate a process of takeover of the SLFP by the Rajapaksas; they are also symbolic and symptomatic of a gradual merging of the Ruling Family and the state, a superimposition of the interests of the Rajapaksas on the Lankan state. Consequently, the Fonseka candidacy is seen not only as a challenge to the SLFP and the Rajapaksas but also as a threat to the Lankan state itself, a threat which must be defeated in the national interest, using all the power and the resources of the state.

After a brief lull, the song hailing President Rajapaksa as the divinely sanctioned High King of Sri Lanka is back on state owned Rupavahini. This song, which praises the President for reuniting the country via a miraculous feat (pelahara) and hails him as ‘the god who won the land’ (derana dinu devidun), is more than an exercise in sycophantism. It symbolises the ruling credo, the politics of salvation, which enshrines President Rajapaksa as the permanent hero-saviour of the nation, a gift to the country from its protective deities. The reappearance of this song is indicative of the transformation of the presidential election, from a standard democratic exercise to a continuation of the anti-Tiger war by other, non-military means.

The redefinition of the election as a political war to save the nation enables the regime to treat political opponents as national enemies and normal electoral activities as a grand anti-Lankan conspiracy. The natural and democratic urge on the part of the opposition to electorally defeat the incumbent is castigated as vile and dangerous, a desire reeking of ingratitude and treachery. This attitude makes it easier for the government to punish its opponents, since such punishments are no longer acts of political victimisation but good and necessary deeds for the protection of the nation.

In this manner, intolerance is turned into a patriotic virtue; the regime can dehumanise its opponents and deprive them of basic rights, by the simple expedient of placing them in the anti-patriotic category. This is a continuation of the regime’s war time policy of zero-intolerance of dissent (dissent and criticism were equated with terrorism) of which Gen. Fonseka, then a ‘super patriot’, was both a votary and a beneficiary. Today he is the arch traitor, notwithstanding his key role in defeating the LTTE and his Sinhala supremacism – simply because he is challenging the Rajapaksas’ right to rule.

When democratic opponents are demonised and electoral challenges are stigmatised, the politico-psychological conditions necessary for a free and fair election diminishes.

Politics of salvation provide an ipso facto justification of electoral violence and malpractices. When an election is depicted as a battle to save the nation, this definition contains within itself the justification of any act, however illegal or unethical, which furthers the ‘patriotic’ cause. After all, under politics of salvation what is at stake is not so much the fate of an individual leader or a party or even a government but the very survival of state and the country.

Given the absence of a massive pro-Rajapaksa wave in the Sinhala majority districts, the decisive role in this election may well fall upon the minorities in general and the Tamils in particular. If most Tamils abstain from voting, for a variety of understandable reasons, Rajapaksa may be able to win the election, freely and fairly. But if a majority of Tamils decide to exercise their rights, and if they do so on the basis of denying the incumbent a second term, an outright victory may require violence and malpractices, on a discernible scale. The politico-psychological justification for such deeds is being created with the transformation of the presidential election from a necessary democratic exercise to a political war for the salvation of the nation.