Vote for change? Dream on

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(May 10, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Time was when elections used to be about change, and about having an alternative. Elections also used to be about cyclic changes in economies.

Every now and then welfarist left leaning progressive policies gave way to trickle-down, conservative, market capitalist policies, and these cycles were said to be good in terms of self correction for economies that had gone too far down the wrong direction...

In other words if the progressives messed up for too long the market capitalists took over, and if they in turn botched up things for far too long, the progressives came back and made amends.

These cycles therefore were considered the necessary self correctives — quite the expected, as night follows day in modern economies.

But, somewhere in the eighties, all of this changed, and now there is no real progressive political domain to pick from, and nothing has been more representative of this Hobson’s choice for voters than the now concluded British parliamentary elections.

Gordon Brown is Labour, but his polices have been so much to the right of centre that for outsiders there was hardly a substantial difference between him and David Cameron the conservative leader, though the two debated recently until the cows came home.

In the US, Obama looks the much better leader than George. W. Bush, a semi-literate political embarrassment who did two terms almost by default —- the first secured due to a rigged Supreme Court verdict, and the second via cynical manipulation of the post 9/11 anxieties of the American people.

Nothing to choose from

But Obama is certainly no progressive in the classical sense, judging by his pandering to the big banks and the oil lobby, best seen by his recent buying into the “drill baby drill’’ manthra of Palin and his other Republican opponents.

Closer home, there is nothing to choose from between the UNP and the SLFP led UPFA (formerly PA) in terms of economic policy. Chandrika Kumaratunge presided over some of the most controversial privatizations of public enterprise, some of which had to be reversed with the help of Supreme Court judgements.

Of course our economies have been welfarist anyway —- free education, free healthcare and the like. Nobody messes with these, but which politician has reformed education and healthcare in the recent past?

Not any UPFA government, and that’s certain.

These sectors have been left to deteriorate, perhaps with cynical intent of letting them lapse into unwieldly dinosaur status with the hope that the World Bank could step in and administer neo liberal sector-specific reforms. So much for the UPFA...
The UNP is the UNP, salivating at the prospect of carrying out the World Bank diktat, if and when in power, which seems never.

The UPFA is on a one dimensional trajectory; successfully exciting the base with patriotic propaganda and administering the love-my-country opiate that makes people want to wallow in poverty while singing patriotic songs.

Horror movie

So where is this country’s Lula, where is our Evo Morales?

Nowhere to be seen, because the left is stuck in a time warp. I mean just look at the way my very good friends Kumar David and Vickramabahu Karunaratne write, as if it is still 1950s, and Colvin and NM are making their “I have a dream’’ speeches.

The JVP is doing a horror movie, with a political narrative that is evocative of Kim Il Sung and the Burmese junta. Somawansa Amarasinghe is meticulous in getting up on platforms claiming that the JVP is not the violent JVP it once used to be, but reality overtakes rhetoric in the time it takes to say Fonseka.

So Sri Lanka’s great progressive hope has been followed by the patriotic roadshow that emerged in the wake of Prabhakaran’s death.

When people are asked to name what’s progressive, they would say its singing lyrics to royalty to the background rhetoric of J R P Sooriyaperuma.

None of this is too surreal. The examples of progressive policy as extant today, if anybody noticed, was referenced in this article citing Lula and Morales, and it is obvious that Latin America with its Bolivarian revolutionary history is the last bastion of enlightened progressive left-of-centreism.

Sri Lanka with her substantial democratic tradition is so far away from that end of the continuum that it frightens people to think that we are moving towards a Singapore model of statist one party market-despotism.

So what’s the problem? With a substantial underprivileged population, why are we not as enlightened as the Latin American progressives are?

It’s perhaps a subject for another day, but is it because the Bolivarians fought colonial powers, while we fought among ourselves - so called ethnic wars?

They seem to have revolutionary fervour that’s residual from those revolutionary campaigns; all we seem to have is our inability to share the spoils of independence?