| by Harim Peiris
( October 25, 2012, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Mahinda Chinthanya
Way Forward, the 2010 election manifesto and indeed political vision and action
plan of President Mahinda Rajapaksa has an importance and seriousness which
exceeds the average election manifesto in a democratic society.
Now, an election manifesto itself is an important document, because from
it flows, the concept of a mandate to rule, the consent of the governed that
forms the core value of a democratic system of government amongst a sovereign
people. A free and sovereign people, including Sri Lankans do not give their
leaders including President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a blank check to govern
according to various whims and fancies but support at periodic elections a
stated set of policies and principles, which then forms the mandate by the
people to their government. However, the Mahinda Chinthanya in Sri Lankan
society has now been elevated, almost entirely by the government’s own
propaganda machine to the same status that Chairman Mao’s "little red
book" occupied in the pre Deng reforms China as the political guide book
to life.
Now the Mahinda Chinthanya Way Forward, issued post war in 2010 in the
light of the new ground realities, states totally unambiguously in the section
on North and East issues, that ‘elections to the Northern Provincial Council
will be held early’. Now almost three years have elapsed; hence it is not
early, but broken undertaking does not justify an even bigger violation. It was
entirely in keeping with his own Chinthanaya that President Rajapaksa most
recently pledged that the Northern Provincial Council polls would be held in
September 2013.
JHU and Wimal violate the
Chinthanya
What distinguishes Mahinda’s United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA)
from CBK’s People’s Alliance (PA) is the presence of the Jathika Hela Urumaya
(JHU) and its wannabe, the JVP breakaway Wimal Weerawansa’s NFF in the ruling
alliance. They have subsequent to comments made by the Defense Secretary
proposing the abolition of the 13th amendment, jumped on the bandwagon of that
strange policy proposal.
President Rajapaksa himself has, on many occasions, confirmed the policy
of his Chinthanaya and started various initiatives to devise a political
solution to what the Chinthanaya refers to as "North and East issues"
basically the anomaly of imposing a mono ethnic Sri Lankan state, now right
down to the singing of its national anthem only in Sinhala, on a multi-ethnic
society. It is this political problem, essentially a task of nation building
that a solution is sought for. Towards this end, the Rajapaksa presidency in
its first term initiated the All Party Conference (APC) chaired by Minister DEW
Gunasekera and the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) chaired by
Minister Tissa Vitharana. More recently post war and in his second term,
President Rajapaksa commissioned the LLRC, pledged to implement its
recommendations including a political solution, went through over an year of an
Indian initiated structured dialogue with the TNA and has rather disingenuously
ignored those processes and most recently been touting a Parliamentary Select
Committee (PSC) as the panacea for all ills. So this current campaign by the JHU
and Wimal is completely contrary to the Mahinda Chinthanya.
Political cover for Mahinda
Whenever the Rajapaksa Presidency wants to take an extreme position on
the ethnic issue, it conveniently gets its even more extremist brain trust of
the JHU and "his master’s voice" of the NFF to take and promote an
even more extreme position thereby allowing the President to create the
political illusion of being centrist and less extreme than its fringe elements,
a Machiavellian move.
The JHU and Wimal’s NFF are small parties on the fringe of the political
spectrum and President Rajapaksa does the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and
the country no good in letting the tail wag the dog. The JHU and the NFF
require the SLFP to provide them electoral credibility and not vice versa. SLFP
stalwarts and seniors are all moderates who believe that the war victory over
the LTTE should be used as a golden opportunity to secure a lasting and just
peace through a political solution with the democratic Tamil political leadership,
not engage in an endless exercise of triumphalism buttressed by a militarised
Northern Province. Post war, Sri Lankan democracy requires that democracy
through the provincial councils and the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) be
established in the North. In fact, whether the presidential appointed,
provincial governor can unilaterally exercise the powers of the NPC on behalf
of the Tamil people has been challenged before Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court. If
the Tamil people are only to be allowed presidential and general elections,
then the results of the same should be noted and respected, where President
Rajapaksa at the Presidential and the UPFA at the subsequent general elections
of 2010 were completely repudiated by the electorates of the North and largely
in the East, too, where in 2010, Hakeem’s SLMC in a previous political avatar
was supporting presidential candidate General Sarath Fonseka and the combined
opposition, leading to the credible claim repeated most recently by the TNA’s
rising star and Colombo lawyer M. A. Sumanthiran, that the President and the
UPFA had no mandate from the Tamil people.
Repealing the 13th endment to the Constitution is not the kind of state
or constitutional reforms Sri Lanka requires in this post war period to ensure
a national coming together after a brutal decades long war to bring about
healing amongst the war affected and social reconciliation through addressing
the root causes of our polarised society.
 The Mahinda Chinthanya Way Forward, the 2010 election manifesto a...){kind=link}