The government’s consummate crisis in the

face of Mahinda’s unconsummatable win

Rajan Philips-February 17, 2018, 12:00 pm

There is no pussyfooting around the political shellacking at last week’s polls, that
the President’s and the Prime Minister’s teams got at the hands of Mahinda
Rajapaksa’s budding party of old bloomers. Not surprisingly, the shellacking has
precipitated a consummate crisis in the so called national-unity government.
While the results of the local government elections have created the current crisis
in the national government, the same results cannot provide any mechanism or
mandate for resolving that crisis. Nor can the impressively lopsided success at the
local elections directly enable Mahinda Rajapaksa to replace the government at
the national level. Put another way, SLPP cannot nationally consummate its
aggregate win at the local elections. It can, however, create havoc for the unity
government and it is doing so in spades. The government leaders, on the other
hand, are scrambling with no one showing any capacity to take control of the
situation and restore even a semblance of order.

The President is being true to his recent form in putting out contradictory
positions by the hour. In one instance, he wanted Prime Minister Wickremesinghe
sacked as Prime Minister. In another, he was reportedly open to the current PM
continuing even with support from some SLFPers to ensure majority government.
This was soon denied by his media unit. At one time, the President seemed
sobered by the realization that under the 19th Amendment, he cannot fire the
Prime Minister, or prematurely dissolve parliament except upon a parliamentary
resolution with two-thirds majority. Then he changed his mind and told a Joint
Opposition delegation that he was seeking legal advice to see if he could remove
the Prime Minister at his whim in spite of, or under, the 19th Amendment. Within
hours, Prime Minister Wickremasinghe countered with his assurance that he
would be Prime Minister until 2020 in accordance with the constitution.

"Cool and confident Ranil continues as PM", beamed the Daily Financial Times on
Saturday, finally breathing free after battling a week of badgering news for the
UNP. The news story behind the headline was about the Prime Minister’s media
conference on Friday after the President had abruptly cancelled his breakfast
meeting with the media previously scheduled for Friday. Whether the cool and
confident Ranil can neutralise the frantic and frenetic Maithri has become the
political question of the day. And one to which no answer has been found over
days despite late night meetings to cool down temperatures.
Lonely at the summit

The President may not have been too pleased to hear about the alleged
telephone conversation between former President Rajapaksa and Prime Minister
Wickremesinghe. The always revealing Rajitha Seneratne provided the first
version that Rajapaksa had called Wickremesinghe and told him that the latter
should continue as PM. Mr. Rajapaksa promptly denied it, calling it "a deliberate
lie" unbecoming of a senior government minister. But on Friday, the Prime
Minister confirmed that the former President had called him to ask if he was
planning to resign as PM. "No", said the Prime Minister. "Very good" said the
former President.

There could be another version of it, or more calls between them, before we are
through the current circus. All of this means nothing unless you are interested in
what is going on in the President’s mind. Who of any consequence is calling him
nowadays for a private but high level chat? It must be feeling very lonely at the
summit, especially after he had called all his colleagues thieves. Imagine what the
President’s state of mind would be if the media piles on him even one tenth as
much as it has been piling on the Prime Minister. I am not saying that the PM
does not deserve what he has been getting from the media. But isn’t it curious
that the President is not getting any of it. Is the media scared of the office of the
presidency, perhaps a hangover of fear from the dark days of the past? Or is Ranil
bashing some Freudian symptom of maladjusted patriotism?

It is indeed curious that with all the speculations about and calls for Prime
Minister Wickremesinghe’s removal from office, or for ‘forcing him to resign
voluntarily’, there is nothing about President Sirisena. If the results of the local
election are taken to mean that the PM should be sent packing, they should
equally mean that the President should be sacked too. In fact, among the three
principal contenders in the local-election-turned-national-referendum, the
President and his entourage fared the worst and that too by a long margin. So the
President and the SLFP have no greater mandate to remain in governance than
the Prime Minister and the UNP – that is if the results of the local elections are
interpreted as mandating a change in national governance. And how would the
local government election results ever justify Nimal Siripala de Silva worming his
way to Temple Trees as Prime Minister of a minority government?

There is no need to add anything more to Ranil bashing, but the cool and
confident Prime Minister still doesn’t get it when he surveys the post-election
debris with studied equanimity, talks about lessons learned and professes future
reforms, but deliberately avoids the ‘B’ word – the bondgate that more than
anything else contributed to the public thrashing his party got on February 10. His
contrition ought to be not only sincere but also thorough, and his new promises
after two years of betrayals have to be more specific and not at all motherhoods.
That said, the incessant calls from outside the UNP for the ouster of Ranil would
seem to have shored up his support within the party. Internally, the UNP seems to
have launched quite a critique of the PM at the level of deputy ministers and state
ministers, while at the same time rallying round him in the face outside attacks.

The calculations by busybody manipulators to tease anti-Ranil UNPers out of the

party to support a non-UNP PM do not seem to have succeeded so far. Yes, so far!
Because, we never know who will be where when it all ends. Despite the euphoria
of the SLPP victory, the UNP still has the numbers not only in parliament but also
in the country. It is silly to see parallels to 1956, 1964, or 1970 in the political
developments of this week. If there is any lesson from history, it should be the
false prophesy of 1956 that it was the last nail on the UNP coffin. The other lesson
should be 1977 when the UNP, once again thought dead in 1970, rose from ashes
with a vengeance and the vibrations from which are still being felt. In 1975, no
one confidently wagered that within two years JR Jayewardene would become
not merely Prime Minister, but President of Sri Lanka.

A new political culture

My point is that the Sri Lankan society, polity and economy have been too much
transformed in size and in substance to be amenable for analysis and
prescriptions using party loyalties and ideological categories of the old decades.
This transformation and how we could deal with it is quite well illustrated by the
real results of the local elections, not the aggregate totals that have been
appropriated for the national circus. A good number of councils are comprised of
a plurality of party representatives, with no single party securing a clear majority.
In many of them, the party with the largest number of seats but not exceeding
the 50% mark may end up in opposition, if all the others gang up to form a
majority in council. This has led to much frustration among party apparatchiks
and calls for amendments to the newly minted local elections law. That would be
unfortunate.

There is another way to look at this and that is to see the apparent stalemate of
plurality without a majority as a blessing in disguise for consensual governance.
That is simply to foster the culture for members to vote on every issue or motion -
from budgets to by-laws to project approvals – not pre-determinedly along party
lines but as individual councillors and on the merits of each motion. In other
words, every motion or initiative must have support across party lines. The
exercise could start with the election of Mayors or Chairpersons. It is not going to
be easy or pretty but there is no other way to breakout of our vicious circle of
partisan politics.

Local governments in western democracies work on this basis – reaching

consensus among a plurality of councillors, and not government by party loyalty
and majority. This was also the basis of the vaunted Committee System of the
Donoughmore Constitution, which itself was modelled on the Council system in
the City of London. Even in China, it is at the local level democratic debates and
decision making are permitted and fostered despite the overarching one-party
apparatus.
The local effects of the local government elections are all but ignored at the
national level. A desperate Commissioner of Elections is looking for help,
especially over the question of meeting the 25% requirement for female
representation. But no one in government or opposition is interested in helping
the Commissioner. Their interest ended when they appropriated the aggregate
local results for national posturing. I say posturing, because there is no way to
constitutionally dismiss the Prime Minister or prematurely dissolve parliament.
The President should ask his advisers what will happen to him, and to them, over
the next two years with a non-UNP Prime Minister or a dissolved parliament.
Rather than seeking inconsequential legal opinion on constitutional matters, the
President should ask the Governor of the Central Bank about the effects on the
economy due to the political circus that he has chosen to stage and preside over.

On the other side of the SLFP divide, Mahinda Rajapaksa is the unintended
beneficiary of the miscalculations of his two political adversaries.
RanilWickremesinghe’s cynical ploy to keep the SLFP divided in the country at
large, while sharing the bed with it in government has backfired spectacularly.
Maithripala Sirisena’s congenital confusion over the primacy of office – which is
more important: SLFP presidency or Sri Lankan presidency, and his eleventh hour
screams as the country’s only anti-corruption crusader, have mostly alienated Sri
Lankans than won them over to his camp. The consummate common opposition
candidate two years ago, Mr. Sirisena, has now exposed himself as a man totally
out of his depth in handling the challenges of office.

Notwithstanding all this, Mahinda Rajapaksa is perhaps the only man in the entire
Joint Opposition bandwagon who might appreciate the precariousness of the
current political situation and the risk of forcing a change of government in
parliament. Consider this cynical scenario: the UNP decides to withdraw from
government and Ranil Wickremesinghe resigns as Prime Minister, leaving it to the
President to do whatever he wants with Nimal Siripala de Silva. The one person
who will not at all be happy with this outcome would be the former President.
Unlike the congenital agitators in the JO baying for Ranil’s blood, Mahinda
Rajapaksa not only knows Ranil better than anybody, but also has exercised
power and knows the risks involved. He demonstrated this quite effectively when
he relinquished office without any drama in January 2015, despite legal,
constitutional and perhaps military advice to the contrary. It is unlikely that what
he relinquished constitutionally then he may want to support being transacted
unconstitutionally now.

The rational way out of the current impasse, if sanity and not insanity would
prevail over the weekend, will be for the current President and the Prime Minister
to work out, however reluctantly, a new co-habitation plan and govern for the
next two years. For all intents and purposes, they will be caretakers in
government until the people get their formal chances in 2019 and 2020 to elect a
new president and a new parliament. There will be no space or tolerance for the
PM-knows-best style and the mega-scale of government that went on for the last
two years. From Megapolis to free trade to the Constitution and to Geneva, it will
be more painstaking and consultative and focused on achieving practical results
and not chasing grand dreams. This was the new culture that was promised in
January 2015. There might be an opportunity to try some of it now but in a
crucially and ironically different political situation. In January 2015, Mahinda
Rajapaksa was a defeated President. In February 2018, he has re-emerged as the
most powerful political force.
Posted by Thavam