Culpability for Collapse: Mahinda’s Mistake, Rajapaksas’ Responsibility

by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

Dr Mahim Mendis and Dr Athulasiri Samarakoon, both of the Open University of Sri Lanka should be hailed as civic heroes for pushing the limits of civic activism and enabling the Supreme Court to be less conservative than it has been in the role of the ultimate defender of the rights of the people including in the socioeconomic domain.

Hitherto, the Lankan SC has been more conservative than its American and Indian counterparts with respect to social action litigation or class action suits. The recent verdict is a welcome change as befits an institution which enjoys a high level of public trust, according to the UNDP survey of 25,000 households.

The SLPP led by the Rajapaksas has brought the SC verdict upon itself by conspiring with President Wickremesinghe and pulling rug from under the wide-ranging, systematic COPE inquiry into the economic crisis initiated by Prof Charitha Herath.

Mahinda Better Than Ranil

My own take is that Mahinda Rajapaksa is paying for his sins of omission, not commission. When Mahinda was President we maintained a pretty decent growth rate, and managed to service our foreign debt. Yes, there were initial borrowing in the private money markets in 2006 but that was to fight a war. The rest of the Gang—Basil, Gota, PB and Nivard—were up to their shenanigans, but were kept within certain parameters by Mahinda, who captained the ship.

Ranil Wickremesinghe and his economic team (2015-2019) which included Dr Harsha de Silva were far more responsible for the country’s unprecedented economic debacle than Mahinda Rajapaksa was, though Ranil’s culpability was exceeded by Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s.

The Opposition SJB’s chief economist, Harsha still defends the disastrous Foreign Exchange law of 2017. (https://island.lk/sjb-belatedly-defends-2017-foreign-exchange-act-rejects-justice- ministers-claim-of-funds-parked-overseas/)

The Yahapalanaya UNP’s 2017 law liberalized the exchange control regulations of 1952 that served us well through the Open economy of JR-Ronnie and the Premadasa industrialization drive. The scrapping of the 1952 law and its substitution by the Ranil Wickremesinghe-Ravi Karunanayake law in 2017 accelerated the nett outflow of dollars, actually decapitalizing the economy.

MR-BR-GR

Looking at the photos of Mahinda at the DA Rajapaksa commemoration in the newspapers a fewndays ago, my memory went back 20 years, to 2003, when I delivered the memorial lecture at the New Town Hall. Mahinda told me it was the first time the event was held in Colombo and joked that Chandrika turned up for the very first time, to listen to me. Mahinda, Leader of the

Opposition, was readying for his run at the candidacy and the presidency. He was in the audience, not on the stage. The only brother who was prominent was Chamal. Gotabaya and Basil weren’t in evidence.

In 2005 President Chandrika Kumaratunga churlishly divided the SLFP and attempted to sabotage Mahinda’s Presidential run by tilting to his opponent, Ranil. The ideological basis was the congruency of Ranil’s lopsided Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) with Prabhakaran and Chandrika’s no less lopsided PTOMS (frozen by the Supreme Court), which had been opposed by Lakshman Kadirgamar. For the Presidential campaign, Mahinda had to fall back on all his brothers, the nationalist Sihala Urumaya (Champika Ranawaka) and the JVP (with Wimal Weerawansa as key orator).

Gota Gang

As President, Gotabaya didn’t have the brains to realize where Basil, PB and Nivard were wrong, he didn’t have the brains and personality to keep them in line. He didn’t have the brains to knowm that he needed Mahinda, as elder statesman and guiding hand.

Egged-on by his cheering squad who told him he was better than Mahinda, Gota’s policies as president were a combination of those of his Trump-Netanyahu lunatic fringe (the overnight island-wide, fertilizer-pesticide-weedicide ban; the changed composition of contents of gas cylinders thst exploded) combined with the dodgy economics of Basil-PB-Nivard who had escaped MR’s control. The lunatics were running the asylum; the crooks, the prison.

The dumbest of many dumb mistakes Gotabaya made was to completely disempower Mahinda Rajapaksa and thereby remove the pragmatic counterweight he could be, by re-centralizing all power in the presidency. Basil too made the same mistake: regarding himself as cleverer than MR was.

Gotabaya and Basil never realized that MR could afford mistakes because in the final analysis, history and popular memory would absolve him because his historical merits, his contribution, outweighed his demerits. They—GR and BR—could not afford any mistakes because they would never be regarded positively as MR was. That was not only because Mahinda will always remain in the national memory as the leader who won the war, but for a more basic reason: the chemistry of his likeability. His appeal cannot be reduced to his historic achievement.

The difference and discontinuity rather than continuity between Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa should be obvious. When Mahinda was defeated in 2015, and a with a new President and Prime Minister in office, a shocked and saddened people streamed to Medamulana for months. In sharp contradistinction, when Gotabaya was besieged, he was alone; no one rallied to his defence in counter-demonstrations. When he was ousted, he was isolated. None wept or visited in noticeable numbers. This was not because GR didn’t give the order to shoot—as his racist-fascist ex-military supporters argue. In 2015 MR left for home before the election results had been released (and while a hardline coterie, which later became the Gota camp, were allegedly urging he stay on).

MR’s Monumental Mistake

Mahinda’s mistake was to refrain from pushing back against Gotabaya, especially when the fertilizer policy was wrecking the peasant base that the SLFP and SLPP retained in two-thirds of the island, and the Rajapaksas – MR’s father, uncle and cousins–had built up in the South. That was monumental sin, but a sin of omission; of failing to do, rather than of doing.

Mahinda may have thought that if he rocked the boat, it would have been bad for the Rajapaksa clan as a whole. He failed to realize that was Gotabaya was doing was destroying the social and political foundations—the very base—of the Rajapaksas, and that if he, MR, had stood up firmly, he could have saved something of that base. Jean-Paul Sartre would argue that ‘not doing’ is also a form of doing, because one chooses not to do.

Without Mahinda as captain, the collective Rajapaksa enterprise went way off course, was hit by a popular mutiny—the Aragalaya–and is sinking. It will stay at the bottom of the ocean until MR’s death and resultant unstoppable wave of sympathy will refloat Namal to the surface, but that too will have to be as the only Rajapaksa in politics or else he will remain entangled by an anchor to the shipwreck. He must delete the ‘Rajapaksas’ (plural) tag, and stick to the ‘Mahinda’ brand and legacy.

The double-cross by his brothers in 2020-2022 i.e., the 20th amendment, which transferred the PM’s (Mahinda’s) powers to the President (Gota) pretty much broke MR’s heart. Apart from his abiding likeability, he is no longer the figure he used to be even in defeat (2015-2019). Mahinda is a tragic figure today; a history-making leader, far more sinned against (by his siblings) than sinning (against the people or the economy).