Gota’s cowardly escape and Ranil’s dangerous tomfoolery

by Rajan Philips

“Gota goes, plunging country into chaos.” That was the headline in The Island on Thursday, July 14. Gota keeps going – from Sri Lanka to Maldives, to Singapore, and probably to Dubai ultimately. And the country keeps plunging from one crisis to another. Gotabaya Rajapaksa did not resign on July 13 as he had promised on July 9. Instead, he appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe to be Acting President while he (Gota) is overseas. The Speaker of Parliament waited in vain till midnight on July 13 for Gota’s letter of resignation. Nothing came.

But the Speaker was given further assurance that the letter will come after Gotabaya Rajapaksa reaches his destination, whenever and wherever that might be. The Speaker even considered the possibility of declaring the presidential post vacant. He should have also considered the possibility of abolishing it altogether! The letter of resignation finally arrived via email on Thursday night. The letter was to be scrutinized for its permissibility for a formal announcement about Friday.

The resignation delay has led to the cancellation of the parliamentary session scheduled for Friday for receiving nominations for interim presidential candidates. With that the vote to elect an interim president from among our current lawmakers, which is scheduled for next Wednesday, July 20, may also have to be postponed. The uncertainty and chaos will continue for a few more days. As the JVP has suggested the July 20 vote need not be postponed at all, especially on account of a resignation letter from a President who furtively fled the country.

Acting President, First Ever

Meanwhile, Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Acting President, is not waiting for anything or anybody. He is acting very vigorously as if he has been President from 1978. He has conveniently forgotten that on July 9, both he and Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised to resign on July 13. The country was expecting two resignations and the Speaker to become Acting President. Instead, there were no resignations on July 13, but two presidents – one on the run, and the other acting out. The Speaker has been kept waiting. Everything is by the book – the Constitution – according to Ranil Wickremesinghe. But the people are enraged – bell, book and candle!

Ranil Wickremesinghe should have been honest and forthcoming, and explained to the country why he has not resigned, and how and by whom it was decided that Gotabaya Rajapaksa could leave the country and leave Ranil Wickremesinghe to be Acting President. The country did not get to see the swearing in, if indeed there was any, of Sri Lanka’s first ever Acting President under the 44 year-old JRJ Constitution. All that the people saw and heard was a televised statement by Mr. Wickremesinghe at noon on Wednesday (July 13). The statement was ill-advised and ill-timed. It was also provocative in tone and politically foolish in content.

As reported worldwide, Mr. Wickremesinghe declared that he had ordered the military to “do whatever is necessary to restore order”. Even as he called on the protesters to withdraw from the occupied buildings and co-operate with authorities, he issued the ultimatum to aragalaya protesters: “We can’t tear up our constitution. We can’t allow fascists to take over. We must end this fascist threat to democracy.”

When did aragalaya protesters become fascists? The minute after Ranil Wickremesinghe became Acting President? It is bad to tear up even a bad constitution, but it is worse to risk tearing up the country. Even Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the military man, did not dare ordering the military to do whatever is necessary. Another military man, Sarath Fonseka, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s substitute candidate in the 2010 presidential election, publicly appealed to the military chiefs to ignore the excessive orders of the newly minted Acting President.

To their credit, and throughout this crisis the military leadership has been exemplary in its cautious approach to the crisis and have appeared to be more empathetic to the suffering people than many of the civilian political leaders. Strikingly, after the Acting President had made his order to the military chiefs, the chiefs called upon political party leaders to meet with the Speaker and “tell them (the) next political steps they intended to take until a new President is elected and called on the public and young protestors to be calm.”

Quite a contrast to the over-the-top statement of Wickremesinghe. As well, there has been no indication of the new Acting President (AP) reaching out to other party leaders. Except, there was one report according to which the AP had asked Speaker to find a nominee for PM in parliament acceptable to both the government and the opposition. Is Wickremesinghe the Queen’s new Viceroy, expecting the Speaker of Parliament to do errands for him?

On the other hand, in none of the media reports on the statements of military chiefs did I find a direct reference to the order issued by the Acting President. The military chiefs described their role as defenders of the Constitution and asked for the people’s support. Military chiefs and the IGP even attended the Party Leaders meeting convened by the Speaker on Thursday, July 14. The governing SLPP did not attend the meeting, but all the other party leaders who attended unanimously decided to ask, “Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to vacate his position at the earliest possible (time) to defuse the prevailing crisis situation.” Defusing the situation is what is called for and that is precisely what Ranil Wickremesinghe failed to do in his maiden statement as Acting President.

Looming Uncertainty

Ranil Wickremesinghe seems to be having a conveniently timed amnesia about the sequence of events that elevated him first to be Prime Minister and now Acting President. Both elevations came courtesy of an embattled President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who for all the narratives about him as a war hero has shown neither the head nor the stomach for a straight political fight. So, he turned to Ranil Wickremesinghe to be his saviour and that of the Rajapaksa family. First, to avoid resignation in May, and two months later in July to leave the country before a travel ban could be imposed on him as it has been on his brothers and former and now disgraced aides. This is how all of Sri Lanka sees the Ranil-Rajapaksa twosome.

And that is why public protests boiled all over again on July 13 when people became suspicious that they were being duped again by the RR-twosome. They have been partially duped for sure – with only one resignation arriving via email and the other finessed away via the Acting President arrangement. The aragalaya protests ever since they began in March have had their ebbs and flows. For what they have achieved in getting rid of an upstart dynasty, the protests have been remarkably peaceful and even decorous. The excesses that occurred on May 9 and again on July 9 and July 13, will have to be seen in the context of the provocations that preceded them.

That said, the torching of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s 5th Lane residence in Colombo is an unforgivable act of arson for which no condemnation can be enough. At the same time, there have been plausible indications that the burning was not by the main protesters but a set up by other troublemakers with their own agendas. Ever since 1977, Sri Lanka has gone through spates of killings, vandalisms, burning properties and burning libraries, and years of war itself. The aragalaya emergence has kindled hopes in the minds of many activists that there is an opportunity now to recast Sri Lanka’s politics anew. Some superstructure recasting is necessary anyway to repair the broken economic base.

If Gotabaya Rajapaksa had resigned two months earlier along with his brothers, the country would have been on the path to recovery that much sooner. The question now is whether the country can survive the continuation of Ranil Wickremesinghe in one office or another without plunging into another crisis. He is certainly the lightning rod for all political castigations, most of which are self-inflicted. But he is not the only hindrance to the country forging a new path ahead.

In fact, there is no one inspirational or charismatic enough leader to take a clear lead before the people, bypassing Ranil Wickremesinghe or anybody else. When there are no outstanding leadership prospects, the preferred alternative is for the contenders to work together rather than against one another. Yet, there is no hope for a consensus candidate for the interim president position, only a growing list of contenders. A highly contested vote in parliament for the interim president will not make it easy for the winning candidate to reunite the party leaders and MPs to set up a ‘caretaker government’ until general elections can be held to elect a new parliament.

The current parliament, even though it has still not reached the halfway mark of its five year term, has totally lost credibility and it is only dragging on because elections cannot be held soon enough. Yet in the dire circumstances of IMF negotiations and procuring essential supplies, the parliament has a role to play, and the current MPs must play their part, even if they are to be corralled and coerced to doing it. Ideally, the interim president that parliament will soon elect could be someone who has no political ambition beyond the caretaker-purpose that the current parliament must fulfill before it is dissolved. In other words, the interim president must be someone who will not be contesting the next parliamentary or presidential election. Such a criterion might facilitate MPs coalescing around a consensus candidate instead of polarizing around multiple contenders.

Ranil Wickremesinghe could have been such a consensus candidate, but he burnt his boats when he became Gota’s Prime Minister without consulting other opposition parties. Even as Prime Minister he fatally neglected or failed to get a handle on the fuel supply and distribution situation. The fuel crisis was the trigger for the new wave of protests that demanded the resignations of both Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa has resigned and Ranil Wickremesinghe has wormed his way to becoming Acting President. He could go on to become interim president, but only with the support of the discredited Rajapaksa party – the SLPP. That would be a Pyrrhic victory or kiss of death, or both. A more statesmanlike option for Mr. Wickremesinghe would be to step back from the presidential fray, but commit himself to continuing his intercessions with the IMF and other international creditors to rescue Sri Lanka from its financial quagmire.