Politics
Mangala
It’s a sign of the basic humanism in Lankans that, regardless of whatever ideology or credentials they held, we speak well of the dead. Judging by the many posts, articles, and memes shared across social media, everyone is speaking well of Mangala Samaraweera. This is nothing to be astonished about: Samaraweera, the most unconventional national politician who ever lived, was also the most likeable to a great many in the country. He was also, for many others, the most disliked; but if the torrent of obituaries and tributes is anything to go by, even they have begun praising him. Perhaps the best tribute one can paid to Samaraweera is that he cut through our instinctive tendencies to take sides in the political divide, uniting us through our universal contempt for politicians.
His legacy is mixed, complex, and debatable. Given the many phases he went through, it defies categorisation. His decision to leave Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2007 certainly spelt the end of one era and the beginning of another. He reinvented himself, turning from the insipid recrudescence of his early years. In doing so he ran the risk of tarnishing his electoral prospects, but having being returned time and time again by the people of Matara, he trumped all those who wished the worst for him. There is little to no doubt that, even with the bitter memories of the previous government, he would have been elected by his people at last year’s general election. That he chose to withdraw is a sign that he had rejected acceptance by one’s electorate as the litmus test for the sincerity of a public figure.
At the end of the day, such gestures, dismissed by some, appealed to those who turned the disparagement of public figures and officials into a regular pastime. Samaraweera was of course regarded as a hero by the country’s youth, predominantly but not exclusively middle-class and suburban. Those born after 1995 especially, who came of age between the last few years of the Mahinda Rajapaksa government and the first few years of this government, saw perhaps only one aspect to his politics. Few saw his other side. It’s not that they did not see that side, merely that by the time of his conversion to liberal democracy, a conversion which took a considerable time, they were so desperate for a representative who dared to differ; they accepted what he told them and believed in. The tributes that continue to flow, in that sense, remind us of Brecht’s dictum about heroes and the lack of them.
He was universally loved, yet also universally loathed. It goes without saying that he was loved and loathed for the same reasons. His admirers saw in him a crusader for the rights of the people, in particular minorities. They saw him as a bulwark against majoritarian extremism. By contrast, his critics, who fell into two broad camps, saw him as being needlessly engaged with issues that either did not matter to the wider citizenry or compromised on such concerns as sovereignty. The more nationalist-minded among them faulted him for tilting too much to the minorities, for demonising everything they held sacred, including the Buddhist clergy. Samaraweera never apologised for his candour; that more or less brought liberal admirers and nationalist critics closer. It was impossible not to have an opinion about him.
His political career reflected the times he lived in; that was in a way few political careers did. He entered politics through the SLFP. Appointed as that party’s organiser for Matara in 1983, he quickly gained a reputation for his initiative and decisiveness. His actions during the second insurrection proved his mettle: with his then friend and later foe Mahinda Rajapaksa, he campaigned to raise international awareness about the crimes of the UNP government. This continued even after the insurrection abated; on a visit to New York in July 1991, in an interview to the National Public Radio he attempted to correct certain misconceptions about the JVP held by the Western press. He took with him a list of some 40,000 people, including 1,000 schoolchildren, who had disappeared during the conflict; this list was never used, or mentioned, by any international agency.
Unlike most political figures, he did not shift overnight. His conversion to liberal democracy took time. One must, of course, be careful when placing this transformation in context and in perspective. Samaraweera’s political ascent coincided with a change in both national and international politics. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shift to the right of many left and socialist parties, he was as entranced by the promise of Third Way neoliberalism as any other politician. With the decimation of the Old Left in the People’s Alliance, brought about by Chandrika Kumaratunga’s tilt to the right, he embraced the new order, forgetting his past and engaging zealously in a restructuring programme which saw the privatisation of SLT. Samaraweera regarded this as his proudest achievement; no less a source of pride were his efforts at beautifying Colombo, at a time when Gotabaya Rajapaksa was studying in the US and Mahinda Rajapaksa was fighting on as a sidelined MP in the PA.
As MP and Minister, he became the loudest voice for a political solution to a military conflict. Few people shared his fervour, but in the interests of expediency, they all took his side. Sudu Neluma had the effect of discouraging recruits to the army, a volte-face that ran counter to the President’s policy of winning the war militarily. Yet, laudably, it also led to the reconstruction of the Jaffna Library, believed burnt to the ground by UNP allied goons 15 years earlier. These did not erode his friendship with those whose ideology he had long since abandoned, which is why he supported Mahinda Rajapaksa when CBK dithered and dallied about making him Prime Minister and, later, presidential candidate. With Samaraweera’s defection from the SLFP in 2007 and to the UNP in 2010, however, he signalled that he put his values before his friendships. He never explained his badmouthing of Ranil Wickremesinghe at the 2004 elections; one of his slogans against him had been “Ranilta Baha.” In a 360 degree turn which was to define the rest of his career and life, he joined his foe’s side.
These turnarounds endeared him to a mostly suburban middle-class milieu, particularly the youth. Certainly, there could not have been a better leader for as amorphous an outfit as the Radical Center; the latter showed clearly that he had not let go of his faith in the Third Way, even after the Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs of the world had long gone and the Emmanuel Macrons and Nick Cleggs were being forced to stick to their centrist credentials at the cost of capitulating to the conservative right. Samaraweera did not entirely succeed in reconciling these strands: a liberal at heart, he was a neoliberal in mind. This explains his aversion, not to Sinhala nationalism, but to almost all forms of political radicalism; for him, as for every Third Way neoliberal, reformist politics was preferable to radical politics. That is why he frequently conflated “socialist mindsets” with “religious majoritarianism.”
What is surprising here is not that he changed at all, but that he changed without attracting accusations of betrayal by the mainstream electorate. The same man who had railed against the “unjust administration” of J. R. Jayewardene and lamented the “holocaust” unfolding in the south could, three decades later, laud that government’s “incredible economic advances” and lament the “Marxist dystopia” the JVP was setting up in the south. No one complained, partly because socialism had, in the eyes of the middle-class, lost its appeal, and it was easy to badmouth the excesses of a radical “leftwing” outfit while sidelining the brutal excesses of a rightwing regime. That the Radical Center was radical only in its commitment to a Third Way neoliberal doctrine, hence, showed well in the remarks of its leader.
Less defensible, by contrast, were Samaraweera’s intervention at the Wayamba elections in 1999, the massive credit card fraud that took place under his watch at SLT, and his siding with Ranil Wickremesinghe against Sajith Premadasa in a leadership struggle that weakened the UNP from 2011 to 2020. Not many will remember that he broke up an anti-Ranil protest in 2013, compelling Premadasa, in justifiable anger, to rail against “migratory birds” trying to chart the UNP’s course. Samaraweera did shift to Mr Premadasa in 2019, but this was a temporary measure; having lent his support to the SJB, he withdrew and left electoral politics. He then revealed his biases: having condemned the SLPP and the SJB as occupying the same political page, he called Wickremesinghe the best president we never had.
That such lapses were ignored, even forgiven, by a young, upward aspiring electorate on the lookout for decent representatives is, of course, a sign of how low standards have fallen in politics today. The truth is that Mangala Samaraweera epitomised the paradoxes of his times in a way none of his colleagues did. I find it difficult to square his concerns for the citizenry with his advocacy of an economic paradigm which rested on the sustained exploitation of the many. But this was a rift he never really saw, nor cared to resolve.
It says a lot about the intellectual obduracy of those engaged in politics, as well as those endeavouring to engage in it, that both liberal admirers and nationalist critics saw his liberal credentials as a genuine article. His more radical critics saw through the mirage better. Yet as the Communist Party’s and the JVP’s tributes to him show, even they considered his values reason enough to ignore his flaws. He was a man of his convictions, even if he refused to see the gap between his social and economic ideals. He was certainly a man of his word.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com