Politics
Reflecting on Ranil
After 20 years of frequent defeats and occasional triumphs, Ranil Wickremesinghe became Prime Minister without winning a single presidential or parliamentary election to merit that post. He had tried a proxy candidate once before, to no avail; Sarath Fonseka wasn’t going to return anytime soon. In Maithripala Sirisena he faced a more reliable ally: someone who could lead the government, literally, to the Opposition. The occasion was historic: half a century after Dudley Senanayake’s UNP connived in the defection of key MPs from the SLFP, including C. P. de Silva and Mahanama Samaraweera, Maithripala Sirisena, the secretary of the SLFP, a man who could have become the next President were it not for the nepotism that ruled the day, broke with the most popular SLFP government and SLFP President Sri Lanka had in years.
This was a tricky election. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s popularity had ebbed, but not completely. His popularity in the south stood strong and held firm. The north and east hardly seemed to matter to him, though he made conciliatory gestures that ended up being rebuffed or rejected. Against such a backdrop, the UNP could not afford an organic candidate, given the disastrous policies it had stuck to during the last stages of the war. It had to contest as part of a common front. The question as to who would lead that front, though, remained unresolved.
Wickremesinghe’s strategy was simple: win the election, become Prime Minister, and oversee a gradual abolition or retrenchment of the Executive Presidency. In this he had the backing of not just the liberal and left-liberal intelligentsia, but also a section of the (Buddhist) clergy as well as disgruntled sections of the SLFP. The clock ticked in his favour: barely two years after the worst bout of protests against his party leadership, he had returned to the spotlight. The pressures of a presidential election soon relegated to the background the fighting that had defined the party since 2010. It was a pincer move: Sirisena would win the presidency, and he would become the President’s deputy, quieting party dissidents while building up the party profile.
As usual the liberal and left-liberal intelligentsia, famous for its myopic idealisation of the values it holds dear, failed to see the time-bomb ticking away. Very few commentators acknowledged or noticed the fatal contradiction between winning a presidency through a proxy candidate and prevaricating on crucial internal party matters. Dayan Jayatilleka was one of the few: in one of the first pieces he wrote after elaborating on his stance against Sirisena’s candidacy, he bluntly asked why anyone would vote for a candidate who would relinquish his powers to an unelected Prime Minister after becoming President. The essay is one of the few prophetic pieces penned by a political commentator here, and as always, the weight of liberal optimism held against it. Five years later, with deteriorating relations between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe culminating in that famous 52-day government, I’d like to think Dr Dayan had the last laugh.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, celebrated for so long by many liberal commentators as their last great hope, lost his halo after April 2019. It would be unfair to take him to task over this; it is not he, but those who drew that halo over him, who need to have their perceptions of reality examined. I can’t think of a single interview where he confirmed this opinion of him, still less a despatch or press conference where he displayed his liberal convictions. Unlike Mangala Samaraweera, who as a Groundviews piece penned by “Some Colombo Liberals” puts it has “spoken up for/paid lip service to the liberal view”, Wickremesinghe’s predilections have been less concrete. This makes him hard to define, though defining him should be the least of our concerns.
Today he stands as “the last representative of the old elite”, as Asanga Welikala pointed out in a tweet: a distinction he shares with Chandrika Kumaratunga. Like Mahinda Rajapaksa, he’s one of a kind, in a class by himself, a cut above the rest – and the last of his pedigree.
One can regret or celebrate this. I choose to reflect on it. If politics is the art of the possible, as he once cautioned his cousin, Rajiva Wijesinha, it is a transient art, an art that goes beyond the lives of personalities and the ideas they champion. Wickremesinghe’s ideas, of course, remain inscrutable and hard to square, because, as Michael Kelly argued in a rather unflattering piece on Bill Clinton during the latter’s term as US President, the man who holds them seems to exist for the moment. To say his politics falls within the right or centre-right, to say he’s a neoliberal, to criticise the capitulations of the State he inadvertently engineered vis-à-vis his engagements with the LTTE, to call him Chamberlainesque (as Dr Dayan repeatedly, and probably justifiably, does), is perhaps to miss the point. He is all these things; he is also none of these things. He is a liberal who’s also illiberal, a conservative who’s also not conservative.
If I bring up the analogy of Baudelaire’s Devil, who managed to convince the world he didn’t exist, frequently, it’s because it applies to many of our political representatives. It certainly applies to Ranil: for a quarter-century, indeed well more than a quarter-century, he got liberals to believe he was one of them. That Groundviews article is so interesting not because it reads like a confession, an attempt at absolution by some of those liberals who realised how wrong they were about him, but because it is patently, deliciously, utterly insincere: it reads like an attempt at absolving him while ticking the liberals off for believing him to be what they idealised about him. Even that anonymous 2019 anti-Ranil tract abounds in hypocrisy: while criticising him for fostering an illiberal culture in the party, it praises him for fostering a liberal culture in the country. The Colombo Liberals of the Groundviews piece don’t give him that much leeway: after all, as they remind us, Wickremesinghe “set fire to a liberal constitution.”
He also led his party through its most disastrous period. As Dayan Jayatilleka has observed correctly, Sri Lanka’s democracy deficit had two faces: the Government’s and the Opposition’s. The UNP’s decision to abstain from the vote on the 18th Amendment rather than oppose it in 2010, in that sense, showed that its leadership preferred to maintain its status quo to changing the government’s status quo, if changing the latter threatened the continuation of the former. The ramifications of this were very clear: any reform of the government could come only with a proper reform of the Opposition. In other words, as Dr Dayan put it, one could hope to change the Rajapaksa raj only if one tried to change the Ranil raj.
Liberals and left-liberals failed to appreciate this pertinent point. That is how 2015 led to 2019: not because Mahinda Rajapaksa and his Joint Opposition derailed the government, but because those who batted for the UNP neglected to resolve its internal crisis before engaging in regime change. Those who viewed the latter in isolation from the former, who thought that the former was less important, didn’t realise the one had to follow from the other.
Perhaps their failure to comprehend this shows their myopia; that may well explain why those who criticise the SJB over its failures – failures that, to be sure, it has in plenty – did not seem to bother themselves much when Wickremesinghe’s faction tightened its grip in the party, going as far as to beat up those who challenged it. That may also explain why the likes of Victor Ivan can conjecture whether Maithripala Sirisena’s candidacy was a ploy by a faction in the UNP to oust Wickremesinghe, without asking why anyone would have wanted to oust a man who had held the party leadership for so long, and against so many, in the first place.
Perhaps it’s pointless pondering these niceties. Perhaps it’s pointless excoriating the man at the centre of them all. In any case, it doesn’t matter. In the popular imagination, Wickremesinghe remains our most intelligent politician today: “the best President Sri Lanka never had”, perhaps the most liberal of them, though liberals who celebrated him once disavow him now.
One of my favourite Westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, has a reporter telling the hero that he will print the legend “when the legend becomes fact.” Myth tends to survive fact: that is how political personalities survive even their deaths. In Ranil’s case, the myth hasn’t just become the fact; it’s outlasted the fact. The most enigmatic politician we’ve had in recent times is set to return to parliament in June. What sort of man we will see, of course, is debatable. Yet even without his liberal halo, he remains a liberal myth: perhaps the biggest and most enduring political myth we’ve swallowed since J. R. Jayewardene’s Dharmishta Samajaya.
The writer can be reached at udakdev@gmail.com