Sirisena wakes up from hibernation

Former President Maithripala Sirisena emerged a few days ago from a long hibernation, interrupted only by his participation in the last parliamentary election to retain his long-held Polonnaruwa district seat. He recently awoke from his slumber sharing a platform with Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India and Yoshide Suga of Japan at an international symposium on Shared Values and Democracy in Asia organized by the New Delhi-based Vivekananda International Foundation. The event was necessarily held under virtual technology in these Covid-wracked times, and our former president, who chose not to ride gracefully into the sunset at the end of the presidential term, was no doubt flattered to receive the invitation to participate in a prestigious international event. He became president as the common opposition candidate under “fortuitous circumstances,” if we may borrow the expression used by Mr. W. Dahanayaka, the veteran politician of yesteryear, on attaining the prime ministry after Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s assassination.

So much for the background of Sirisena, who retains the leadership of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) he deserted in 2014, to run for president the following year. His speech at the Vivekananda symposium received considerable publicity, both here and abroad. Ironically, its theme was a concept to which politicians worldwide pay lip service, but is sadly something that is commonly discarded upon attaining office. Sirisena is no exception to this actuality and the people of Sri Lanka who voted him into power on high expectations have not forgotten what happened in October 2018 even if the former president has let that sorry episode slip out of his memory. If we may remind him, that was when he committed the impeachable offence of dismissing Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his government and appointing Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa, the man he defeated in 2015, as the new prime minister. Rajapaksa, at Sirisena’s invitation, formed an illegal short-lived government despite being a minority in the legislature and Sirisena, the prime mover of those machinations, was forced to eat humble pie by a unanimous decision of the country’s highest court.

At the start of his speech into which he must have had considerable input, but was surely ghost-written

as far as the English version he read out was concerned, Sirisena quoted from the familiar Pali stanza which appears at the end of the Pirit Pota. Certainly Raja bhavatu dhammiko was not what happened in October 2018; nor Yahapalana post-2015. It may be correctly said that the then prime minister asked for what was done to him by the man whose United National Party anointed as president in 2015. The evocative Sinhala idiom illagena parippu kewa says it all. Sri Lanka’s political history vividly demonstrated in the past, certainly up to the last election when the GOP was reduced to zero, that a common opposition is a sine qua non to topple a powerful government in this country. There is no need to labour the fact that Maithripala Sirisena would not have been elected president in 2015 but for the UNP support of his candidature. Even if 1956 when Mr. Bandaranaike’s SLFP-led Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) scored a landslide victory, the MEP had a no-contest agreement with the two old left parties, the LSSP and CP, then a formidable presence in the country’s political firmament. The elections of March and July 1960 best illustrate this point. The UNP led by Mr. Dudley Senanayake won in March and formed a minority government which was defeated in the very first Throne Speech presented to Parliament.

Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake recommended dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a new general election to Sir. Oliver Goonatillake, the Governor-General in the then prevailing order. The arithmetic of the March 1960 electoral result clearly showed that many seats the UNP carried there would have been lost if the anti-UNP vote was not divided between the SLFP and the left parties. It is commonly said that it was the entry into politics of Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike, widely described as the “weeping widow” during that campaign, that made the difference. She replaced Mr. C.P. de Silva as the leader of the SLFP and prime minister-designate. Mrs. Bandaranaike, then not even a Member of the House of Representatives (she chose not to run at that election), became the world’s first woman prime minister as a member of the then Senate. It was the ‘No Contest’ Pact between the SLFP and the old left parties that benefited both sides that enabled the SLFP victory. The blue party was not the sole beneficiary; the reds too won more seats than they otherwise would have. The SLFP having enough seats to form a government of its own did not invite its electoral allies to join the new administration and the LSSP and CP joined the UNP in the opposition.

We return to Maithripala Sirisena now that we are done with the short capsule of post-Independence political history. Predictably Sirisena outlined at the symposium some of the achievement of his tenure including the shedding of certain presidential powers and the Right to Information Act. Some of the presidential powers removed by the 19^th Amendment have been restored by the 20^th recently enacted. Sirisena voted in its favour although he boasts of trimming presidential power in his day. He also supported the 18^th Amendment which abolished the presidential term limit but did not in any way seek to abolish the presidency which all holders of that office, with the exceptions of Presidents J.R. Jayewardene and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, pledged to do. All of them, Sirisena included, welshed on that promise. Let us not deny him his moment in the limelight following the end of his glory days. But let us not forget the contradictions of his actions as president and the virtues he preached at the symposium.