Opinion
Suicidal government, divided opposition, distorted Aragalaya
BY DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
If pressure is manifestly building up in a boiler and the safety valves stay shut, then an explosion is inevitable. The ruling party or should I say ruling party+1, the plus being Prime Minister Wickremesinghe are keeping the safety valves shut. A Cabinet reshuffle with a sprinkling of SLFP and SJB defectors does nothing to outrun the coming explosion.The ruling party had the chance of a confidence-building measure aimed at a consensual dynamic in Parliament. It could have made the gesture of voting for Rohini Wijeratne Kaviratne as Deputy Speaker. It did not. By rejecting that option, it enhanced the rhetoric of confrontation in Parliament.
RANIL RAJAPAKSA?
The ruling party may well continue on this path, on an issue that is far more crucial, and that is the 21st Amendment. That amendment is the very last chance to show that anything positive and accommodating of the Aragalaya demands, can come from this Parliament. It is perfectly alright for the SLPP to enter negotiations with all other parties over the text of the draft resolution but those negotiations must have a tight deadline, because a clock is ticking outside. The SLPP must not be or be seen as the deal-breaker. It must agree to whatever all the others agree to.
The new Prime Minister, who is also the very old Prime Minister, not only in age but also because it is his sixth go round in the post, is compounding the problem. In the first place, it was a wrong choice. If Gota didn’t want to appoint the Opposition Leader because the latter had attached too stiff a price tag, the next best choice when facing a YOUTH REVOLT, would have been his own party colleague Dullas Alahapperuma, who shares in part the same ideological formation as the young rebels or rather the parties that back them.Not only was Ranil the wrong choice, Ranil has or Gota-Ranil have yet to do the right thing. What is that right thing?
The deep and deepening Sri Lankan economic crisis requires the very best brains we can muster, just as a complex surgery would require the finest surgeons handling it. What and where is our A-team which is handling the economic crisis and also negotiating with the world system? Dr Nandalal Weerasinghe is definitely a huge plus, but where are Dr Nishan de Mel, Dr Dushni Weerakoon, Dr Deshal de Mel and of course Prof Howard Nicholas (who has worked with the Vietnamese government)? These stellar talents have to be on the frontlines of the economic war, not in some backroom advisory group.
OPPOSITION OBSTACLES
Now to the Opposition. I think that Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa should have responded faster to President Gotabaya’s last speech, which provided an opening. The speech was in the evening, the reply, even the same reply should have gone in early next morning. Timing is essential in politics. The response should also have been somewhat more nuanced than it was. The stress should have been on the President’s remarks on the 19th Amendment. That should have been nailed down. The exit issue should have been flagged but worded more diplomatically; not quite so ‘in your face’. The approach should have been what the Cold Warriors used to call Soviet ‘salami tactics’, i.e., a slice-by-slice incremental approach to taking power and displacing the existing governmental leader.
Today, the most glaring lapse of the Opposition is its divided character. The main Opposition is too heavily tilted towards one side of the Opposition spectrum, i.e., the TNA, and too far away from the centrist group with the larger numbers; the SLFP-led 11-party bloc of roughly 40 MPs. The main Opposition party should be more even-handed and equidistant in the opposition space if it is to get the arithmetic right. if not it will have to inhabit a liberal enclave, with the JVP-NPP growing on the ground, outside Parliament, and posing a serious electoral challenge.In the face of galloping quasi-anarchic radicalization, no Opposition formation can make it alone. It is only—I repeat, only—a progressive centrist re-groupment; a new Center-Left, that can rebalance the democratic system and save it. That means the SJB plus the SLFP; Sajith Premadasa plus Maithripala Sirisena. Nothing else would be sufficiently broad-based.
The chance is coming up with the 21st Amendment. The SLFP is not for outright abolition of the Executive Presidency. The SJB has recently converted to abolition. Either the latter can remain politically fundamentalist and lose the vote, or it can arrive at an agreement with the SLFP and secure a solid vote for abolition of the 20th Amendment and its replacement by a version of the 19th. In my personal view as a political scientist and ex-diplomat (rather than a lawyer, accountant or banker), the most responsible and correct view on the Executive Presidency is held by the SLFP, the 11-party bloc it leads, the 43 Group of Patali Champika Ranawaka, and Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka the chairman of the SJB.
ARAGALAYA ADVENTURISM
Finally, for the Aragalaya. Before the Aragalaya and even before Mirihana or the candlelight vigils on the sidewalks, there was the peasant unrest. The peasantry got it right, when it said “never since 1948 has there been a leader like Gotabaya who devastated us like this”. Some said it had happened earlier under the British, others demurred, saying not even under the British.The candle-light vigils, the Mirihana demonstration and the Aragalaya all got it right: Gota Go Home, because he was the one responsible for the catastrophe and he was the very worst we had ever experienced. His was a freak presidency.
The Gota Go Home/Gota Gotta Go slogan corresponded perfectly to Mao Zedong’s definition of the correct line or what he called ‘the mass line’; ‘from the masses, to the masses”; the cognitive cycle from the perceptual knowledge of the masses to the conceptual knowledge of the revolutionary intellectuals and reinserted in its refined version, into the mass consciousness.This was working fine, as manifested in the spectacular demonstrations in the Sri Lankan Diaspora.Where are those now? What has happened is the struggle has shifted, been diverted, cluttered, adulterated, confused.
How can anyone square ‘Gota Go Home’ with ‘down with all 225’, ‘shift power out of the Diyawanna Parliament’, ‘overthrow the system,’ etc., which, if at all, should come ONLY AFTER the ouster of Gota? Fidel Castro and Che Guevara said none of this while fighting to oust Batista. The Iranian mass movement that ousted the Shah never raised these divisive issues during the successful struggle; they only came up later. The Filipino movement which ranged from the Catholic church, and the Liberal to the Maoist CPP-NPA-NDF, never raised these slogans within the mass struggle to get rid of Marcos.How on earth can one say, as the peasants rightly do, that no one has ever been as bad for agriculture and food security as Gotabaya, and also say that this has been going on for 74 years?
How can one logically say that the 20th Amendment created an autocracy and then say that things have been lousy for 74 years? How can one rightly assert that the economy has never been worse and then say that the years in which Ceylon/Sri Lanka was a model of welfare, as well as those decades in which we had a high growth rate—including an average of 5% during wartime—all belong to 74 years of doom and gloom?
How can a rational mind accept that the truth that Gotabaya’s 20th Amendment makes for an autocracy, and then jump from that to the conclusion that one should abolish the entire Executive Presidency rather than surgically remove the 20th Amendment—and in the case of the FSP-IUSF, abolish Parliament as well?
How can one justly accuse Gotabaya of having usurped all power through the 20th Amendment, thereby creating a powerless Parliament and Prime Minister, and then go on to lynch Parliamentarians for not changing the situation? How can one justly target an autocratic President and his oligarchic clan as concentrating power and wealth in their hands, and also attack the Parliament and parliamentarians?
These divisive slogans were imported into the original struggle firstly and mainly by the JVP-NPP and later, with more Tabasco by the FSP-IUSF, or should I say, IUSF-FSP.Then there is the question of violence and the character of that violence. The idea that it is somehow justifiable to lynch supporters of the government or even its opponents like Kumara Welgama, because Mahinda Rajapaksa’s thugs attacked demonstrators on Galle Face Green is bullshit.Liberal Party leader Benigno (“Ninoy”) Aquino was assassinated, shot in the back of the head, as he was getting off the plane in Manila, having flown in from the USA to lead the anti-Marcos struggle. Where was the rioting and lynching of Marcos supporters in the subsequent struggle? The massive, inclusionary demonstrations led by widow Cory Aquino (who later became President) and powered by the university student movement, especially of the University of Manila, was determined, militant, massive but non-violent. If there had been even the slightest lethal violence would the military have been neutralized and Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile broken ranks, thereby ending the rule of Marcos, forcing him to fly into exile?
Don’t excuse the lethal mob violence by reference to harsh economic conditions or the privileges of MPs. There has been considerably militant, even violent street agitation, in recent years in Latin America, against the terrible economic hardships created by the neoliberal model and its crisis. There was shooting, even lethal shooting, by the State. Examples range from Chile to the town of Medellin in Colombia. Chile has elected a leftwing president while a left populist is front-runner in Colombia’s election. Where was the mob violence against parliamentarians and the lynching to death of any of them throughout Latin America?
The stuffing of slogans and the justification of violence has blurred, even distorted the profile of the Aragalaya and caused cognitive dissonance among its impressively broad support movement and mobilization in the diaspora.