Vows, pledges and reality

Tuesday 12th December, 2023

Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa has lashed out at a section of the media for floating a story that he is planning to patch up differences with President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Premadasa has alleged that the journalists who are spreading that story are in the pay of the government. His consternation is understandable. Such rumours have the potential to demoralise the SJB’s rank and file in an election year. The UNP is sparing no pains to eat into the SJB’s vote bank and recover the lost ground on the political front.

Premadasa declared himself as the SJB’s presidential candidate several months ago. Perhaps, what prompted him to do so was the UNP’s claim that the SJB would skip the next presidential election. Premadasa has already embarked on his presidential election campaign. He has been stumping the country to all intents and purposes. It is said that he who pursues the stag regards not the hare.

Premadasa is keen to run for President, and not likely to settle for less; therefore, it may not be fair to claim that he is planning to cut a deal with the UNP.

That said, it needs to be added that Sri Lankans do not take politicians’ pledges and vows seriously. They have seen over the decades the emergence of coalitions of strange bedfellows. In 2004, the JVP went all out to prevent the then President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga from appointing Mahinda Rajapaksa Prime Minister; it was resentful that Mahinda had striven to thwart its efforts to join the SLFP-led UPFA to contest the 2004 general election. But the following year, the JVP made an about-turn and led Mahinda’s presidential election campaign from the front and ensured his election as President!

Nothing is said to be so certain as the unexpected in politics. Whoever would have thought Mahinda and Ranil would ever opt to smoke the peace pipe and savour power together? The UNP accused Mahinda of having defeated Ranil in the 2005 presidential contest by bribing the LTTE into preventing the Tamil people from voting in the areas under LTTE control. One may recall that Wickremesinghe as the Prime Minister of the Yahapalana government, went to the extent of having his parliamentary group vilify Mahinda as a thief, in Parliament. Mahinda, who was leading the Joint Opposition at the time, returned the favour by having his MPs call Wickremesinghe a thief. Today, Wickremesinghe stands accused of protecting the interests of the Rajapaksas, having secured the coveted presidency with the help of the latter!

Sirisena and Mahinda made no bones about their antipathy towards each other and got down and dirty after falling out in late 2014. The former accused the latter of abuse of power, corruption and even criminal offences, in the run-up to the 2015 presidential election, and thereafter. But the duo kissed and made up in 2018, having done their darnedest to destroy each other politically. Sirisena even appointed Mahinda Prime Minister at the expense of Ranil, who had enabled him to realise his presidential dream; he claimed that he had been compelled to sack Ranil as PM because there was a conspiracy to assassinate him. Today, Ranil, Mahinda and Sirisena are together!

In the late 1980s, the JVP leaders suffered violent deaths at the hands of the then UNP government, whose ‘Caravan of Death’ left thousands of JVP activists and others dead. But from 2015 to 2019, the JVP cooperated with the UNP fully. After the SLFP’s pullout from the Yahapalana government the JVP propped up the UNP-led administration although Prime Minister Wickremesinghe was a prominent member of the UNP regime, which decapitated the JVP.

The TNA, which has accused the Sri Lanka Army of war crimes and is demanding an international investigation, threw its weight behind the war-winning Army Commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka in the 2019 presidential race, one year after the decimation of the LTTE’s military arm.

Thus, it may be argued that anything is possible in Sri Lankan politics, which is full of strange bedfellows.