The Rajapaksas’ control over the 115-member Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna group in the 225-seat Parliament may have waned, but not vanished
If someone thought that the importance of the Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka’s contemporary politics had ended for good with the sordid drama of President Gotabaya’s sacrilegious exit, it need not be so. Their control over the 115-member Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) group in the 225-seat Parliament may have waned, but not vanished. With the result, the candidate with their blessings, mostly silent, has the potential to win the presidency for Gota’s residual term until the second half of 2024, when Parliament votes to replace acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe, otherwise Prime Minister still.
Unlike sought and promised by various anti-Rajapaksa parties before Gota’s unceremonious and even more unbecoming resignation — after fleeing to Singapore, his ‘final destination’ for now, via Maldives, the first leg aboard a Russian-made AN-32 transporter of Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) along with his wife — consensus has eluded the nation on the choice of a new President. Hence, all the tall talk of an all-party government, or non-party government, or national government, through the weeks and months of anti-Rajapaksa public protests that had gripped the nation as none else through the long decades and centuries of recorded history.
Today, there are at least four candidates in the fray, with a fifth and a possible sixth one sneaking in from the sideline. As he tactically chose not to resign before Gota put in his papers, Ranil became the acting President under the Constitution until the parliamentary vote, fixed for 20 July. This has given him an early-bird advantage but even without it he seems to be having a better chance inside Parliament, which alone constitutes the electorate, and outside, where opinion is otherwise divided his loyalty — whether it is to the Sri Lankan nation, or to the Rajapaksas, whose parliamentary support he would require, given that his is a one-man legislative group.
Though working on individual MPs and groups from behind the scene, Ranil is yet to announce his candidacy after the presidency became vacant. It is taken for granted as he had once earlier indicated his interest. But the real early-bird and also the spoiler of a consensus process is the Leader of the Opposition Sajith Premadasa of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB, ‘United People’s Power), which is the more popular breakaway brand of Ranil’s United National Party (UNP), the nation’s GoP.
Ever since losing the presidency as the UNP candidate to Gotabaya in Elections-2019, and through the popular protest for the Rajapaksas’ exit in the past months, Sajith, son of LTTE-slain president Ranasinghe Premadasa (1993), has lost no opportunity to declare his candidacy for the anticipated vacancy, and also talk about an ‘all-party government’ through and through. The SJB won 54 parliamentary seats but four of them have since identified with the Rajapksa camp, two of them after their one-time boss Ranil became prime minister in the place of two-term president Mahinda Rajapaksa in May.
Against this are two other candidates who too have thrown their hats into the ring. The first is Dulles Alahapperuma, supposedly representing a 10-member group of ruling SLPP rebels and a one-time confidant of Mahinda Rajapaksa. He has declared his candidacy, but another from the same rebel group, former minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa’s name is also doing the rounds, but he has not opened up.
Not from the streets
Unlike often believed, the real rebellion against the Rajapaksas commenced not on the streets from within their multi-party coalition government. First, three peripheral party leaders whom Gotabaya as president entrusted with key portfolios, provoked him enough, wanting him to sack his brother Basil Rajapaksa as finance minister — but got sacked, instead.
If this one was anticipated, the Rajapaksas were not prepared for the exit of three groups of total 40 MPs to leave them in quick succession even as the cloud of public mood against their mishandling of the economy was gathering mass. They comprised the 14-MP Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the parent party of Rajapaksas’ SLPP, a 16-member group of minor parties, with left, right and centrist ideologies, and a final batch of 10 SLPP parliamentarians, on whom candidate Dulles Alahapperuma is counting on, as his key base, still requiring another 100-plus vote to win the presidency.
There is a fifth candidate, possibly lurking in the corner. Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka was the successful army commander when the Rajapaksas gave unwavering political leadership to neutralise ‘LTTE terror war’ for good in 2009. He fell out with the Rajapaksas post-war, when he unilaterally declared a massive recruitment programme for the army without discussing it with the powers-that-be and without the Cabinet even seeing a scrap of paper with the proposal written on it.
In the end, he sought to rebel against the Rajapaksas, who were unsure of his popularity within the armed forces, post-war, and jailed him on allegedly trumped-up charges after Fonseka had contested against incumbent Mahinda in the post-war presidential poll of 2009 and lost. After Mahinda lost the 2015 presidential polls, the successor government in which Ranil was again the prime minister, Fonseka was freed, created Sri Lanka’s first and only Field Marshal, became an MP and minister, only to be dropped at the first available opportunity. He is at present an SJB parliamentarian, always in the race for whatever comes his way, but never reaching even the second round.
Anti-Ranil strategy
In the normal course, the Rajapaksas’ dwindled-yet-simple, wafer-thin majority should ensure the presidency for the candidate of their choice. But their choice is not yet known. It is also not clear if the two assertive Rajapaksas, namely, Mahinda and Basil, after Gota had fled, are on the same page, as the three were at logger-heads through the past months of multiple crises, both economic and political. With Basil always unwilling to give up his dual citizenship of the US and also given his aborted ‘escape’ after Gota had quit, partymen may root for Mahinda, who anyway was the most popular of all politicians in the country, until the economic crisis took the nation by surprise.
In the days after Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abyawardena announced Gota’s exit and fresh elections on 20 July, an SLPP office-bearer declared the party’s support for Ranil. Within hours, a party MP and likewise SLPP chairman GL Peiris, at present Foreign Minister, separately rooted for Dulles Allahapperuma, who was elected on the SLPP symbol, as they have pointed out. Neither is a heavy-weight but given the wafer-thin majority that the party enjoys, every vote counts, if its candidate has to win in the first-round.
But there could be a second round if no candidate wins an absolute majority of 113 votes. In such a case, the second preference votes obtained by the third, fourth and such other candidates would be distributed among the top two, one phase after the next, to see if either of them makes the grade. On paper, Ranil seems to hold the advantage even if he misses a first-round victory.
However, the Sajith-Dulles combo is said to be working on this even while contesting against each other, so that Dulles with a higher number of second-round votes from both the SJB-combine, which accounts for 70-75 MPs, apart from a substantial number from the SLPP parent, wins. The deal, according to some local media claims, is for Dulles to then name Sajith, his prime minister. Again, they all remain speculative still, as no party has issued any instructions on the second and third preference votes, if any, even though it is a ‘secret ballot’ and a three-line whip does not hold any promise to any candidate.
Civil war threat
Already, there are talks of high-octane horse-trading, promises of power and cash, as if the ‘Aragalaya’ (struggle) kind of public protest either did not happen or was meant only for the Rajapaksas, and none else. In this background, the centre-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), the breakaway group of yester-year militant group, JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna), now mostly mainstreamed, has cautioned the nation against possible ‘civil war’ if Ranil became President.
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Truth be told, the FSP, headed by yesteryear JVP militant Premakumar Gunartnam, does not seem to have any favourites, possibly barring JVP boss, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is contesting only because others did not attempt or allow a consensus around Speaker Abeywardena for President, as they had proposed. However, early speculation was that if Anura became President, Gunaratnam would be Prime Minister – an unlikely combo, given their internal contractions with the FSP talking ‘revolution’ more than the ageing parent.
Not only the FSP and the JVP, there was a general demand from the anti-Rajapaksa protestors to deny Ranil the prime minister’s job first when Mahinda R quit, and then against his becoming Acting President on Gota’s exit. They see him as a ‘protector of the Rajapaksas’, which is what they claim he did as full-fledged prime minister from 2015-19.
The complex relations between the two owed to a strong belief that between them the UNP, as it stood then, and the SLPP should not create space for a third political force, and thus continue to maintain the post-Independence equilibrium. That equilibrium was sought to be centred on the UNP and the SLFP parent of the Rajapaksa party, which they had headed until they broke away five years back.
Notwithstanding the fear/caution or threat of a civil war, as may be interpreted, the FSP has thus far claimed ownership – at times excessively – for the weeks-long mass movement against the Rajapaksas. It was indeed a combination of factors and forces, including the otherwise anti-Rajapaksa urban middle class, centred on capital Colombo.
Arsonist attacks
But there is no denying the continuous presence and domination of trade unions and university unions, which are said to be under the tutelage, originally of the JVP and now mostly under the FSP, since inception in 2012. The FSP has however carefully but not firmly distanced itself from the arsonist attacks on the homes of 78 SLPP politicians, starting from all Rajapaksas in public life on 9 May, and that on Prime Minister Ranil’s private residence on 9 July.
The former was staged hours after Mahinda quit as Prime Minister, when ‘Rajapaksa goons’ attacked peaceful protestors at ‘GoGotaGama’ venue on Colombo’s Galle Face Green beach-front. The second was as if to celebrate the exit of Gota Rajapaksa from the seat of power and the ‘mass occupation’ of his office and official residence, and as a warning for Ranil not to aspire to become President, a position he had craved and contested but lost to Mahinda Rajapaksa, as far back as 2005.
However, the FSP has claimed that Ranil was behind it all and was also behind reports of protesters taking away two T-56 machine-guns and ammunition after overpowering soldiers outside Parliament House, which they sought to occupy, too. However, they have spared Ranil of links to the arsonist attack of 9 May.
The police investigations are as slow as can be though early on, they cleared claims that the death of a ruling party MP in the midst of protestors on 9 May was an incident of suicide. The police, based on post mortem examination, announced that it was a cold-blooded murder, so was the accompanying death of the MP’s police security guard.
The Rajapaksas seemed to have been circumspect in ordering the security forces, including the tri-Services, to use ‘force’ to bring the situation under control. Ranil, as Acting President, did not hesitate to give a free-hand to the military and the police force to restore order, empty official buildings that were also symbols of the Sri Lankan State, of protestors, who had also begun fighting among themselves.
This was followed by visuals of armoured personnel carriers of the Sri Lanka Army, with gun-toting soldiers popping out of them, doing the rounds of capital Colombo, a couple of days ago. There seems to be a selective black-out of army-related news since. Even the reports of the protestors vacating the presidential palace and the Prime Minister’s office, even while holding on to the presidential secretariat, which is located at the end of the main protest venue, have been gleaned from Sri Lankan social media.
The protestors’ message was that they would stick together until after the presidential poll, and to see whom Parliament elects as President for the next two-plus years. But then, if the Rajapaksas are going to have a say in the choice of the president, they may continue to ‘rule’ but without being in ‘reign’. But then, Ranil, who is a cunning old fox, knows that for making him President, the Rajapaksas need only a simple majority, but for impeaching him, they would still require a two-thirds majority!
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and commentator. Views expressed are personal.
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