Ranil to be lynched by the Angry UNP Mob: Guilty of being in vicinity, and several previous charges.

For an unpopular politician, Ranil Wickramasinghe must be the longest serving opposition leader.

Ranil Wickramasinghe. picture credit: AP

There are so many negative things that can be said about Wickramasinghe. He doesn’t understand the common man, his ideology is directly borrowed from west and he tries to cut Sri Lanka to fit his ideology, his cronies are a set of Colombo elite and he doesn’t listen to party grassroots instead thinks that everyone must accept his theory. He held important offices in several violent and corrupt governments, and did not raise a voice.

And he is an appeaser of the worst kind. His “peace process” with the LTTE terrorists was mainly focused on discussing the logistics to provide what the terrorists want, and telling the south that how recently converted LTTE is from violence to “peace”, and how the south should bear any terrorist act until the tiger is properly domesticated.

Opposition to Ranil

We have been critical of Ranil for long. And the UNP has been two-minded about him. There were few half-hearted attempts to oust Ranil from within the party hierarchy, and all of them were futile. Some of the rebels converted with a few bones thrown at them, some just lost and stayed losers, some left the party. The average UNPer was the most useless on this: if the Ranil was kicked out, they would have been happy “wow, now Ranil is out, we can at last win”. But as long as Ranil is there, they would mutter under their breath “රනිල් ඉන්නකම් දිනන්න බෑ” among themselves, and praising how much of a visionary, how internationally accepted the නායකතුමා is for the outside world. Even some so-called non-UNP liberal critics limited their criticism on Ranil to his inability to win people (= win elections) and his sexual favors that hurt the party (= party’s ability to win elections).

Party Supporters’ Role

Ranil clung in to power using the utterly undemocratic party constitution, and the party supporters who preach about democracy to everyone did not have any issue. The alliance he formed with Mangala Samaraweera had the simple and narrow-minded objective of coming into power: the UNPers did not have any objection when Ranil accepted that Mangala would be a hitherto-nonexistent “deputy prime minister” in Ranil’s government. Such was the tunnel vision of the UNP at the time and such was how desperate they were for a political win.

Fonseka Comes In

When Fonseka was brought into the scene, it was by the JVP and Mangala, but that perfectly matched Ranil’s scheme. Mangala who is an expert on such operations definitely had other ideas than Ranil’s. Mangala is a guy who would even sacrifice his own future for an agenda: he may not have cared about what will happen to Ranil if Fonseka really won. But definitely, Ranil did not have that in mind. It has not been long since Ranil was told by the party big shots that he must either contest in a presidential election, or must give the party leadership to the contestant. Now, Ranil had a convenient escape, at least a conditional one. If the UNP contested, he will have to face the election and lose both the election and the leadership in the rebellion that ensues, or he will have to abandon the leadership immediately. But with Fonseka, he had a fair chance of clinging into the party leadership. If Fonseka loses, everything will be fine for him.

Party Supporters’ Role with Fonseka

What was the “compromise” needed from the Party supporters?

First, a lot of amnesia and hypocrisy. Many of them were silent when the UNP mocked/played down/was blind to the war victories. Now when they picked Sarath Fonseka, that was because they all knew that they need someone they can sell – someone who can win. When they allied with JVP, that was not an alliance made on principals. It was merely a facade of democracy and freedom, and the real reason (as admitted by their respective leaders) was that neither UNP nor the JVP nor an alliance of them could compete against Rajapakse and have a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning.

Even when it was obvious that Fonseka does not have a credible track record on democrasy/openness/corruption, and even when the Fonseka camp used carrot promises such as increasing public servants salaries by a whopping 10,000 rupees, even those who were initially critical of Fonseka resorted to the tunnel vision of expelling Mahinda to end “rampant corruption and lack of democracy” and said “hey, Fonseka promises nice things. How cool”. To quote Indi Samarajiva, for instance, (because he was among the few who openly supported UNP but had a cautious approach to Fonseka, so one can reasonably assume that he represents the end of UNP who did not blindly support Fonseka just to come into power):

I think it’s pretty good and agree with most of the stuff. My comments on why are in today’s Sunday Leader. To quote: “you can support the believable change I am promising. I will restore democracy. I will eliminate corruption and help families by creating jobs, increasing incomes and lowering taxes and the cost of living. I am not a career politician but a public servant.” Now I do.

[Emphasis is mine.]

Now Indi gave some publicity to an anti-Fonseka rant of mine, and that’s quite gracious and nice of him. And he also wrote about the sad state of the UNP:

I don’t think this convoluted deal is going to save the current UNP, and I don’t think it should. If the UNP wants to return as a party it needs to do what political parties do and restart and rebuild itself, with new people. All the backroom deals won’t get the party anything but screwed and its supporters anything but demoralized. I like the UNP and I like Ranil but it should never have come to this.

But that was before he threw his weight behind the Fonseka campaign. Later, he did not seem to have any problem in supporting the “backroom deals” and “the convoluted deal”, even after the Fonseka’s campaign became more and more typical of the usual dirty political ploys (such as preposterous promises left and right) despite the blindingly obvious boiler-plate promises to “restore democracy” etc.

(People such as Taboo subjects were even worse, and I have addressed them elsewhere; I do not go further on Taboo Subjects author for this reason, and the reason that however hypocritical his praise of the dirty alliance was, he pretended to vote for Wickramabahu Karunaratne. This post is not about closet UNPers but the card-carrying type, the hypocrisy nevertheless is of the same recipe)

Right Before the Election

So right before the election, the UNP was with the cozy little dream that they are going to win, and everything seriously wrong about the dirty alliance was forgotten. So many people, (in the particular niche of blogs, Lanka Libertarian, Lanka Rising, A Voice In Colombo, පන්හිඳ සමග, නුවර පාර and many others including this author) have been pointing out what’s wrong with the alliance. It was a one that was not to succeed. Fonseka at the moment was nothing more than a JVP/Mangala puppet who was showing with each act, that as a politician, he is not different from, or is worse than, an average politician. He would have needed serious practice to become an MP, let alone a president of the country. And his promises needed an executive president with the powers of a cabinet of ministers, not a non-executive president as he promised.

Postmortem

Did the UNPers care? No. What was important was winning, and winning RIGHT NOW. Did they win? Oh no they didn’t. They could not have, with THAT Fonseka, THAT UNP and THAT JVP and THAT Mangala. It could have come as a hard shock, but it is real.

Now there’s a little sitting back and pondering, and finding someone to hang. It seems that some have seen Ranil hanging around in the election office. AHA! There’s a call for his resignation.

That’s all good and fine; any party guy should have rights to voice opinion on what kind of reformation he thinks is good for the party. What’s wrong here is not seeing what really went wrong at the moment. It was the majority UNP voters who gave up excreting real pressure on the party for reformation all this long, it was them who bet on Fonseka for flimsy promises and an unstable alliance as if winning and winning right now is the most important thing. It was them who were silent when Ranil promised a phantom deputy Prime minister post to Mangala Goebbels Samaraweera. It was them who ran the Fonseka race knowing very well that Fonseka’s only qualification is that he can grab power for them, and that party leaders can not. NONE OF THESE were signs of reliable, honest, sustainable, genuine democratic progressive reforms. ALL OF THESE were opportunistic tactics to get power as soon as possible. And now they are gonna hang Ranil. Of course he is responsible for the mess UNP is today, but that’s just as the root cause. The mess itself with caused with contributions from the UNP voters, and expedient Fonseka alliance was the manifestation of their desperation.

Personally, I’m happy if Ranil gets the sack. That would pave way for a more practical opposition and a stronger one, which would be necessary to handle the Mahinda Government in the true spirit of the democracy. But people have given a clear message, and that is: don’t be in a hurry for power.

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