Election on a precipice

Sri Lanka's election season commenced with a thunderbolt, a development unthinkable in those heady days six months ago, when the demise of the Tamil Tigers was celebrated with milk-rice and crackers. Most Sinhalese regard President Mahinda Rajapakse, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and Commander of the Army Sarath Fonseka as the 'heroic trinity' responsible for their historic triumph over the LTTE. Today, that war-time triumvirate has collapsed and the Sinhala South is compelled to witness the unseemly sight of its saviours battling each other for power. Until his fallout with the Rajapakse brothers, Fonseka shared most of their ideological and political predilections. A Sinhala supremacist intolerant of dissent, he was a key player in the Rajapakse project of turning Sri Lanka into a Sinhala-dominated national security state. But the Rajapakses also have dynastic ambitions; their brazen attempts at monopolising the credit for defeating the LTTE irked Fonseka, just as his brash effort to claim a lion's share of the credit alarmed the Rajapakses. In this highly charged environment, minor irritants became blistering sores, snowballs heralding the ultimate avalanche.

Dynamic candidacy
Fonseka's entrance into the race has deeply affected the political dynamics of the upcoming election. To begin with, it has united and rejuvenated the United National Party (UNP) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the two major opposition parties. A balance between the government and the opposition is necessary for the political health of any democracy. When the opposition is more powerful than the government, instability becomes endemic; when the opposition is ineffective, it gives the government a sense of power that is not conducive to moderate thinking and conduct. The Rajapakses' plan was to trounce the twice-defeated Ranil Wickremesinghe of the UNP during the presidential election, and use that victory as a springboard to obtain a two-thirds majority at the parliamentary poll, which must take place before 22 April 2010. This would have been sufficient to enable them to craft a constitution suited to their dynastic needs. The Fonseka factor wreaked havoc on this carefully calibrated plan and energised the opposition, thereby partially restoring the essential balance between the government and the opposition.

Beyond a reenergised opposition, the impartiality of Dayananda Dissanayake, the election commissioner, has also emerged as another unexpected obstacle to the Rajapakse behemoth. Through his conduct during the now-concluded nomination process, Dissanayake has already demonstrated that he is determined to ensure a free and fair election. To this end, he plans to set up a competent official body to monitor both state and private media to try and ensure impartial coverage. Dissanayake also stated that proxy candidates, most of the 22 contenders, will not be permitted to use the opportunities granted to them under the constitution to canvass for their paymasters, as has happened in the past. In addition, international election observers have also been invited. Perhaps most significantly, he warned that if polling is marred by violence, the exercise will be declared invalid in the affected constituency and the final national result delayed until re-polling is completed.

Without doubt, the upcoming campaign will be acrimonious, perhaps even bloody, and the result is likely to be a close affair. Rajapakse, with the power and the resources of the state at his command, is likely to win. But it will not be the cakewalk he and his strategists had expected when they opted for the premature presidential poll. If Fonseka can deprive Rajapakse of an outright victory by pushing the election into a second round, the fallout may limit the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) to only a marginal victory at the parliamentary election, thus preventing any legislative intervention in the constitution. The Fonseka factor has now rendered uncertain not only the outcome of the presidential election but also that of the parliamentary polls and thus the very future of the Rajapakse project.

The Rajapakse-Fonseka fallout created much consternation within the 'patriotic' camp. But the Sinhala supremacists, with the exception of the JVP which was in the opposition in any case, closed ranks around Rajapakse once Fonseka's candidacy was confirmed. In this sense, Fonseka entering the fray is unlikely to cause a big enough swing in the Sinhala vote to defeat Rajapakse. On the other hand, the general has electrified the opposition, propelling it into vigorous action. As the recent provincial council elections confirmed, the UNP vote base has remained largely intact. Indeed, the UPFA's huge victories were the result of high levels of abstentions among disorganised and demoralised UNP loyalists. For instance, the UPFA won the Southern Provincial Council with a huge margin because there was a 42.6 percent decrease in the UNP vote from 2005, not because of any post-war swing towards the UPFA. Meanwhile, support for the UPFA decreased by 3.2 percent from 2005. If there was no groundswell of support for the Rajapakses in the South, their home base, there cannot be a pro-Rajapakse wave nationally. Since the Fonseka factor will galvanise most UNP loyalists into voting, barring a last minute hitch, the electoral race is likely to be close, even in the Sinhala South.

Fonseka's impact on the electoral field also demonstrates how the minorities could have become the 'third force' in Lankan politics had they formed a united front on a common minimum platform. As things stand, the minority parties are divided. Douglas Devananda's Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP), Arumugam Thondaman's Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) and Ferial Ashraff's National Unity Alliance (NUA) are backing Rajapakse while Rauf Hakeem's Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) and Mano Ganesan's Western Peoples Front (WPF) are supporting Fonseka. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is undecided while M K Shivajilingam, a TNA parliamentarian, is contesting the presidency as an independent.

In Colombo, which has a high concentration of Tamils and Muslims, most minority voters are UNP supporters. In 2005, a majority of Colombo Tamils obeyed the LTTE and abstained from voting, indirectly helping Rajapakse win. Haunted by this memory, most Colombo Tamils are likely to vote for Fonseka this time around, just to deny Rajapakse a second term. So will a majority of Colombo Muslims, since Fonseka is backed by both the UNP and the SLMC. Though the CWC is backing Rajapakse, the UNP has a significant presence in the plantations and Fonseka may be able to win a sizeable chunk of the upcountry Tamil votes as a consequence.

Meanwhile, many Eastern Muslims, fearing the Buddhist revanchists of the rightwing Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) backing Rajapakse, are likely to vote for Fonseka. The squabble between the TMVP's Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan ('Pillayan'), chief minister of the Eastern Province, and his former leader Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan ('Karuna') – currently a government minister – may enable the Eastern Tamils to vote with relative freedom. At the August local government elections, the UPFA managed to win in Jaffna but was trounced in Vavuniya. This indicates that in a free and fair election, a majority of the northern Tamils will vote against Rajapakse. This does not, however, necessarily mean that they will vote for the war-time army commander.

The Tamils have nothing positive to expect from Rajapakse who has denied the very existence of the ethnic problem, also implying that any Tamil with a close relative in the LTTE is a traitor. But will the Tamils of the North and the East be allowed to vote freely? Will the power of the state be used to engineer a massive 'victory' for Rajapakse? Will an independent election commissioner, international election observers and Fonseka supporters in the army suffice to impede attempts at holding a peaceful but un-free election in the North? These are unanswerable questions this side of 26 January. Meanwhile, media reports about abysmally low levels of voter registration among the internally displaced (7000 out of 200,000) indicate that many Tamils may stay away from voting – or will be induced to do so by the powers that be, in the hope of replicating the 2005 outcome.

Future imperfect
In a display of cognitive dissonance, the Rajapakse camp is warning that a Fonseka victory will result in a military dictatorship. It was the Rajapakses who allowed, and are allowing, the army to meddle in politics, thereby blurring the clear line of demarcation which existed in Sri Lanka between the military and the polity even in the worst years of the conflict. The Rajapakses also have a history of limiting democratic freedoms citing them as incompatible with national security needs. In any case, Fonseka is retired. He is contesting the election as a civilian and his victory cannot become a military coup.

All the same, a Fonseka presidency can imperil democracy in other ways. The general has promised to abolish the executive presidency, implement the 17th Amendment which seeks to reduce executive powers via five independent commissions, provide a political solution which goes beyond the 13th Amendment on devolving power to the provinces and ensure media freedoms. Lofty promises indeed, but will he honour them? What if a victorious Fonseka decides to retain the executive presidency, until he has 'set the country right'? Already there is talk of a moderate versus hardliner split in the Fonseka camp with the candidate succumbing to the JVP hardliners. Lankan democracy can become imperilled irrespective of who wins the election.

Landmines litter Sri Lanka's path to a post-war future. A huge army with war psychosis is incompatible with a country sans a war. Neither Rajapakse nor Fonseka has a programme to change, in terms of size and psychological makeup, this war-time army to one suited to a peaceful democracy. The country has lost the European Union's Generalised System of Preferences (GSP+) as a direct outcome of the Rajapakses' refusal to abide by international humanitarian laws and standards. The subsequent adverse impact on trade will aggravate the economic woes of the masses. The war crime charges will continue to resonate internationally. More pertinently, there cannot be a genuine reconciliation with the Tamils so long as Sinhalese of all political persuasions cling to the myth of a humanitarian offensive and deny that the state Lankan forces too engaged in human-rights violations during the endgame with LTTE. How can the Tamils forget the past and look ahead, if the only future possible is one in which their legitimate grievances and demands are denied and their suffering and loss belittled?

An election is supposed to provide the possibility of a dramatic break away from the crisis mentality, but it is clear that the presidential election this January will not provide a solution to any of the burning problems. Nor can Rajapakse or Fonseka be trusted to act democratically, constitutionally or even moderately after the election. But if the Fonseka factor can push the election into a second round, it may impede the Rajapakse project of establishing dynastic rule behind a democratic façade in a Sinhala dominated Sri Lanka. It may also remind Sinhala politicians of all hues that Tamil and Muslim voters do matter, even in a post-LTTE Sri Lanka.

~Tisarenee Gunasekara is a writer based in Colombo.