When a country has a strong Executive Branch, alliances matter. But when a country has an Executive Branch that doesn’t use that considerable Executive power in deference to the head of the Legislature, alliances should matter much more.
An orphan needs a father, and ex PM Ranil Wickremesinghe’s immediate reaction to the memorable failure of his government, is try to father the failure on the President. He said the president is responsible, and should be included in any probe of his government’s misdoings and mismanagement. That’s quite a leap for a man who thought the President, Maithripala Sirisena, was occupying that post as a decoration.
‘My story telling ended with the election,’ said Wickremesinghe, who was given a prime speaking opportunity at the Galle Literary Festival in 2015.
It appears his story telling in fact started recently. His new story is that there was indeed an ‘alliance’ he was in, with President Sirisena.
That must have been for about five minutes. The rest of that Alliance’s story was of a UNP Wickremesinghe government.
Ranil Wickremesinghe’s father the late Edmond was a kingmaker. His son was a king, or at least he thought so, though for everybody else this must have been hilarious.
Ranil as PM gave shape to a UNP government modeled in his own image. Arrogant, incompetent and tone-deaf.
Wickremesinghe cannot work in alliance with anybody, and the emphasis in that sentence is on the word ‘work’. Anyone can function in alliance with various convenient bedfellows for the purpose of elections.
People want to get elected. They will go out of the way to be accommodating to achieve that end. But, in getting things done, Wickremesinghe’s signature style is to make a hash of everything. There is immense difficulty to find any partner game enough to do that in any kind of bargain.
How could the past government have been anything but a Wickremesinghe Government? It was his choice of Education Minister.
It was his choice of Law and Order Minister. It is obvious by a first glance of it, that Ranil Wickremesinghe engineered the 19th Amendment to concentrate the powers of the Executive on himself.
It was his task to appoint the Cabinet, and the President’s powers were summarily done away with in this regard.
Nice try, one may say. Alliances could very often be troubled, but there can be no alliance if one partner is so dominant, that the first thing he does is neutralize the other party, and take away all his powers.
A BASE PLAY FOR POWER
More to the point, Ranil Wickremesinghe (RW)’s strategy was to take all of the President’s political advantages away from him, by converting him into a figurehead without a political base.
It’s why the RW brigade of journalists writing from as far afield as Canada and his faithful opinion makers back here, faulted the president for taking over the SLFP chairmanship, and focusing on the affairs of that party.
The president in other words was not allowed to have a political life of his own.
Now, though RW did not succeed turning the Alliance with President Sirisena into a complete rout in which the latter was a doormat, doing that certainly was his intention from the beginning of the ill-fated partnership.
The greatest victories are from battles that are not fought, said the strategic genius of the Orient, Sun Tzu. In hindsight, the president won this war of wits with RW and his ‘alliance’ that was meant to make him a useless decoration, by simply not fighting that battle.
RW seemed to have lulled himself into thinking that the president does not resist. He took the Executive President of this country for a dupe and a pushover, because the president simply did not fight.
To think that way was no way of making alliances, but RW thought he had no need for alliances, when he had himself and only himself in his sights. His father Esmond was known as kingmaker, but unbeknownst to him he had made a son who thought himself to be Emperor.
Those who gave the late Wickremesinghe Snr. the nickname, would have not thought that it would make sense to people that way, that he would be a ‘kingmaker’ in that visceral sense, by bequeathing to the world a son who dreamt he was Monarch.
RW liked to think that he had some sort of natural paternity over the President’s political life after the formation of the Yahapalana Government because the UNP, he theorized, had secured the president the presidency.
The president knew this was only half the story. In fact he knew that three quarters of the story was that he had paternity over RW’s political life as the functioning Prime Minister under Yahapalanaya.
He had given life to the UNP, which had no viable candidate to run for the presidency in 2015.
He brought in floating votes from the non UNP or the opposite side of the political divide, when he crossed over and consented to be the Common Candidate in the 2015 Presidential poll.
He had brought in the base, and RW to a great extent provided the remainder as filler. But yet, the latter treated him not even as junior partner in the alliance, but as the non entity in what he considered a non alliance, since he was the only factor he thought that mattered in the partnership.
All of this takes the writer onto a blast from the past, John Rettie’s feature in the British Guardian, in an obituary for Sirimavo Bandaranaike.
Rettie wrote this most robust, classic journalistic introductory paragraph to that piece:
“What does she know of politics?” scornfully asked a cousin of the assassinated Prime Minister of Ceylon, Solomon “Solla” Bandaranaike, when his widow Sirima announced that she was taking over his party’s leadership in 1960.
“In Solla’s time, Sirima presided over nothing fiercer than the kitchen fire,” continued Paul Pieris Deriyanagala, who had been best man at the Bandaranaikes’ wedding. “She’ll end by spoiling her personal reputation and ruining the family name.”
Few forecasts have proved so mistaken. (End quote.)
RW’s estimation of President Sirisena in the Alliance was something similarly, or perhaps far more dismissive. To repeat Retti, few forecasts have proved so mistaken as RW’s sizing-up of President MS!
By now any reader, even one quite unacquainted with the ways of recent Sri Lankan politics, would have an idea of how RW considers the word ‘Alliance.’
If this was a marriage, his chauvinism killed it, and drove the president back to his natural political base, which in effect did the latter a favour.
A HEADLESS CHICKEN
Dr. Colvin R de Silva once told the then Speaker Stanley Tillekeratne in the 1970s, that he could be removed for “some reason, any reason or no reason at all.” Towards the end of the Alliance, RW was clearly imparting a similar message to the President, particularly when he brought India precipitously into the equation, and stated, without any shred of accuracy after his last visit to Delhi, that the Indian Prime Minister had faulted the Sri Lankan President for delays in certain Indian projects.
This was how RW was taking his gloves off to dispatch a president who he by now considered left baggage from the past. He certainly must have regretted that tactic of plotting removal ‘for some reason, any reason, or no reason at all.’
It seems this plan boomeranged and came back to bite him.
In fact, astute observers would not say RW was subsequently removed by President Sirisena for ‘no reason at all.’ What were the reasons indeed, if they are to be clinically listed, for his removal? All of the above, obviously, and more, would be the answer.
A point has to be noted down about the obvious ideological incompatibility with the UNP as well which has been alluded to already when the president spoke at the rally held in Sri Jayawardendenepura recently after the events of October 26th.
Of the most important observations the president made that day, the most pertinent was that RW pursued an economic policy that did not fit in with ‘our culture.’
That reference to culture is informative. The UNP, though to the right of the SLFP, to which the president has complete fealty to, has in its comprador approach, been a party culturally moored to the land.
DS Senanayake was a man of the soil, and JR Jayewardene made a fetish almost of attending wap magul ceremonies and other such back to the land rituals. RW saw this part about relating the economy to the people, as an unnecessary embarrassment, and largely dispensed with those niceties altogether.
Even if he was neo liberal to the core, RW did not have to be this type of proactive neo liberal, implementing the policies of market greed, and running amok in the manner of a headless chicken. To think that he was under the impression that he had the President’s head cut off, was comically instructive under these circumstances.
It’s difficult for politicians such as the president to move from the natural political habitat so far in the opposite direction into UNP territory, and reach full potential as statesman or policymaker. The late CP de Silva brought with him a posse of MPs in the 60s, and crossed over to the UNP, signaling the end of the then Sirima Bandaranaike Government. He did end up as the Minister of Irrigation and Power in the succeeding Dudley Senanayake government of 1965.
But the last years of his political life were decidedly not spent in his own skin, and in 1972, just two years after the defeat of the Dudley government, CP de Silva passed away.
Both hailing from the farming districts of Polonnaruwa, for some reason, President Sirisena not remaining on the political right, which is not his natural political habitat, is a decision that he consciously took to avoid the fate of those such as the late CP, ‘the deity of Minneriya.’
Besides, he spent a political aeon in the SLFP, in alliance with like-minded partners, first in the PA of Kumaratunga, and then in the UPFA with Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Contrast that long marathon with the four years clipped, with RW in the UNP, and it would be clear that ideology matters more than the gloss of politically convenient cohabitation, in matters of choosing political bedfellows.
Why did he not think of crossing over prematurely despite his own obvious reservations about the then regimes of the former SLFP leaders, Kumaratunga and Rajapaksa?
Why did he have to cut short his stay in the UNP, and only the UNP, of course it being the RW run UNP?
It’s for the simple reason that agreements and alliances though they are flexible in politics, have to be under colour of some common purpose or a modicum of commonly held principle, if they are to survive. The President’s familiarity with RW only bred contempt.
THE POLITICS OF COALITIONS
Coalition politics is more cultural synergy than political expediency, wrote Bidyut Chakrabarty in his book on India’s post Independence politics, Forging Power. (Oxford University Press.) That thought should mesh in seamlessly with the President’s comments about RW’s economic policies being incompatible with the local culture.
There is zero cultural synergy that the president and his party can achieve with RW, whereas the same certainly cannot be said of his time with President Rajapaksa, when despite differences of opinion, which is normal, he was able to move ahead on a common agenda with him. After all, didn’t Mahathma Ghandhi call Subash Chandra Bose the ‘prince among patriots,’ despite the yawning ideological differences between the two, within the commonly held goal of freedom from colonial rule?
In today’s preferred parlance, the quick takedown of that would be to say simply, ‘now that’s the story.’
That’s the story of President Sirisena’s rejection of the Wickremesinghe alliance, the short but brutish UNP dalliance if you will, and his return to more familiar territory that would bring his politics back to a place that would make for something other than being in perpetual denial.
LEGACY
Such a back to roots reconciliation is far more important to legacy than expediency, when especially the politics of expediency is impossible with RW, because there is nothing that simply can be expected from a taker, not a giver such as him, within any kind of political partnership, expedient or otherwise.
Try to remember who it was, that statesman who said, ‘history will judge us kindly.’ When asked why, he simply deadpanned, ‘because I will write that history.’
In making alliances, there is no sense in doing so unless when the deeds are done and the dust is settled, the protagonist is prepared to write the history and not leave it to somebody else to do that.
Who shall write the history of this phase in our politics, the first third of our Sri Lankan century? A hint: it will certainly not be Ranil Wickremesinghe.
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