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by Jayadeva Uyangoda

The fragile cohabitation arrangements between the UNF -led Cabinet of Ministers and the PA's Executive President seems to be breaking down. The deep rift between the UNF and PA leadership is not an isolated development; rather it is indicative of an organic crisis of Sri Lanka's Sinhalese polity. If the rift unfolds further, it can even undermine the present peace process initiated by the UNF and LTTE leaderships. If the Sinhalese ruling elite fails to arrest this bitter process of intra-class in fighting, the only way to rescue the peace process is to place it on a track autonomous of the party politics in the South. Even that will require the precondition of the PA and UNP leaders refraining from politicizing the engagement with the LTTE.

The growing enmity between the two main political parties in Sinhalese society in moments of accommodation the Tamil community is not a new development. It is a caricatured repetition of what happened in the past, in1958, 1965, 1987 and 1995-2000. It appears that the Sinhalese polity suffers from a crippling incapacity to seriously address the ethnic conflict. Whenever an initiative towards peace with the Tamil community is made, it has immediately led to the political bifurcation of the Sinhalese polity for seemingly inexplicable reasons.

Inhered in it are some curious paradoxes of Sri Lanka's politics.

Yesterday's ruling party which went quite far to resolve the ethnic conflict through compromise and accommodation would oppose today's ruling party's pursuit of the same course of action. The only saving grace in this paradox is the readiness of yesterday's opposition party, in power today, for a new accommodation plan that may even go far beyond what it opposed earlier. In power, these parties have been quite innovative in proposing settlement options to the ethnic conflict. Out of power their behavior gets defined by considerations that are brazenly partisan, familial and even personal.

Unless the Sinhalese ruling elites, particularly those out of power, stop this practice of political self-aggrandizement, they can only ensure the continuing protraction of Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict with consequences that might even lead to state collapse. The current reports of fresh parliamentary elections as well as a parliamentary coup d'etat have distinctly surreal dimensions. The country is struggling to get out of two profoundly difficult problems. The present economic crisis is the worst economic collapse the country has faced for three decades. The peace process is so fragile that it always runs many risks of coming to an abrupt and violent end.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis and the future of the peace process are so intertwined that a careful synchronization of an economic recovery plan with a well-designed negotiation process is needed for Sri Lanka to achieve some degree of recovery. That requires some political stability in Colombo.

In the present breakdown of political stability, progress in both economic and peace fronts is most likely to suffer to a considerable measure. When the political leaders are pre-occupied with issues other than an urgent agenda for economic recovery, the IMF representative in Colombo and his cohorts in Washington DC will enjoy a free hand in forcing their neo-liberal recovery package on the government that in turn will create greater class polarization.

The setbacks to the peace process may immediately be expressed in terms of the government's inability to proceed with direct negotiation plans with the LTTE. The LTTE leadership is very unlikely to politically engage with a regime the immediate future of which has suddenly become uncertain. Continuous postponement of direct talks between the government and the LTTE may even lead to the weakening of the LTTE's own preparedness for political engagement with the adversary. That in turn is very likely to strengthen the LTTE's parallel track of returning to the war option.

Counter-state guerilla movements do not usually place much faith in waiting games, especially when their counterparts show political confusion.

The SLFP and UNP leaders in Colombo may need to seriously reflect on the political implications of their present confrontational behavior. If they fail to do so, even at this moment of deep crisis, that failure ought to be seen as symptomatic of a parallel crisis that exists side by side with the ethnic conflict and as deep-rooted as the ethnic conflict is. In fact, Sri Lanka's polity suffers from a triple political conflict. The ethnic conflict is the first and the most enduring one. The second is located in the Sinhalese society, involving the ruling elites and the subordinate social classes mobilized in the JVP's politics of radical Sinhalese nationalism.

The third is also located in the Sinhalese society and it reproduces itself repeatedly as an intra-class conflict within the politically bifurcated Sinhalese bourgeoisie. These three conflicts are inter-related in a peculiar manner. Attempts at resolving the first through political means enhances and brings to the surface the second and third conflicts, reproducing the first in greater intensity.

What Sri Lanka is confronted with today is precisely this possibility of the ethnic conflict being propelled forward by non-ethnic, inter-class and intra-class, conflicts in the Sinhalese society.

The growing crisis between the President and the Cabinet also indicates the degree to which our main institutions of governance as well as state power have failed to contain an inter-party and intra-class conflict. This raises a fundamental doubt about the capacity of Sri Lanka's institutions of state power to contain and resolve the protracted ethnic conflict. It is quite alarming that both the PA and UNF have been sending signals during the past few days that they might resort to extra-institutional action to deal with the conflict between the President and the Cabinet. The Sinhalese political leaders should realize that the settlement of the ethnic conflict presupposes and necessitates both reforming and strengthening of Sri Lanka's institutions of governance and state power.

When they weaken the institutions in the way they do now, it will indeed diminish the systemic capacity of the polity to manage and resolve any of its conflicts.

Is there any meaningful way to address this fundamental political problem of Sri Lanka? At present there seems to be no way out from the crisis unless Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mrs. Chandrika Kumaratunga come to realize the primacy of class interests over factional or family interests. One mistake both Mr. Wickremesinghe and Mrs. Kumaratunga have made in recent months is to allow individuals with no sharpened class interests to be able to define and determine the terms of political imagination and engagement within their own parties. Out of power, Mrs. Kumaratunga has allowed the JVP and some floating intellectuals to influence the SLFP's emerging political agenda. In power, Mr. Wickremesinghe has allowed the priorities of the UNF to be defined by little men with no long-term political perspectives as such.

Both Mrs. Kumaratunga and Mr. Wickremesinghe need to review all these developments that have taken place in the political entities they lead. At the same time, the two leaders should now sit down together and seriously reflect on which political destination they, as the President and the Prime Minister, are leading Sri Lanka and its people to. More than any other time in Sri Lanka's recent political history, today the political stability of the entire system rests on the hands of two individuals bickering in Colombo. And they, sooner or later, will have to sit down with a third individual who is waiting there in Vanni.

Meanwhile, one may say in somewhat lighter vein that Mrs. Kumaratunga should be patient enough to give Mr. Wickremesinghe also a chance to govern and deal with the ethnic conflict. She had her turn and the rules of parliamentary game require that she give a chance to her opponent too.

Messing up of a country should not be viewed as the prerogative of one political family.

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