Archives

by Jayadeva Uyangoda

With the first round of official talks between the UNF Government and the LTTE scheduled for September 16, politics in Colombo continues to be a contestation of strength between the two rival parties, the UNF and the PA. Prime Minister Wickremesinghe's approach of patient diplomacy towards Mrs. Kumaratunga, who is besieged on a variety of fronts, appears to be working, at least in the direction of calming down the rising political tension. The best option for the two leaders, and for the country, is to find a formula that will bring about a win-win outcome in this potentially ugly tussle between the two centres of state power in the run up to negotiations with the LTTE.

As this week's developments indicate, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe has acted somewhat conciliatorily on the question of the proposed constitutional amendment that seeks to curtail Presidential powers of dissolving parliament. His meeting with the President on September 03 suggested that there was some possibility of rapprochement between the two leaders. Dialogue, one may say, is a better alternative to confrontation through press releases.

As these two leaders may know well, re-opening of the fault lines of the regime of governance is not the best way to prepare for negotiations that will have to deal with crucial questions of state power. The impending negotiation with the LTTE is not an ordinary political affair. Rather, it centres on the fundamental issue of re-organising Sri Lanka's post-colonial state, in association with a secessionist, and militarily unvanquished minority nationalist movement. It is time that both Mr. Wickremesinghe and Mrs. Kumaratunga realised that what would be really tested in the days and weeks ahead is not their skills in political one-upmanship, but the capacity of the Sinhalese ruling class, which they are supposed to lead, in dealing with fundamental questions of state power at a moment of reckoning.

By the beginning of next week, we may know exactly whether the two parties would manage to find a new strategy for cohabitation. And indeed, a large part of the coming turn in Sri Lanka's politics will hinge on the nature of the political relationship that the Prime Minister and the President may develop during the crucial two weeks prior to September 16.

Although there appeared early this week some signs of a fresh initiative for UNF-PA cohabitation, against the current balance of forces, it can happen only if the President is ready to accept the terms of engagement as defined by the UNF Cabinet's political affairs sub-committee. But, Mrs. Kumaratunga has been trying to assert her authority in defiance of the UNF Cabinet's attempts to make her the weaker partner in a cohabitation regime. During the past few weeks, she also made a series of attempts to gain an upper hand in the cohabitation tussle with the UNF Government. But the 19th Amendment proposal, combined with the fixing of dates for talks with the LTTE, seems to have weakened her capacity to define events to come.

Obviously, the UNF Government has succeeded in pushing forward its own agenda of events by making use of the rifts within President Kumaratunga's own party, the SLFP. Meanwhile, the Government's decision to lift the ban on the LTTE, ignoring the President's protestations, is a clear indication that the UNF leadership has decided to pursue its own program and calendar, despite President's dissent.

Concerning the proposed 19th Amendment to the Constitution, it presents Mrs. Kumaratunga no room for accommodation. Confronted with a take-it or-leave-it option, she might be tempted to leave it, because it is not simply possible for her to support a move, proposed by her opponents, that will drastically reduce her own powers as the President. Her oft-repeated position that she will support the total abolition of the Executive Presidency, not piecemeal amendments, is unlikely to persuade her rivals. The UNF leaders, it appears, are perfectly happy with the prospect of Kumaratunga being confined to her office of Presidency with diminished authority during her second and last term.

In any case, a meaningful cohabitation between the UNF and PA cannot happen in a political vacuum. The way in which politics in the South has been polarized during the past few years provides the broader context for the continuing erosion of cohabitation possibilities between the PA and the UNF. The present regime of political polarisation is not a sudden development. It began to crystallise in 2000-2001 when the then UNP led Opposition alliance broke up and a new alliance between the PA and the JVP was worked out through the so-called 'probationary government." During this period, there also occurred a series of splits within the PA, UNP, SLMC and SLFP. Meanwhile, most of the Tamil political parties also began to drift away from the PA, making the latter electorally vulnerable to any UNP-led multi-ethnic coalition. The presidential and parliamentary elections held during 200-2001 enabled all the new combinations and permutations of political forces to take some shape.

In that backdrop, the SLFP, under the direction of Mrs. Kumaratunga and a few of her colleagues, established a new political-ideological alliance with the JVP, thereby pushing her party and regime decisively away from a policy of negotiation with the LTTE. This is quite parallel to the SLFP-JVP alliance of 1987-88 against the UNP's move to resolve the ethnic conflict through Indian involvement and constitutional accommodation. The SLFP, unlike the UNP, is an ideological and interventionist party. And paradoxically, the SLFP has always derived its ideologies and interventionist strategies either from the working class parties or from the Sinhalese 'petty-bourgeois' forces. Mrs. Kumaratunga, the only leader who had the capacity to divorce the SLFP from its Sinhalese petty-bourgeois ideological trap, has now committed the same mistake her parents did in the past. A cardinal error she has made two years ago was the forging of an alliance with the JVP which has inherited the MEP-SLFP ideology of the 1950s and 1960s. This regressive move by Mrs. Kumaratunga and some of her young colleagues has indeed crippled the SLFP's capacity to be a modern and modernising political force in Sri Lanka.

The UNF Government, meanwhile, is not a homogenous entity either. Some of its members with whom President Kumaratunga has been having encounters of immense hostility, are keen to weaken Kumaratunga politically, as the president and as the leader of the SLFP. Attempts being made by some members of the UNF government to split the SLFP can be counter-productive at the present moment, because a weakened SLFP under the Bandaranaike is most likely to enter into a coalition of Sinhalese nationalist resistance to government-LTTE accommodation. From the perspectives of the UNF project of a negotiated settlement with the LTTE, the most prudent approach would be to involve Mrs. Kumaratunga as a stakeholder of the entire exercise. This will require from Mr. Wickremesinghe a great deal of effort to convince a few of his powerful Cabinet colleagues.

To return to the processes of re-alignment of political forces, inherent in it are trends peculiar to contemporary Sri Lankan politics. Mainstream Sinhalese political parties have not yet moved decisively away from the politics of narrow Sinhalese nationalism, although in power they may demonstrate some, limited capacity for pluralism and multi-ethnic accommodation. Indeed, these mainstream Sinhalese political parties continue to produce leaders and policy spokespersons who are quite comfortable with both extremes of the political discourse Sinhalese nationalism and accommodationist pluralism. The trouble with this type of duplex politics is that it has never enabled the Sinhalese ruling class to make a decisive move towards managing or resolving the most destabilising crisis with which the polity has been beset for decades. It goes against the grain of ruling class capacity to govern a modern and complex society in deep crisis.

Meanwhile, no one should presume that the Tamil secessionist nationalists who from time to time may seek accommodation with the Sinhalese polity are unaware of the narrowly pragmatic and obviously instrumentalist approach of the Sinhalese ruling elite towards the ethnic conflict. They are indeed mindful of the fact that the Sinhalese ruling elite is deeply divided on the question of dealing with their insurgency. This indeed has many implications for the forthcoming negotiation between the UNF Government and the LTTE.

Firstly, in dealing with a regime whose political future as a government remains uncertain due to intra-class and inter-party divisions in Colombo, the LTTE would be extremely cautious to maintain its military preparedness. As the LTTE might be quite aware of, in an atmosphere of political bickering in Colombo, a peace settlement with any Sinhalese government can only be something that is uncertain and contingent on processes extraneous to the negotiation exercise.

Secondly, while devising their strategies to extract as many concessions as possible from a politically weakened counterpart, the LTTE will also be quite conscious of the fact that any agreement with the UNF Government might run the risk of being totally turned down by the PA which has now been engaged in a project of returning to power. Although LTTE might, for tactical considerations, want to see the UNF-PA conflict goes on unabated, they should be aware of its long-term negative implications for a political settlement. If the LTTE, as its critics in Colombo assume, is merely manipulating the negotiation options to serve its military objectives, the present split within Colombo's ruling elite only further facilitates that path. September is, as all the signs indicate, is going to be a crucial month for Sri Lanka's political future. Events that will take shape during the first three weeks of the month will have a decisive bearing on Sri Lanka's capacity to grapple with the present stage of its crisis management task.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager