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| Wednesday, 24 March 2004 |
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Politics | |
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| Off the cuff The politics of recollection By the Monitor This morning on my way to work squeezed inside an overcrowded bus, I was forced to listen to campaign ads. Someone had been made to ask Ranil Wickremesinghe a question. "The Freedom Alliance is promising 30,000 jobs, what are your plans?" The Prime Minister gave what I thought was an intelligent answer. "I will create more jobs through economic growth." He has not yet learnt that growth-led development is old hat even among classical economists. At least Premadasa got it half-way right. He said, "Development with poverty alleviation". It seems few of our politicians understand that the only thing that necessitates poverty alleviation is poverty creation. This business of poverty creation, they do. It is always an unfinished business. The subtext of job-promising ads, therefore, is the following: we will make you poor through economic growth and then we will give you jobs at slave wages. That ad was followed by another, and more interesting, ad. The UNF reminded the people of the atrocities perpetrated by the JVP during the late eighties. These are ads, I told myself. The questions asked are easy. The statements are selective. The late eighties were made of blood and fire, some admittedly generated by the JVP. Someone should remind Ranil Wickremesinghe that the UNP was in power at the time and that the only thing that can match state terrorism is LTTE-terror. The late eighties belonged to the UNP. That party was in no uncertain terms the political butcher of the times. I was amused by the let's-remember-terror ploy. We are a people who have over many centuries learnt the fine art of treating all things, terror included, with equanimity. We forget fast. We forgive easily. This is why 88-89 is old hat for the electorate. It was old hat back in 1994. The hat has only grown older since then. The JVP secured 10 seats in 2000 and a year later had 16 MPs. This is not to say that anyone should disregard anyone's past, especially if it happens to be full of blood and carnage. But then we are talking about April 2, and all candidates and parties should realise that we don't vote people to power. We, typically vote people out of power. We remember, sure. Not old crimes. We remember most the most recent crime. This is almost an axiom in our polity. People will remember the UNP S. B. Dissanayake and not the PA S. B. Dissanayake. They will not remember Mahinda Wijesekera of 1994-2001. They will most definitely remember the 2001-2004 version of the man. The same goes for the ex-PA gentlemen. The exception that proves the rule would of course have to be Ronnie de Mel. He will get some votes because he has always entertained the electorate. The past is a weak factor in the equation, and Federica Jansz and the Sunday Leader ought to understand this. That is if they want the circulation of that paper to expand beyond the small circle of kepuwath kola folk. Not going to win any new votes. Sorry. No one has a stellar track record. No one can claim exclusive bragging rights. Not the UNF. Not the PA. Not the JVP. All they can do is pray that the voter will have a selective memory and that they will select out their mistakes and crimes. This is the edge that Freedom Alliance has over the UNF: the voter is less likely to have forgotten the UNF's crimes. It is as simple as that! No party has ever won an election. Other parties have lost. This is the bottom line. In an ugly game played by ugly people, why should it matter that one cuts one's face to spite one's nose, or the other way around? Ideology has already lost, for there is little to choose between the main players. In the long run, we forgive and forget. In the short, we take revenge. I think our political culture ought to be richer and more informed than these things indicate. The past should count. The past, meaning not just the crimes of the previous regime, but the long past. The future should count too. If all the pleasure we derive is the satisfaction of having backed the winning horse or having ousted an incompetent government, we don't deserve solutions. We deserve poverty. We deserve screwed up notions such as poverty alleviation. And of course screwed up governments. |
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