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| Saturday, 17 July 2004 |
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There are so many psephologists today busy trying making statistical projections attempting to prove to the people that the UNP did not lose at the provincial council elections. They range from the UNP's media spokesman Ravindra Randeniya, to leader writers in some newspapers who have become overnight statisticians of the political kind. Trickery in political statistics is much sought after by the UNP, rapidly showing dangerous signs of a constriction of the throat, making it unable to swallow reality, served with no garnishing or special culinary decoration. Unable to swallow the reality of having lost at all seven provincial councils, including the Central Provincial Council which it controlled with an understanding with the CWC, the UNP and its cohorts of pseudo statisticians are making every effort to show that the UPFA did not get the mandate it claims. It is known that statistics can be used to make a shapely woman seem like a broomstick or vice-versa, and the UNP is now busy trying to do just that. It is seeking to fool the people with statistics, when the reality of defeat keeps staring it in the face. What must be told to all these political and editorial statisticians is that in the ultimate analysis elections are all about winning them, in a free and fair manner. The UNP contested all six provincial councils, even after the defeat at Wayamba, in the hope of winning at least some of them, and definitely retaining its hold over the Central Provincial Council. Had such a thing happened, it has all the right to talk of the people being already disappointed with the performance of the UPFA government. But what happened was the reverse. Not only did the UPFA do a white wash of the UNP in all six districts that polled on July 10, it even won over the Central Provincial Council convincingly, not even leaving room for the UNP - CWC to bargaining there. The victory was all the more remarkable by the UNP winning only the Nuwara Eliya District and that too by a very narrow margin, despite all the so-called election wizardry of S. B. Dissanayake. What is worse for the UNP all polls observers were emphatic that this was a free and fair poll, with the least violations of polls law. The low poll Many interpretations are given of the low turnout of voters at these elections. According to UNP's apologists this was a clear case of dissatisfaction with the performance of the UPFA government so far. However, those labouring in the UNP's statistical distortion unit, ably backed by some editorialists in the private media, do not produce evidence from any opinion polls conducted among voters of the reason for their not casting their votes, whether it was dissatisfaction with the Government's performance or any other. In this day and age of opinion polls, with companies specializing in it operating here, the UNP and its friendly media stands exposed when it fails to give us the results of any such poll. We are expected to take the word of the UNP's pundits of statistical distortion that the voters did so because of dissatisfaction with the Government. How does the UNP know this to be a fact? If there is such public dissatisfaction with the Government, while still not having a simple majority in Parliament, why was the UNP unable to get its own supporters in large numbers, and also the disgruntled supporters of the UPFA if any, to the polling stations, and teach the UPFA a lesson by defeating it at in least some of the Provincial Councils, if not all? The biggest reality the UNP leadership finds so difficult to swallow and digest is that so many of their own supporters just did not bother to turn up even to show their opposition to the UPFA. Although not seeking to stray into the field of psephology myself, it is a simple fact of observation that polling at PC elections has been generally low in this country. It can never be compared with polling at the General Election, where the people vote for a possible retention or change of government. The highest polling at a PC election was in the Southern PC election in 1994, which began the tide that swept the UNP out of power after 17 years. No PC poll held after that had such a high voter turnout. Similarly, the argument that the UNP's pseudo statistical pundits keep hiding is that there could not have been such an interest in teaching a political lesson to the present government so soon after it was elected, even among UNPers. Similarly, a large number of UPFA supporters believed that the bulk of the people would remain with them at least for the first year of the new government and did not bother to go to the polls in the large numbers they did on April 2, this year, when they defeated the UNP by a majority of over 700,000 votes. One need not go into heavy statistical analyses to understand this simple political reality. |
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