Elections and the tsunami

V.S. Sambandan

Tsunami relief has not emerged as a major, island-wide issue with the potential to sway the electorate. It now jostles for space with other local issues.

About 90 km south of Colombo, a smashed passenger train stands abandoned on a track in the coastal village of Peraliya, symbolising all that is post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Across the island, slim hope clashes with absolute dejection among the survivors.

For the victims, particularly the poor with no access to the levers of power, the past 10 months have been an unending and cruel cycle of hope and disappointment. Largely reconciled to their anguish, the tsunami-affected voters are now a weak voice in a marginalised constituency.

Among sections of the victims, despair over unmet expectations has translated into disgust over the November 17 Presidential Election. Rather than emerging as a major, island-wide issue with the potential to sway the electoral outcome, the post-tsunami Government response now jostles for space with other local issues.

Only along the battered coast is it still in focus. Guesstimates place the number of tsunami-affected voters outside the northern and eastern districts at about one lakh, fraction of the 13.32 million voters of Sri Lanka. The voters in this relatively small `tsunami constituency' have largely kept to their known party preferences. Island-wide, the topics of discussion are division of the country, rising prices, and job prospects.

Though the two main contenders Mahinda Rajapakse of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP) have addressed tsunami-reconstruction in their manifestos, their promises are yet to emerge as factors that can decide the outcome of the elections.

To a large extent this is but a reflection of the comparatively low priority given to development issues in Sri Lankan elections, historically fought on issues that evoke high emotion. Moreover, each of the five tsunami-affected provinces has a major issue - emotional, political or ethnic - that overrides post-tsunami Government performance when it comes to electoral decision-making.

Historically, Sri Lankan Presidents have won or lost, depending on the positions they have taken on major issues. Unlike the promise of ending economic autarky made by J.R. Jayewardene in 1982, or the strong rhetoric of sovereign assertion by R. Premadasa (1988) and the promise of peace by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (1994 and 1999), the tsunami is far removed from the majority of the Sri Lankan voters.

Among the undecided in the Southern belt, for instance, shortcomings over the Government's post-tsunami performance, are offset by the "southern identity" of Prime Minister Rajapakse, who hails from one of the three southern districts.

In the tsunami-affected areas of the eastern Muslim majority district, Amparai, the Prime Minister faces an anti-incumbency factor and the alliance between the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) and the UNP. Even there, the tsunami is not the single-largest issue.

Muslim concerns over their security in any solution to the decades-long separatist conflict over-ride everything else. Given the decades of distrust between the Muslims and the Tamils, the electoral outcome here would depend on how much the SLMC-UNP combine convinces the voters that Wickremesinghe's template for a solution would be the best bet for the Muslim-majority in Ampara.

In the other north-eastern districts of Jaffna, Trincomalee, and Batticaloa, the ethnic conflict clearly outweighs the concerns over tsunami reconstruction. The Tamils in these districts have voted according to the diktat either vocal or subtle of the LTTE.

The studied silence of the Tigers on the Presidential candidates makes it difficult to predict their electoral prospects. An additional factor is the turnout of Tamil voters living in the LTTE-controlled areas (some of which were devastated by the tsunami) who would have to cross over to the Government-controlled territory to cast their vote.

The turnout from the Northern and Eastern electoral districts would be a key factor to contend with. In addition to these local factors, there is the statistical reality that the number of tsunami-affected village divisions is less than 10 per cent of the tsunami-affected electoral districts.

The devastation, hence, is marginalised both in numbers and in geographic area. With most of the survivors retaining their pre-tsunami party loyalties, the impact of the post-tsunami Governmental activity on the uncommitted voter remains unclear.

Some sections, for instance, among the survivors near the site of the train disaster, feel that voting is a futile exercise. The voices of discord range from assertions that they would not vote at all or would make their votes invalid, to a sober afterthought that the candidate who helps them would win their vote.

Over the past 10 months little has changed for some of the survivors. Heightened expectations and broken promises are all they have. It is also obvious that not many are paying the same attention to the tsunami victims any more.

Immediately after the tsunami, Peraliya where the train with over 1,000 passengers was washed away was the focus of all attention. Today it is a forgotten patch. The islandwide election for the highest political office has meant that the focus has shifted away from even what little relief effort was going on.

The once self-contained and proud villagers have been reduced to penury.

There is a ray of hope in the form of a vibrant resilience. Those who have started rebuilding their lives do so with the substantial largesse from foreign donor organisations, local temple authorities or assistance from individuals. With the Government's role largely confined to providing cash and food relief or promising to meet long-term housing needs, there is also the realisation that nothing more can be expected in a hurry.

The committed voters, therefore, continues to view the post-tsunami work through their respective party lens. Supporters of the UNP assert that it is an issue big enough to ruin the prospects of Prime Minister Rajapakse. For those who have decided to vote Rajapakse, the post-tsunami operations are not a big issue.

In their own ways the manifestos of Rajapakse and Wickremesinghe reflect the larger economic thinking of the two leaders in their approaches to lead their countries out of the tsunami devastation. The left-of-centre Rajapakse's main promises are a special administrative unit for each district and a temporary social security scheme to provide relief until normality is restored.

Wickremesinghe, with his free-market orientation, sees a role for the Government more in coordinating the private and public sector operations that are in force, and taking steps to restore the devastated economy.

The one controversial issue in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami was a Government proposal to create a 100-metre buffer zone. However, this does not have the potential to emerge as a major factor to move the uncommitted voters in large numbers as the Government has already announced a rollback.

The choice before the undecided elector, hence, is between the Premier's tangible promises of handouts and a visible administrative structure and the Opposition Leader's longer-term path of economic sustenance and revival.

The distancing of the tsunami from the electoral decision-making process is also best understood against the backdrop of the splintered nature of the Sri Lankan polity. With every ethnic group divided along political lines, party considerations have always prevailed. One of Sri Lanka's major moments of truth was when the bitterly divided polity failed to come together as one in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami.

That the SLFP and the UNP share the loyalty of the Sinhala voters is a historical electoral reality. The consolidation of the Muslim vote under the SLMC has been seriously challenged since the demise of its founder, M.H.M Ashraff, five years ago. The cracking of the LTTE's monolith last year in the form of the revolt by the former eastern military commander, V. Muralitharan (`Col.' Karuna), has caused an uncertainty in the East, which will be under test during the Presidential poll.

This further relegates the tsunami as an election issue. The edgy electorate remains as deeply divided in its political affiliations as it was before the tsunami hit the island. The Peraliya wreckage, a reminder of the December 26 tsunami, now has an election poster of a smiling Prime Minister pasted on a broken carriage.

(The Hindu)