Internal intrigues

LOYALTY: I was asked the other day by a very senior diplomat as to why I had my knife into Ranil. He added that the question was not his idea, but he had been asked by someone of his acquaintance, and thought it appropriate to put the question.

This was slightly better than being accosted by one of Ranil's cousins, a year ago, and being told that I must be very happy that he had lost.

I could sympathize with the poor lady, whose horizons were limited by blood relationships in a manner that is the norm in the higher echelons of Colombo. But it struck me as rather sad that she had to assume a personal motivation for my assessments.

I thought I had given ample reason in my writings for the disillusionment that had gradually overtaken me despite having so optimistically having voted for him in the election four years earlier.

I would not have returned to this topic, which is not a particularly pleasant one, were it not that soon after the newspapers reported a surprising statement by Karu Jayasuriya, the epitome hitherto of restrained loyalty to his party leadership.

Though I can respect his loyalty to his party, I had long thought it strange that he confused such loyalty with total acquiescence in the desires of his leader. Doubtless this owes something to the UNP's authoritarian constitution, but I felt that, given his undoubted patriotism and decency, he should long ago have at least questioned the disastrous journey on which Ranil had been taking both the country and the party.

For Karu to have spoken out, there must have been a grave provocation. He makes clear one aspect of this when he refers to newspaper reports that claimed his motivation for promoting a UNP-SLFP understanding was to secure ministerial positions.

Clearly he refers here to the Sunday Leader which, apart from references to a desire for portfolios, talked about a secret agenda 'to create a split within the UNP...the final outcome being the ouster of Wickremesinghe as leader of the UNP and the opposition. The agenda was initially known by UNP Deputy Leader Karu Jayasuriya and G. L. Pieris.'

Interestingly enough the Sunday Times, whose editor is much more balanced in his much more longstanding affection for Ranil, suggests a distinction between Karu and GL though referring to 'a section within the UNP that was clamouring for Ministerial posts'.

Reading these two analyses, I was reminded of newspaper reports at a time when it first became clear that Ranil's government was a hotbed of cronyism and corruption. Both the Leader and the Times exposed many deals, shattering the illusion I had had that both Marapana and Choksy were safe pairs of hands. But, unlike most of my acquaintance, who had voted for Ranil, and now bleated about how badly he was being let down, I began to realise that all was not as it seemed.

For, while I could accept, though not approving of it, the argument, advanced even by his wife, who is certainly no friend of the corrupt, that the poor man could not alienate politicians who brought in votes, such an argument clearly did not apply to Choksy and Marapana, let alone the bureaucrats with unsavoury reputations to whom Ranil had given such prominence and such power. Clearly there was some sort of an agenda here, and it made sense to apply one's little grey cells to figuring it out.

Light dawned when the Editor of the certainly a fan of the regime, said quite candidly that there were only three high profile members of the Government against whom there were no plausible allegations of corruption. These were Ranil himself, Karu and Karunasena Kodituwakku. And when poor Kodituwakku lost I realized that these were three people who did not need enormous amounts of money for the elections that they had to fight.

In the case of the last two it is because they did not spend massive amounts on posters. That is why the former lost the next election, and it is a tribute to the latter that he has done so well without recourse to the adulatory posters that everyone else requires.

Including Ranil. Indeed, as Irvine Weerakkody has pointed out, as indeed the UNP's own committee of inquiry headed by NGP Panditharatne indicated, the UNP had relied far too much on playing up its leader, not only in the Presidential election, but in Parliamentary elections.

The preposterous posters of his beautiful face, the grotesque CD with viridu all about his virtues, the breathless advertisements highlighting his name, were all part of a strategy that must have been appallingly expensive.

But he did not have to pay, and so he did not have to make money for himself, the way his hapless peers did, about whom his own coteries are so scathing. Rather, it was through party funds that these markedly personal campaigns were run.

But, in Sri Lanka, the way contributions to party funds are obtained is not considered a fault of the party, or its decision makers - and so, even in the Times, it was only Choksy who got criticised for his wonderful amnesty to so many financial supporters of the party.

Meanwhile the Leader had launched a blistering attack on Karu too. I don't suppose many people remember now the allegations back in 2003 of corruption in the Ministry of Energy. If they do, they would have assumed the allegations were true, and Karu was guilty.

But once you realise that there is always a particular agenda in the criticisms made by the Leader, it does not take you very long to work out that this was part of a more sustained campaign to do him down.

After all, in the Wickremesinghe coterie his name was mud, and it was said he could not be trusted. Fortunately for them Gamini Athukorale was dead, so the challenge of 2001 was unlikely to be repeated - but there was no harm in making doubly sure.

Perhaps at long last Karu has understood this too. Some of his statement suggests as much. But in the long run, since he is not ambitious enough to fight in the manner his opponents are used to, he will I suspect, be done down.

Ranil's strategy for doing this became clear enough with the attack on Karu that was launched by Vajira Abeywardene, of Southern Highway fame. Sadly, unless the more sensible people in the UNP rally round, and rally round forcefully, once again the party will be left to Ranil and his groupies.