Shades of authoritarianism to the fore in UNP

POLITICS: The recent kerfuffles in the SLFP have been so interesting, for observers of politics, that relatively less attention has been paid to developments within the UNP. This is not however surprising, given that the general picture presented is that turmoil within the UNP has ceased with the departure of those who had tried to rock the boat.

The traditional supporters of the UNP then are delighted, while it seems that those who support the government are not at all concerned about this. After all the SLFP itself has never really been interested in the internal workings of the UNP.

Indeed it only began to pick off people from within the UNP as recently as 2000, when there was a fairly substantial exodus, of whom the most prominent today is Sarath Amunugama.

Its earlier venture into the field, in 1991 when the UNP split spectacularly, was in fact initiated by UNP dissidents. These maintained their own independent identity through the DUNF, even though they broke conclusively with the UNP and acknowledged Mrs Bandaranaike as the potential head of any alternative government.

Crossovers and intra-party tensions in the past

The approach of the UNP had been very different from the start, perhaps understandably given that the SLFP had been set up by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike when he and a few others broke away from the UNP in 1951. Winning them back one by one then, at least those who had initially been in the UNP, may have seemed always on the cards.

So within a few years the UNP had managed to attract back Bandaranaike’s principal lieutenant, Bernard Aluwihare, which is why there was such trauma in the SLFP about the succession when SWRD was assassinated.

CP de Silva, the deputy at the time, passed over once in favour of Dahanayake, who was doubtless for caste reasons hastily and disastrously made Prime Minister, led the party at the March 1960 election but he was then persuaded to yield to Mrs Bandaranaike after the SLFP failed to win that election.

So, though C. P. de Silva served faithfully as her deputy for four years, after she triumphed in the July 1960 election, it was easy for the UNP to entice him to cross over in 1964 when the accession of Marxists made him feel that the original Bandaranaike moderation had been superseded.

He was not the only one, which was how her government fell prematurely, as Chandrika’s government fell in 2001. In both instances financial inducements played a large part, though in both instances too there were those like de Silva himself who genuinely felt the SLFP was being led astray.

In the late seventies, despite the sad community of interests between the Bandaranaike led opposition and the UNP’s Cyril Mathew wing over opposition to Dudley Senanayake’s District Councils Bill, the SLFP made no attempt to take Mathew into its ranks even after dudley Senanayake removed him from the Secretaryship of the UNP.

In the seventies however the UNP continued to take over SLFP dissidents, the most prominent being Ronnie de Mel.

With the new constitution J R Jayewardene stopped crossovers in principle, though he instituted provisions to allow those in the opposition to cross over to his side, a provision Ranil Wickremesinghe tried to reintroduce in 2002. But by the eighties indeed the strategic brilliance of the UNP leader had led to a new game, which was to ensure turmoil within the opposition.

The account of how JR promoted dissension in the SLFP, most obviously by sending Mrs Bandaranaike a recording of Maithripala Senanayake’s wife talking of the need for her husband to take over the leadership of the party after Mrs Bandaranaike’s Civic Rights had been removed, made fascinating reading in the 1983 equivalent of today’s newspaper gossip columns.

Anura Bandaranaike, then as now, played a prominent role in the dispute, and was part of Senanayake’s rival group, while Vijaya and his wife Chandrika Kumaratunga came to the fore in Mrs Bandaranaike’s faction and were thus able to ensure that the left-leaning Hector Kobbekaduwa became the party’s candidate for the 1982 Presidential Election.

With that faction being formally recognised, Anura Bandaranaike came back into the fold, albeit too late to offer himself as the presidential candidate, though that may have been what he had hoped for and what his mother would have liked.

Unfortunately Mrs Bandaranaike was not so ready to forgive Senanayake, who found himself out in the cold and therefore ended up actually supporting the government in the 1982 referendum to extend the term of parliament until 1989.

JR meanwhile could claim that the SLFP had been taken over by Naxalites, as he characterised Vijaya Kumaratunga, and clap him in jail. Anura Bandaranaike obligingly went abroad, so that campaigning during the referendum became as one-sided as the actual conduct of the referendum with its massive stuffing of ballot boxes.

An opposition of course cannot so readily play this game, of creating turmoil within its opponents, so when Chandrika Kumaratunga was in power in 2001, Ranil Wickremesinghe happily accepted S B Dissanayake and the rest when they crossed over.

As a sop to their image, he even adopted the concept of a United National Front, rather than the UNP, which allowed them some semblance of independence in the election that followed, which propelled him to power.

The SLFP meanwhile, having taken Amunugama in 2000 in pursuit of constitutional reforms, forgot about potential recruits from the UNP and moved into alliance with the JVP, informal in 2001 and formal in 2004, which facilitated its resuming full control of the government after the 2004 election.

Interestingly, without prejudice to his election manifesto, Mahinda Rajapaksa took in a few crossovers from the UNP almost as soon as he became President. Both Rambukwelle and Samarasinghe seem to have acquitted themselves well in office, and made it even clearer that President Rajapaksa was not the communist racist controlled by the JVP and the JHU, which he was painted as by the traditional supporters of the UNP and their foreign friends.

But such a characterisation, based not on rationality, but on what Shakespeare described as a woman’s reason (I think him so because I think him so), cannot be challenged by evidence or argument.

It will continue to the end of time, even though the JVP has now abandoned the government, though the JHU has moderated its calls for the abrogation of the ceasefire, and though those who negotiated with the Tigers on behalf of Ranil Wickremesinghe are now part of the Rajapaksa team.

These last, Prof Pieris and Moragoda, certainly add intellectual and international weight to the government, whatever their individual shortcomings.

However, forgetting the high praise bestowed on them in the past, they are now characterised by those who deplore the crossovers as variously useless theoreticians, the worst of the worst, desperate for portfolios because they are too old to obtain them when the UNP returns to power and troublemakers of whom the party is well rid.

This last description is particularly interesting in the light of the revelation that the witch hunt still continues. Recent reports indicate that both Sajith Premadasa and S B Dissanayake, clearly the only characters still left in the UNP who still have a substantial independent national following, have been heavily criticised at recent meetings of the existing UNP hierarchy.

Indeed the account of what was described approvingly as the cutting down to size of Premadasa asserted directly that he was an agent of the President who was supposed to continue to stir up trouble within the UNP.

Dissanayake meanwhile was accused of originating the revolt in the party, and had to swear fealty, rather like the poet Ysinno in Lakdasa Wikramasinha’s devastating critique of feudalism, before he was once more considered kosher.

But, all told, reports of the problems within the UNP have made instructive reading for those who can remember previous reports, which however our political columnists in general assume no one can do. A wonderful example of this is provided by the accounts of Karu Jayasuriya’s removal from the Deputy Leadership of the Party, which after he crossed over was characterised as entirely his own fault.

One account that would ordinarily have been thought relatively objective claimed that he had taken himself out of the running by not being present at the party convention. A few weeks earlier however the claim in several reports was that Karu Jayasuriya could not be appointed Deputy Leader because there was no such position in the UNP constitution.

Some reports then claimed that Wickremesinghe had specially created the position for Jayasuriya, who was a political neophyte graciously promoted by Wickremesinghe and, though such irregularities were acceptable in the past, they were now no longer proper.

The UNP Constitution

Characteristically, no political columnist seemed to have looked at the UNP constitution, nor was its evolution discussed in terms of the actual history of the party, and its National Leader.

Now having managed to obtain a copy of the document, initiated by Gamini Athukorale (though I gather it has been amended since, to accommodate Rukman Senanayake and Tissa Attanayake, the new cutting edge of the party), I can understand why no newspaper committed to the UNP thinks of giving any prominence to it whatsoever.

The document is quite preposterous, based on the sort of authoritarian concepts that would be suitable in countries that still revere Great Leaders, such as North Korea. Earlier I had assumed that that sort of approach was characteristic only of Prabhakaran in Sri Lanka, and I said as much when I described the document called ‘Structure of Tamil Eelam Judicial Administration’, which begins with the claim that ‘It functions on the basis of the direct approval of Prabhakaran, the National Leader.’ and adds ‘All laws are made with his approval.’

Now however, having seen the UNP Constitution I can understand the cosy relationship that was built up between Prabhakaran and Wickremesinghe. Unlike in the days of D S Senanayake and his successors as UNP leader, Wickremesinghe is now the leader for life of the UNP, in terms of a change he introduced in 1995.

There is only a single reference in the entire Constitution to the manner in which the ‘National Leader’ of the UNP emerges, and that is in Section 8.1 which provides that, when there is a vacancy, the National Executive Committee selects the National Leader. Alternately, that power can be delegated to the working committee by a proposal ratified by the Executive Committee.

So, clearly, the National Leader in office at the time the Constitution became operative is therefore as long as he wants.

And that National Leader controls all other positions, in that he either appoints directly or must nominate for ratification - or else selection is either by the Working Committee that he nominates absolutely as he wishes, or else by bodies such as nomination boards that are appointed by that working committee.

A more centralised authoritarianism could not have been envisaged even by the Dear Leader Kim Il Sung.

So, as far as the position of Deputy Leader goes, the National Leader must make a nomination each year, which the Annual Party Congress must ratify. Wickremesinghe however,failed to make a nomination this year, obviously because he was angry with Jayasuriya but did not have the gumption to promote anyone else.

And he could be sure that no political commentator would draw attention to his breach of his own constitution. Instead, after the initial claim that there was no such position, which is palpably false, the myth has now crystallised that it is all Jayasuriya’s fault for not attending the Convention, and that the Dear Leader was waiting to nominate him had he turned up.

And there is more of this sort. After the barrage of propaganda, many people in Colombo, if nowhere else, will claim that the Dear Leader’s initial appointment of Jayasuriya as Deputy Leader was an act of kindness to a political neophyte. However, the fact is that the appointment was made after he had triumphed at the General Election of 2000, with a massive vote even though he had been moved to Gampaha.

Before 2000 he had in fact been Chairman of the Party, appointed to that position in 1995 as successor to A C S Hameed, another party stalwart who had become disgusted with Wickremesinghe by that stage. During those five years there was no Deputy Leader, nor an Assistant Leader, only a Chairman (Karu Jayasuriya) and a General Secretary (Gamini Athukorale).

It was probably because he felt threatened by two such able politicians that, in 2000, Wickremesinghe created the posts of Deputy and Assistant Leader for them, and gave the two established positions to acolytes without independent political standing, Charitha Ratwatte the Chairmanship and I believe the now long forgotten Senerath Kapukotuwa the Secretaryship.

It was then doubtless, on the argument that these two functionaries should be free of representative obligations, that the Constitution specified that they should not be members of Parliament. The real reason clearly was to remove Jayasuriya and Athukorale from the positions.

That having been achieved, the Dear Leader has once more gone into reverse gear, and appointed two members of Parliament, the obliging Rukman Senanayake and the even more obliging Attanayake, to these posts.

Meanwhile, entertainingly, the Constitution specifies that the Chairman and the Deputy Leader and the Assistant Leader would have their functions decided on by the National Leader, and that they should always act after consultation with the National Leader.

Despite such safeguards I suspect increasing paranoia will prevent these last two positions being filled, at least not until the current posse of acolytes have proved themselves even more obliging and/or more royal than Ratwatte or Kapukotuwa or Malik Samarawickrema.