People’s gratitude and ‘Suba Anagathayak’

‘I am fortunate to be the leader of a country of fathers, mothers, and children who know the value of gratitude.’ That is how President Rajapaksa referred to the new mandate he received, during the course of his independent day speech. The question however is: was this statement a courtesy paid by the President to the nation for voting him to power or did the President fervently believe that the people voted him because they were nothing but paragons of gratuitous virtue?

Well, gratitude is a virtue but it is a virtue that we generally identify towards our parents. We consider it our duty to look after our parents, as a mark of gratitude for what we owe them. But then our parents are part of our past and it is the children that is our future and we do not call what we do for our children as ‘gratitude’. Hence gratitude becomes a ‘duty’ for our past and it has little to do with our children which are our future ‘investment’. Now the question becomes more simple; did people vote for the President as a ‘duty’ or did they vote for him as an ‘investment’?

Different people in different countries attach different value to their franchise depending on their level of literacy and electoral sophistication. ‘In India’, they say that, ‘you do not cast your vote but you vote your caste’. Similarly in Sri Lanka we have a set of people who think that the vote is part of their genealogy and hence that they should be voting for the same political party irrespective of how that party performs. Such people effectively vote for their ancestors who are dead and gone rather than for their progeny that is living.

But an intelligent voter would always choose between the issue that could the nation and exercise the franchise in the best interest of the nation. It is those voters who are called the ‘floating vote’ and hence become the deciding factor at every election. Therefore now we come to the point, and that is; that the intelligent voter, vote for the future and not for the past and hence his vote is more an ‘investment’ than a ‘duty’.

In any case in this commercialized world where materialism instead of virtues dictate people’s behaviour, finding people who attach values for virtues like gratitude are rare. Even when people have to be grateful, they will be grateful, not for what you have already done for them but for what they think they are capable of getting from you in the future.

Having thus reasoned out the voter behaviour, are we to then think that President Rajapaksa was entertaining delusions when he complimented the people for being grateful? Well, the answer is ‘no’ and the President knew of the voters pulse before you and I and that is why despite his enviable record for the past four years, he chose ‘Subha Anagathyak’ (Bright future)as his main campaign theme. Therefore the President, though he paid this compliment of ‘a grateful nation’ as a matter of courtesy, I am sure is not taking people for granted for their gratitude.

This argument that gratitude was not the criteria of peoples vote at the January poll becomes all the more cogent when we see the fate that befell Fonseka who claimed the sole credit for the war victory. The Opposition relied so heavily on this ‘people’s gratitude factor’ and this was evident in the first place, when they elected to adopt Sarath Fonseka as the joint Opposition candidate. The idea was to cause a split in this ‘gratitude vote’ which they thought President Rajapaksa otherwise would poll en masse.

In addition the Opposition tried to market Fonseka’s war heroism so stridently and sometimes emotionally by stating that ‘Fonseka put his life on line for the country gathering splintered parts of his own physique with his bare hands after the suicide attempt on his life’. Hence if the vote is to be taken as ‘Thank you for the war victory’, Fonseka may have appealed more to the average voter than Rajapaksa. But then why did people, especially the Sinhala people, reject Fonseka so overwhelmingly?

Although Fonseka entered politics as a war hero to split the Sinhala nationalist vote he made the fundamental mistake of making obvious, his political dependence on the very forces that worked against the war. What Fonseka should have done was to charter a middle course of being an individual acceptable to all parties while keeping the block opposition vote of the UNP and the JVP in a reserve. But instead Fonseka became more UNP than Ranil Wickremesinghe himself.

His attempt to white wash ‘Chandrika and other Presidents’ for their war efforts also did not go well with the public because the public knew what happened during the 34 years of war in Sri Lanka.

The more Fonseka talked of war the more it became apparent that his knowledge of the national and international forces that thrusted war on us, was abysmal. Finally Fonseka brought his own image down to the same egocentric macho level of Prabhakaran.

The finality however was the understanding he reached with the ITAK (TNA) and Sambanthan’s whole hearted campaign drive in his favour. Why should Sambanthan request the Tamils to vote for the very man who killed Prabhakaran and displaced the Tamils unless he has reached a new understanding with Fonseka? Such questions influenced the Sinhala vote and hence it became plain that Fonseka would compromise the national security to lure the minority vote. With that Fonseka lost even the semblance of respect Sinhala people had for him and instead they entertained forebodings of separatism again.

Further Fonseka’s election manifesto was a scrap of paper where nothing comprehensive was projected. His promises on salary increases and houses for everybody only added more fickleness to his campaign.

His advocacy on discipline, good governance and anti corruption appeared to be borne, more out of the need to ‘settle scores’ than of national necessity. To add to all that his speeches became more and more ‘Un-Presidential’. Hence in every way the Anagathey (future) Fonseka projected fell short of ‘Suba Anagathayak’ of the President.

Therefore in the final analysis the people voted for the President in January 2010 for a better future with peace than for the heroism of the war ravaged past. Let the Government now harness all our resources in working towards that goal.