The wit of Ravi Karunanayake

The clown Canio of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci is anything but funny. By the time opera-goers get to the tenor’s aria ‘Vesti la guibba’ (‘Put on the costume’), they generally have tears streaming down their faces - unless of course they are British, in which case they just grimace.

The British-Latvian circus performer Nicolai Poliakoff’s creation, Coco the clown on the other hand, was nothing if not funny. Although on the receiving end of often violent pranks, Coco was certainly not a tragic clown.

Hence, for Coco the Clown to call the pagliaccio funny would be ridiculous. However, National Organizer of the United National Party and Colombo District parliamentarian Ravi Karunanayake managed something quite similar last week.

In the course of a speech he said that the governing party, the United People’s Freedom Alliance, is ‘afraid’ of the UNP, afraid that it will be beaten at the hustings.

Readers will agree that this statement is rather strange, given that the UNP has just suffered one of its worst defeats at the hands of the UPFA at the recent Local Government elections.

Pressure groups

For the governing party to be ‘afraid’ of being beaten in this penultimate round (the Mullaitivu district Local Government polls are yet to come) of elections to local authorities must be something akin to a joke at this stage. Last Wednesday, Ravi showed his superb mastery of his comic medium. He addressed a gathering at the UNP HQ, Sirikotha, on the occasion of its 65th anniversary. He said that winning or losing elections was not the criterion for the success of the party.

Marxist parties often contest elections, using it as a platform to promote a revolutionary programme. They measure their success by the radicalism they inculcate in others. Societies and pressure groups such as the Fabians attempt to push society towards reform.

The UNP is patently not Marxist. It, palpably, does not attempt to reform society. It was formed just prior to independence in order to contest the elections. So clearly Ravi is indulging himself in his harmless, unthreatening and entertaining little vice.

Karunanayake demonstrated his impish sense of humour on another occasion recently. Asked by a journalist, Mandana Ismail Abeywickrema, whether it mattered any more whether the UNP leader was Ranil Wickremasinghe or Sajith Premadasa or Karu Jayasuriya, he said:

UNP election defeats

‘If you are getting a replacement, the next person should be far better than anyone. It could be all three of them and even people like us. We are also part and parcel of the UNP. Nobody can disregard that.’

However, he is clearly not a megalomaniac. ‘It would be naive to overestimate ourselves,’ he said, when asked by the same journalist if he considered himself up to the job, ‘when we know what we are up against.’

An obvious realist, he said he thought that the UNP requires a strong collective leadership to face the ‘politically streetwise’ President Mahinda Rajapaksa. A backhanded compliment to add to humour - he is obviously more fearful of the President than vice versa.

The clowning around didn’t stop there. When asked about the string of UNP election defeats, he replied that ‘the SLFP would have lost 50 elections before coming into power’.

‘Would have’ is the appropriate, operative phrase here. As every schoolchild knows, elections were few and far between in 17 years of UNP rule. The SLFP ‘would have lost’ 50 elections - had they been held!

Vote rigging

And even the freeness and fairness of the ones that did take place was questioned. There were allegations of vote rigging, of ballot-box stuffing and of impersonation on a grand scale.

After all, in 1982 the SLFP candidate for President, Hector Kobbekaduwa, went to the polling booth only to find his own ballot had been cast for him. Peter Keuneman, the long-serving, famous Communist former MP for Colombo Central, had the same experience.

The infamous referendum of 1982 was questioned by none other than the Commissioner of Elections himself. A record for Sri Lanka.

It is of course possible that Ravi’s brave words about the UPFA’s fear were meant to bolster confidence in his party’s chances in the forthcoming Local Government elections. They may have been intended to prove his loyalty to and faith in his party.

For all is not well between the UNP in Colombo and Ravi.

He has been accused of deleting the names of loyalists of Sajith Premadasa, opposition leader to the Opposition Leader, from the UNP list for the Colombo Municipal elections.

Obscure names like Ariyaratna Santiago, Ramya Rajapaksa and Wilfred Dias are being bandied about as having been included or excluded from the list.

Or perhaps Karunanayake is only living up to the pagliaccio’s words in the aria ‘Vesti la giubba’:

‘... laugh, clown, so the crowd will cheer!.
Turn your distress and tears into jest,
your pain and sobbing into a funny face’