Leopard’s spots and Mr Hyde?

Martin Luther King, in his famous speech from the Lincoln memorial said: ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal”... Let Freedom ring!’

These are noble sentiments indeed. His ‘I have a dream’ speech propelled King to the top of the world's list of orators, to the lofty heights occupied by such great speakers as Abraham Lincoln, Gamel Abdel Nasser, George Jacques Danton, Leon Trotsky and Mahatma Gandhi.

It also marked King as a great statesman - one who could hold his head tall among the great national leaders of the world. It was in recognition of King's role in history that the US instituted a national holiday in his honour.

Back in this emerald isle, this other Eden, we find another speaking about his dream: none other than Deshabandu Karu Jayasuriya. His dream, it turns out, is to form a United National Party government.

Mahatma Gandhi

Martin Luther King

Gamel Abdel Nasser

Since he had already launched his campaign to become leader of the UNP, one should probably be correct in deducing logically that his dream includes himself as head of the new dream government. He dreams of a kingdom, with himself as king.

UNP politicians

‘Regime change’ is hardly the dream of which are made great statesmen. But it does make for great UNP politicians. Whereas the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the other parties to its Left gained their life's blood from popular support, the strength of the UNP has always been the big money backing it.

Ranil's failure to take effective power means that the UNP is losing its financial patronage. After all, its traditional backers have been good businessmen. They invest their money in politics to get good returns. And investing in Ranil Wickremesinghe's UNP appears very much to be a case of throwing good money after bad.

For the supporters of the SLFP and the Left, getting their parties into office has always been a means to an end - to bolster popular sovereignty and to achieve greater social justice and equity. For the UNP, on the other hand, getting power has been an end in itself. Power is its raison d'etre.

So Karu is carefully positioning himself as the champion of UNP victory. He probably draws his inspiration from JR Jayewardene, who apparently dragged the landslide victory of 1977 out of the party's massive defeat in 1970.

Of course, JR's UNP was aided very much by the fact that the SLFP-led United Front government had instituted a development programme which had never been carried out successfully by a democratically accountable government.

Modern history

Only part of that programme had been socialist: the part which achieved the greatest level of equality in Sri Lanka's modern history. Its economic growth programme - the part which caused hardship - was solidly capitalist, based on the same principles of industry-led development as propelled South Korea and Taiwan to the status of developed economies. If anything, the conditions in those two ‘Asian Tigers’ were even harsher than in Sri Lanka. Anecdotes suggest that large swathes of their populations survived on little more than tree bark broth for extended periods; whereas our rice ration ensured that nobody went short of their essential dietary staple.

The secret of JR's success was his appeal to the people on two levels: to the affluent middle classes who had money but nothing to spend it on with promises of more goodies; and to the poor with his promise of ‘eta ata’ (eight free pounds of cereal - which most people assumed was eight seers/kilograms).

JR's very effective campaign of 1973-77 was devised in accordance with his ‘The UNP in Opposition, 1970'. He recognised that the people saw the UNP as the party of the ‘haves, the affluent, and the employers’, while the United Front was perceived as that of the ‘have nots, the needy, and the unemployed'.

Human rights abuses

He asserted the need to change the UNP's image and built up his almost limitlessly-funded propaganda machine around the slogan of a ‘Dharmishta’ (just and righteous) society. The reality, of course proved to be very different.

The first (JR-led) period of the UNP's 17-year-long misrule began with a reign of terror against the SLFP and the Left, went through a period of absolute impunity in which it did very much as it pleased, and ended up with two full-blown insurrections on its hands.

The next, shorter period saw the gross human rights abuses of the Premadasa regime, accompanied by the crassest personality cult ever seen in this country - with the vastly overblown statistics of a Hitler or a Stalin. The only really impressive statistic, that of human deaths through violence, was ignored.

What JR had done, with the able assistance of Ranasinghe Premadasa, was to transform the UNP from the bourgeois but democratically inclined party into a fascistic death machine. Society was transformed from one in which compassion and equity were valued to an unrighteous one in which only money and power did.

The UNP under Ranil Wickremesinghe has never acknowledged its sins, not asked forgiveness for the terror campaigns, the bicycle chains, the pogroms, the torture chambers or the disappearances. We have not heard Karu disassociating himself from the UNP's past crimes.

The brief return of the UNP to power in 2002 saw national assets hived off, the country's integrity injured; it used the blackmail of street violence to grab the defence ministry, only in order to oversee the dismantling of national security.

The SLFP has changed its position from one of total self-reliance to compromise with the open economy, albeit with its core values of national sovereignty and social equity in place.

The important question before the people is whether the UNP leopard has in fact changed its spots, or whether the only difference between its Dr Jekyll and its Mr Hyde is Karu's rhetoric.