by Rajan Philips

There is nothing even remotely common between the current circumstances of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka and Donald Trump in the United States of America. In fact, Gotabaya Rajapaksa is not even in Sri Lanka. He has been flying from country to country in search of safer pastures before facing the inevitability of returning home, subject to confirmation by his successor President Ranil Wickremesinghe that the time is opportune for the ultimate return of a runaway president.

The latest news, however, is that Mr. Rajapaksa is planning on returning to Sri Lanka and wait there until he gets a Green Card visa to the US based on his wife’s American citizenship. If that is the plan and all goes well, Mr. Rajapaksa will be in the US soon enough to watch live the unfolding political soap opera invloving Trump. For Sri Lanka and President Wickremesinghe, the sudden decision by Gotabaya Rajapaksa to return to Sri Lanka as early as next week (August 25) and stay there until he gets his US Green Card will create complications and even trigger new waves of protests.

Trump, on the other hand, is dug deep in American politics, and is belligerently urging his supporters to fight on his behalf against the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation who have taken the unprecedented step of searching Trump’s Florida residence and retreiving classified government and intelligence documents. Trump is known to have taken them with him while leaving the White House in violation of the law and well established traditions. He is now facing potential indictments for violating the US Espionage Act, criminal handling of government documents, and obstruction of justice.

What might be common between Trump and Rajapaksa is that neither held any elected office before being elected as president. In fact, when Trump became US President after unexpectedly winning the 2016 presidential election, Gotabaya Rajapaksa made it known in Sri Lanka that he was making a study of the Trump victory as an example how someone from outside politics could win the support of the people to get elected to political office. Trump was defeated after one term and doesn’t want to leave politics now. Gota was forced to resign after half a term and has no more appetite for politics.

If Gota is a fugitive on the run, Trump is a bully bent on bending the law according to his whim. Gota’s fears are as much over the risk of legal punishments at home and abroad, as much as they are about the people’s wrath. Gota ran away from the people, but Trump is stoking populist resentment against the deep state to get himself out of legal trouble. He is exploiting America’s cultural divisions that have been crystallizing through the last decades of the twentieth century to upend the American political system. He will do everything possible to become president again and pardon himself in perpetuity.

Trumpian Onslaught

America is at war with itself over its own culture and there is no immediate end in sight, at least not before the baby boomers, who came of political age in the sixties and seventies and who have been the main exponents of the current culture war, are all dead and gone. The culture war is over attributes and attitudes on everything ranging from race, religion, voting rights, immigration, guns and abortion. Even the American institutions are caught in this war, and nothing exemplifies the deep divisions in society more than the US Supreme Court. The US economy, however, is still strong, resourceful and diverse enough to survive the current recessionary phase in the global economy, and to subsidize the culture war.

The Sri Lankan situation is entirely different. Ever since independence, Sri Lanka’s political crises have been dampening its economic potential. Now, for the first time, an unprecedented economic crisis is threatening to overhaul the political order. Unlike in the US, the people in Sri Lanka are not divided into pro-Rajapaksa and anti-Rajapaksa camps. Everyone wanted and want the Rajapaksas out. The economic havoc that the Rajapaksa regimes cumulatively created would seem to have provided a new basis for people to overcome their habitual ethno-political differences and achieve an overarching unity against the entire political establishment. To wit, the emergence of Aragalaya and the rhetoric for sacking the whole 225 lot in parliament.

The political questions are also different. In the US, the question is whether the American political system and its institutions can survive the Trumpian onslaught, whether or not Trump is indicted and even punished for his manifest political crimes and violations of the constitution. Last week, the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, a highly respected jurist who would have been a Supreme Court Judge now but for the machinations of Senate Republicans who thwarted his nomination in 2016, personally authorized the application for warrant (which was approved by a Judge) and the eventual search by FBI of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club-residence in Florida.

The FBI operation created a political furor and although Trump is accusing the Attorney General and the Department of Justice of conducting a witch hunt against him at the behest of President Biden and the Democrats, the truth is just the opposite. It was Trump who throughout his four years in office wanted successive Attorney Generals, the DOJ and the FBI to do his political bidding. He was rebuffed by Attorney Generals appointed by him.

Equally, election officials in States with Republican governments, and many of whom were Trump supporters and voters, rejected his entreaties and threats to maipulate the 2020 presidential election results to make him, and not Biden, the winner. Every court in the US, including Federal judges appointed by Trump, have summarily dismissed applications filed by Trump acolytes challenging the 2020 vote counts in states that Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020. The Federal Courts and the Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed judges, have consistently held against Trump’s claims for immunity in other litigations against Trump.

In other words, American institutions have so far withstood the Trumpian onslaught, but the onslaught does not appear to be waning at all, even as the legal nooses around Trump and his accolytes are both multiplying and narrowing. As I noted earlirer, the Trumpian onslaught and the push back against it are being sustained by the underlying culture war. There is no end in sight, but future directions may become clearer after the mid-term elections in November and the next presidential election two years hence.

Sri Lankan Shenanigans

For all its political imperfections including the direct and indirect suppression of voting rights of minorities and immigrants, the US maintains a canonical regularity and fixed timing of any and all elections. Election timing cannot be changed even by the Head of State or Head of Government or even a Legislature at any level in America. In most other countries the timing and conduct of elections are often at the discretion of governing parties, and especially the prime minister in a parliamentary system. In recent years, the discretionary powers of prime ministers to call elections have been curtailed and a number of countries, specifically Britain, have moved towards fixed-term parliaments between elections unless parliament votes to dissolve itself before the fixed term is over.

Before 1977 in Sri Lanka, the timing and conduct of elections were generally to the advantage of governing parties. After 1977, they have always been to the advantage of governing parties with the newly minted executive president exercising near total control over virtually everything about any and all elections. The 19th Amedment rescinded the president’s power to dissolve parliament within four and a half years after a general election, while the 20th Amendment limited that curtailment to two and a half years.

Surprise and no surprise, there is now a tug-of-war between MPs over the presidential powers to dissolve parliament in the 22nd Amendment Bill that is currently before the legislature. The SLPP MPs (who passed 20-A) now want to disable the President from dissolving parliament for four and a half years (as it was under 19-A). On the other hand, the SJB MPs and the SLFP MPs (all of whom take immense credit for passing 19-A) want to disable the President for only two and a half years. The hypocrisy in the alternated positions of the government and opposition MPs should not be shocking. The government MPs do not want an early election, indeed no further election if possible. An early election is all that the opposition MPs are looking for.

President Wickremesinghe is self-inflictedly caught in the middle, muttering his mantra of an all-party government. But he has other tricks up his constitutional sleeve, such as forming a national government for the purpose of bribing MPs with cabinet positions to get them onside with the President. This cheap trick was one of the more despicable provisions in 19-A and it now seems to have crept into 22-A under the drafting wizadry of Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe. What is truly sad is that the majority of law makers have forgotten everything and learnt nothing even in the middle of a crippling economic crisis and so soon after the massive protest wave that got rid of an elected President and his Prime Minister. There is no limit to the capacity of lawmakers for crass shenanigans.

So, in contrast to the US, the question in Sri Lanka is whether the country’s institutions are capable of positively transforming themselves in response to the unmistakable protest wishes of the people. Remarkably, while Aragalaya was able to see off an elected president, it has not been able to shake up the parliament at all. This is rather odd in the context of the Aragalaya outcry for abolishing the presidency and restoring parliamentary democracy, for it is the parliament that seems to have become the bulwark for the ‘ancien regime.’

There is also all manner of rearguard actions by the former political benefactors, as well as beneficiaries, of the Rajapaksas, who somehow want to preserve the old Rajapaksa nationalist political agenda while mercilessly castigating them for their economic mismanagement and familial corruption. They blame Aragalaya for apparently getting the country out of the Rajapaksa frying pan and dropping it into the Ranil Wickremesinghe fire. Would these critics of Aragalaya have wanted the Rajapaksa regime to keep going?

And they blame Ranil Wickremesinghe for rescuing the Rajapaksas and becoming their puppet. Curiously, perhaps not so, their attacks on Ranil Wickremesinghe carry a sting and a tone that never marked their worst attacks on the Rajapaksas for the latter’s worse blunders. The verbal contortions and tongue twists of Rajapaksa supporters turned Aragalaya attackers may have little or no consequence, but their capacity to be disruptive should not be taken lightly.

A recent instance of undiplomatic disruption would seem to involve the cliquish decision making within the Foreign Ministry and the Sri Lankan Mission in Beijing that allegedly led to the controversial visit of the Chinese naval ship Yuan Wang 5 to Hambantota. Leaving aside the controversy surrounding Indian reactions to the visit, it is pertinent to ask whether arranging a port of call for a Chinese satellite tracking ship is the appropriate way to expend government and diplomatic time and resources when Sri Lankans are anxiously waiting for any shipment from anywhere that will bring fuel and other essentials.

There is also the distracted blaming of Basil Rajapaksa for the political behaviour of the SLPP MPs in paraliament. Basil Rajapaksa deserves only blame, and not only blame but also penalty. But those who are blaming him vigorously now were the ones who praised him lavishly from 2018 onward for his prowess as the SLPP’s electoral magician. These pundits could not see through what Basil knew all along and later admitted – that the Rajapaksas might be good at winning elections but never good at governing. Now they, the pundits, are talking! Even now they are misplaced in targeting Basil instead of the real culprits – the SLPP MPs, and parliament itself. In their curiously convergent logic, the current impasse is all due to the faults of Aragalaya and of Basil Rajapaksa.

President Wickremesinghe looms large in the middle of all of this. He is in an unenviable position. He is assailed from all sides and gets no public support from any side. His record during the 2002 peace process and again during the yahapalanaya government (2015-2019) does not easily evoke trust in the man’s promises and confidence in his ability to deliver on them. His record has been one of over-promising and under-delivering. He needs to reverse that quickly and demonstrate it in words, actions and, most of all, results.