The Gota wave

Saturday 8th August, 2020

It may be quite a while before the Opposition parties figure out what hit them on Wednesday. They are reeling from concussion. The SLPP has secured a steamroller majority in Parliament and needs only a single crossover from the Opposition benches to have two-thirds of MPs on its side; it has 145 seats, and its allies which contested separately in some areas have four seats among them. Time was when it was thought that stable governments were not within the realm of possibility under the Proportional Representation (PR) system. The SLPP leaders have given the lie to this claim.

The SJB came a distant second in Wednesday’s race. In the run-up to the polls, it made numerous promises and even undertook to give as much as Rs. 20,000 each to the needy families a month, but the people voted for the SLPP overwhelmingly. However, the fact remains that winning 55 seats is no mean achievement for a newly formed party.

The UNP underestimated the SJB, which it considered only a minor irritant and expected the ‘sleeping Elephant’ to wake up and fight back. Sun Tzu has said in his Art of War, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This is exactly what has happened to the Jumbo party, which is now like a wild elephant hit by a train. For the first time in the history of the Grand Old party, it has been left without a single elected MP.

The SLFP has had to ride on the SLPP’s coattails. It could win only one seat under its own steam. It has become a political cripple owing to its disastrous political marriage with the UNP. The yahapalana cohabitation has ruined both the UNP and the SLFP.

The TNA won 22 seats in Parliament, in 2004, with the help of the LTTE, but that number dropped to 16 at the 2015 general election. It lost six seats at Wednesday’s polls; this is a 37.5% drop in the number of its seats. It now has only 10 seats. The EPDP, the SLFP, the SLMC, the TMVP and the SLPP have eaten into its vote base in the North and the East. The TNA is losing its appeal to the public if the erosion of its vote bank is anything to go by.

The JVP’s support base is shrinking. It had six seats in the last Parliament but could retain only three of them on Wednesday. It exploited issues such as the inequitable distribution of national wealth to fuel its terror campaign in the late 1980s. It coined the catchy slogan, kolobata kiri gamata kekiri, (‘milk for Colombo and melon for the village’) to highlight the glaring urban bias in development initiatives and the allocation of state resources. Thirty years on, it has come to be dependent on Colombo and an adjoining urban centre to secure representation in Parliament! On Wednesday, it lost badly in the areas that constituted the heartland of its militancy such as Matara, Galle, Hambantota and Moneragala. The present-day JVP leaders have lost their hold on what may be called the Wijeweera belt, which stretches along the southern littoral.

President Rajapaksa, who leads a socio-political movement that seeks a radical change in national politics, is keen to accomplish his mission, but the SLPP parliamentary group consists of a bunch of politicians determined to restore the status quo ante. Group dynamics of the new government might result in friction, if not conflict, between the discordant sections within the SLPP. The numerical strength of a government does not necessarily translate into its stability, as we saw in the late 2014, when a seemingly monolithic Rajapaksa government with a two-thirds majority in Parliament disintegrated.

People have reposed their trust in the SLPP again by giving it a fresh mandate to rebuild the economy, safeguard national security and usher in development. This is a tall order, given the global health emergency and the sorry state of the national economy. Whether the SLPP leaders will learn from their past mistakes, which are legion, act wisely and manage their electoral fortunes properly, while living up to people’s expectations, or squander them big time, as they did from 2010 to 2015, remains to be seen.