Politics
The Opposition’s road ahead, and a critique of the Radical Centre
As it stands, the Opposition under Sajith Premadasa has three routes to take, or to be more specific, left to take. Without considering all the cards on the table and deciding what card it should deal with, it cannot and will not go forward. Simply put, there is nothing to talk about if the SJB doesn’t evolve a consensus on tactics and strategies.
Unfortunately, for reasons that are only too obvious, the regime seems to be losing as much legitimacy as the Opposition. People have given up, or seem to have given up, because they don’t see the government being constructively engaged. If Premadasa is serious about upping the ante, he has to correct course, engage, and confront better.
The first option the SJB has is to unite under Mr Premadasa. This is the simplest option, yet also the most effective. The SJB’s biggest strength is the SJB. From a strategic perspective, it has the arsenal and the ammunition. It has several figureheads from the yahapalana regime who are not tainted as most of those in the UNP are. While it won a fraction of the votes the present government did last August, it did come out as a viable opposition. To pose the kind of challenge to Mr Rajapaksa’s regime it managed to do last year was not easy, but that it did speaks a lot about its credentials. The SJB is the only option those against the regime have at present. To claim it as the other side of that regime’s coin, then, is plainly absurd.
The second option is to bring the parent party, the UNP, back. Those in support of this view Mr Premadasa as a weak opposition leader. They claim that he has not stuck to the job well enough and has failed in his task. While they offer no proof of how he has floundered, they claim that Ranil Wickremesinghe is more suitable for the post than Mr Premadasa.
The third option is to retreat from parliament entirely and partner up with an amorphous and ambivalent radical centre. A section of Sri Lanka’s middle-class, including left-liberal artists and activists, have emphasised again and again their dissatisfaction with the establishment, recommending an alternative platform outside the system. In the absence of such outfits, they have gathered around Mangala Samaraweera’s Radical Centre.
The Radical Center does not pretend to be or to operate as a party; it is an activist group, and as with all such groups, it works with ideals, not action plans. That those in it accuse those in the opposition of not having action plans is rather strange, but the truth of the matter is that they have attracted the disaffected from Sri Lanka’s anti-political stratum of intellectuals and activists. Hence, insofar as they constitute or resemble a political association, they oppose not just governments and oppositions, but the idea of politics itself.
The legion of radical centrists spreads far and wide, and is hardly an isolated phenomenon. Those who believe it has no influence are deluding themselves: Mangala Samaraweera was the Foreign Minister in the yahapalana regime, later serving as its Finance Minister. Most of his pronouncements are on foreign policy and the economy. These pronouncements may be wrong, as they often are, but the expertise and experience underlying them cannot be denied. The Opposition cannot wish them away; it must confront them.
Thus, if the SJB is to counter any negative publicity from his outfit, it must listen to what Mr Samaraweera has to say on these matters and consider how to react to his comments. To start things off, they must note that Mr Samaraweera has got it wrong on three fronts: his assertion that all politics is to blame for the crisis in Sri Lanka, his conflation of narrow racism with “a socialist mindset”, and his suggestion that the SJB is no different to the government.
Sri Lanka’s liberals have, for the most, never been able to distinguish between different kinds of political formations. This is why they regard Sinhala nationalism as a devil to be harnessed in much the same way ultranationalists regard human rights and multiculturalism as devils to be harnessed. They make two mistakes here: pitting nationalist politics against liberal democracy, and assuming liberal democracy is the only form of democracy at the table.
All other wrong assumptions follow from these two mistakes. Thus, having equated nationalism with anti-democracy, they equate nationalism with socialism, and place the two on a vaguely defined continuum. Since all politics in Sri Lanka have caved into populism or socialism in some form, and at some stage, this cohorts translate their opposition to populist and socialist politics into a total opposition to politics: given that most of us are nationalists or socialists in their books, they conclude that there must be something rotten with all politicians, not just the government. Ergo, supporting them is untenable; ergo, we need a radical centre.
What is grievously wrong with this view of things is not that it pits the good against the bad guys à la Cowboys versus Indians. If all it did was to divide “us” from “them” ideologically, even politically, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Rather, what is wrong with their vision is that they assume what’s good for them is good for the country.
This explains why their notion of liberalism is superficially progressive, yet quintessentially fundamentalist: they support individual rights, independence of the judiciary, and separation of powers, but are silent and ambivalent on socio-economic matters, i.e. matters that concern the populace at large. Indeed, insofar as they hold any view on the latter at all, they project a right wing, libertarian stance, opposed not to authoritarian states, but to interventionist states. Having confused “government” with “authoritarianism”, they seek to reduce it politically and eliminate it economically, giving pride of place to the market.
The inescapable conclusion here is that most of our liberals are, in reality, classical liberals. They view the government with disfavour and imply that its presence is reason enough for its speedy elimination. Advocating market reforms as a panacea for the problems of the country, they have become as rigid in their outlook as their nationalist opponents. That explains, inter alia, their rather strange opposition to incorporating ESC rights in the constitution.
Economics has never been a strong point with Sri Lanka’s deracinated activists: they oppose infringements of individual rights, yet prefer the market to the government and disparage any party or alliance that recommends an alternative to the current economic system. They fail to understand that even in the capitals of the West, liberals haven’t opposed interventions by the state when such intervention was considered necessary, be it in the interests of sovereignty or security. They fail to understand that liberal as economists in these countries may be, many of them, including Krugman and Stiglitz, have emphasised the need for intervention in times of crisis. The irony is that our liberals charge their nationalist opponents of being out of step and outdated, yet the latter accusation can just as validly be applied to them.
Let me explain. If Sinhala ultra-nationalists are stuck in 2009, somewhere in Nandikadal, Sri Lanka’s (classical) liberals are stuck in 1973, somewhere in Santiago. This explains their fascination with Ricardo Hausmann and their marginalisation of Joseph Stiglitz; they prefer free market fundamentalists to their more pragmatic counterparts. Whatever the reason there may be for this state of affairs, our liberals remain trapped in a rabbit hole: they believe in a liberalism even the liberal West has seen fit to abandon. Clearly, being out of touch with the times is far from the exclusive preserve of nationalists, socialists, and populists.
Sri Lanka’s pro-market right is occupied and manned by a strange mishmash of activists, artists, and economists, most of whom vacillate between condemning the idea of the state and advocating a free market fundamentalism scarcely different from the fundamentalism of their nationalist opponents. It tells us a lot about the depths academic standards have been lowered to that Sri Lanka’s nationalist and liberal circles remain intellectually obdurate and politically untenable. Whatever route Mr Premadasa and the SJB take, then, they must avoid a joining of hands with intellectuals, activists, and ex-parliamentarians whose claims about the polity are as simplistic as the claims made by their opponents. The SJB must evolve a consensus on its political ideology, articulate and debate it publicly, and set itself up as a strong opposition. To aim at self-righteous rhetoric now would be to achieve precious little later.
Note: Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz are both Nobel Prize recipients. You’d think our liberals and neoliberals had better sense in their choice of economic consultants.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com