COLUMN

Warning bells in Sri Lanka

The Provincial Council elections in Sri Lanka, along with other recent developments, could erode the ruling alliance's support base and lead to greater political turmoil ahead.

WHEN Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga assumed the Presidency of Sri Lanka four and a half years ago, she kindled many hopes in what then appeared to many a benighted country brutally battered by war since 1983. Her bold initiative to tackle the ethnic conflict came like a breath of fresh air after the stale and cynical approaches made during the United National Party's (UNP) 17-year-long reign. Her proposals for devolution of power to provincial and local authorities, and her promise to replace the overcentralised French Fifth Republic-plus presidential system with a more democratic form heralded a non-cynical, anti- Machiavellian, open, pluralistic politics. Although no economic policy radical, she seemed remarkably responsive to new ideas. In the first year, she galvanised and enthused Sri Lanka's liberal-Left intelligentsia and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as few other political leaders had ever done.

Today, scepticism, if not despondency, has replaced much of that hope. The paradigm shift to more open, democratic, participatory governance appears to have been arrested and partly reversed.

The anti-LTTE "Operation Jayasikurui" (Certain Victory) ran out of steam after bleeding Sri Lanka heavily - an annual cost estimated by the National Peace Council at 21 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product). The economy is stuck in a neo-liberal rut. The time for new initiatives seems to have passed; there is a return to the ways of manipulative politics, and the politics of patronage, so dismally familiar to South Asia. The upward-looking phase of Kumaratunga's ruling People's Alliance (P.A.) may be running out. The warning bells now ring loud and clear.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the run-up to and the results of the fraught, contentious elections to five Provincial Councils (P.Cs) on April 6. The P.A. barely managed to retain the Western province, Sri Lanka's largest and richest, with a quarter of its population and 45 per cent of its GDP. It wrested the other four from the UNP which had won them in 1993 (before the P.A. was born).

But the quality of its victory was at best poor, uncertain and slippery. Worse, it came amidst strong accusations of electoral malpractices, some of them backed by independent NGOs such as the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV).

Even if the rigging charges are discounted, the P.A's performance in the P.Cs marked a sharp decline in relation to the 1994 presidential elections and the 1997 elections to local bodies.

Compared to 62 per cent five years ago, its vote fell to just 49 per cent in 1997, and now further down to 45 per cent. This puts it barely two percentage points ahead of the rival UNP, itself unblessed by a great leadership, faction-ridden, and not free from the odium of long years of cynical misrule. The difference in the five P.Cs between P.A. and UNP votes is only about 126,000. This would be wiped out more than twice over by the votes rendered invalid.

In the five P.Cs - Western, Central, North-Central, Sabaragamuwa and Uva - as a whole, the P.A. won 120 seats, and the UNP 112. In Colombo district, the P.A's vote declined by a massive 44 per cent over 1994. In other urban areas such as Kandy), the UNP increased its vote share to come within a couple of percentage points of the P.A's. In only one of the five P.Cs (North-Central) did the P.A. win an absolute majority of seats. Elsewhere, it can only form a government in alliance with other parties, some of them ideologically hostile.

SRIYANTHA WALPOLA
Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga. The Provincial Council election results mark the erosion of the ruling People's Alliance's vote bank.

The conduct of the polls came in for critical scrutiny from observers such as PAFFREL (People's Action for Free and Fair Elections), MFFE (Monitoring of Free and Fair Elections) and CMEV, especially after the P.A's performance during the end-January elections to the North-Western (Wayamba) P.C. These were widely acknowledged to have been badly rigged, with 1,557 incidents of violence, of which 895 took place on polling day.

These acts of violence included physical assault, intimidation, threat, removal of names from electoral rolls, booth-capturing and stuffing of ballot boxes. The P.A. was held responsible for about two-thirds of these cases. Wayamba, much like Meham in Haryana, became synonymous with unconscionable electoral malpractices, which affected a quarter of all polling centres. Even the Election Commissioner was forced to admit that as many as 212 polling centres (of a total of 1,160) witnessed serious malpractices (although he, contradictorily, ordered a repoll in only nine centres).

This time around, independent monitors received over 1,300 complaints during the poll campaign. The police registered 298 complaints on polling day. But the intensity of violence was much lower than at Wayamba. The CMEV claimed that the performance of a third of all polling stations it monitored was "unsatisfactory". Even if this sample is considered unrepresentative, it amounts to five per cent of all polling stations. This may not have drastically affected the party-wise outcome of the elections, but in Sri Lanka's individual-candidate preference-vote system, each vote has a unique value and can alter candidate-wise outcomes.

It is regrettable that there should have been electoral malpractices in the Third World's first democracy, where adult suffrage goes back to the 1930s. And it is worse that the P.A. should have got into an ugly confrontation with independent election monitors, especially the CMEV, to the point of running a campaign against them in the pages of the state-owned Daily News.

Indeed, Kumaratunga personally attacked the CMEV as "a cat's paw" of foreign interests and UNP "agents", and questioned (at Kandy on April 1) the integrity and genealogy of one of its prominent members. It could be argued that the CMEV at times overstated the incidence of violence, that it did not carefully distinguish between minor and serious cases, and named those accused of misdemeanour without verifying the allegations. But it is malicious to claim that it represents the UNP or "foreign interests". The confrontation only lowered the P.A's stature and invited parallels with the "Wayamba factor", to the P.A.'s own embarrassment.

Today, the P.A. is a party largely on the defensive. It has lost much of its elan, most of its idealism, and a good deal of its appeal. It is now seen to be exercising power delinked from a larger, universal, purpose. Its earlier hope, that the UNP, hampered by Ranil Wickremasinghe's inability to give it political direction, would face steep erosion, and pave the way for its own upward growth, stands belied.

BESIDES exposing the P.A's weakness, recent political developments, in particular the P.C. elections, serve to highlight five significant trends. First, the votes of the ethnic-religious minorities in the south, which had swung towards the P.A. five years ago, are returning in appreciable measure to the UNP, their traditional representative. Thus, argues Dr. Neelan Tiruchelvan, the well-regarded scholar-MP and director of the International Centre for Ethics Studies, it is hard to explain the UNP's strong showing in central and northern Colombo (two-fifths of it Tamil- speaking) or in the coastal fishing villages, without such a shift.

Second, in the central highlands, with their tea estate labour of Indian origin, the influence of S. Thondaman's Ceylon Workers' Congress (CWC), a P.A. constituent, is on the decline. In 1993, Thondaman allied with the UNP and won 12 seats in the tea districts. This time, the National Union of Workers sponsored by him has won only seven, with slim margins. This is partly owing to the emergence of an educated and aware youth among the "Indian Tamils" (as distinct from the long-settled/indigenous "Ceylon Tamils" of the North and the East). This layer is discontented with the CWC's paternalist conservatism, the corruption and extravagant lifestyles of its leaders, and their failure to respond to its aspiration for better educational and employment opportunities. Thus, the Upcountry People's Front, a CWC rival, has cut into its vote, which is shrinking with the grounding of the peace process.

A third trend is the re-emergence of the Sinhala ethnic-chauvinist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) as a significant force. The JVP was brutally crushed after its 1987-89 violent uprising, but has tripled its vote-share to five per cent since 1994. Its present vote-share is 54 per cent higher than that in the 1997 local elections. The JVP is now the third largest party, with 15 of the 263 seats in the five P.Cs. This puts it in a uniquely strong position, for instance in the Western P.C., where the P.A., lacking a majority, can only form a government with the support of ideologically distant parties.

This will of course involve some kind of bargain with the JVP so that its eight P.C. members support the 46-member P.A. in the 102-strong council. Just such an understanding is apparently being reached, under which the JVP will probably be offered the council's chair. More important, its exiled leader Somawansa Amarasinghe, an important former politburo colleague of Rohana Wijeweera, is allowed to return without serious criminal charges being pressed against him. It is unclear if this will facilitate the JVP's "normalisation" and "parliamentarisation", or encourage it to shift the centre of gravity of politics towards the ethnic- chauvinist pole. The development raises awkward questions.

A fourth noteworthy trend is the emergence of Karu Jayasooriya as a major power-centre within the UNP. Until he quit as Colombo Mayor after the P.C. polls, Jayasooriya had earned exceptional goodwill among the city's middle class as an able administrator who improved municipal services much in the fashion of the efficient, result-oriented manager. He has won over 2,50,000 preference votes, the highest polled in this elections, and only slightly lower than the earlier score of Chandrika Kumaratunga (2,86,000) with all her assets. Jayasooriya is a political maverick - a businessman not known for political vision or skills, conservative on the ethnic question, but earnest, uncorrupt and accessible. His emergence signifies middle class despair with the "normal" politician, and a temptation to look for managerial quick-fixes for political problems.

Finally, there is growing discontent within the P.A. - among sections of the Left which joined the alliance five years ago in the hope of creating a radical-democratic, progressive alternative to the UNP's misrule. This is partly because the P.A. leadership has failed to deliver on most of its promises, including exceptional provincial autonomy, especially for the North and the East; partly because its economic performance has been poor; partly because association with it increasingly attracts the charge of doing Machiavellian politics. Historically, the Sri Lankan Left has enjoyed a very special intellectual and moral status. But after state socialism collapsed, its cadre base has eroded, It now faces a grim dilemma: influence the P.A. from within towards more progressive policies, or quit and adopt an independent, critical posture while building a cadre base. Many leaders like MP Vasudeva Nanayyakara seem inclined towards the second option. The election results have strengthened them.

These trends together mark a watershed so far as the P.A. is concerned. It has to choose, and rather quickly, its strategy for the near future. Should it call an early presidential election or should it wait till August next year? The outcome of the recent elections has jolted sections of its leadership. They now prefer to temporise and hold on to power as long as possible in the hope that the UNP's internal crisis will worsen. The other view is that there is no merit in waiting; that will only mean further haemorrhage and base erosion; it is better to take the plunge and call an early election.

This view derives strength from the likelihood that the economy, which has slowed down by two percentage points in GDP growth, will decelerate further. Sri Lanka's public finances are a mess, with the fiscal deficit almost 10 per cent of GDP, export growth plummeting to 2 per cent from 8, and prices of essential goods rising sharply. With tighter garment quotas, low oil prices (which will hit remittances from the Gulf) and pressure on tea exports, the slowdown could have harshly unpopular effects.

Besides, after the fall of Killinochhi and the suspension of "Jayasikurui", there is little likelihood of a big change in the military balance of forces in the North and East. The prospect of a negotiated settlement of the ethnic question is dim. Because of the political uncertainty looming ahead, it might be best to call a damage-limiting early election.

Whichever course the P.A. chooses, one thing is certain. The phase of hope, new initiatives and change inaugurated in 1994-95 is now past. Sri Lanka's politics has entered a contentious phase. If political polarisation accelerates and ethnic tensions get aggravated, it could plunge deeper into turmoil and strife.

AN INDIAN POSTSCRIPT

Sri Lanka is delicately, precariously, uncertainly poised. We in India must do nothing to upset the situation there. New Delhi has done well to keep its hands off the island's ethnic issue in recent years. But it damaged its own interests by acting duplicitously on the free trade agreement issue - first by promising freer imports of tea, and then reneging on its promise. Along with the nuclear and missile tests, which only underscore the "Big Brother" image , this has bred resentment - dangerous in the present circumstances. New Delhi must take corrective action, promptly and sincerely. Deviousness on its part could spell disaster.