By Kassapa
Spare a thought for Namal Rajapaksa. A few years ago, he was the heir apparent of a seemingly invincible dynasty, being groomed to take over after the senior Rajapaksas retired. Today, he is a political orphan struggling to survive in a sea of chaos contaminated by heartless betrayals.
Namal Rajapaksa is the fourth ‘major’ candidate in the presidential election. Still the reality is, no one takes him seriously and no one (including himself, if he has any political sense) expects him to win. Yet, contest he must and suffer the ignominy of being an ‘also ran’ to preserve the remains of the ‘pohottuwa’ party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP).
Where did this carefully crafted political script go wrong? It did begin with Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s blunders that led us to bankruptcy as a nation. Rajapaksa fled, possibly grateful that he escaped the mobs baying for his blood at the gates of the President’s House. Ranil Wickremesinghe took over and, after an anxious few months, the Rajapaksas could again venture out in public without being ridiculed.
The older Rajapaksas were resigned to supporting Wickremesinghe for the next presidential election even when he was quietly charming individual ministers (such as Prasanna Ranatunga and Kanchana Wijesekera), state ministers and MPs, to the extent that the likes of Wijesekera and Ranatunga began openly endorsing Wickremesinghe, even before the SLPP could do so.
This was the point at which the crucial miscalculation was made. The Rajapaksas, anxious to preserve their political identity, demanded their pound of flesh from Wickremesinghe, if they were to lend their support and their grassroots party machinery for his campaign.
They asked for, among other things, assurances that the prime ministerial position will be reserved for their party. This, Wickremesinghe was not willing to agree to. The mistrust grew, not helped by verbal sniping in public from the relatively inexperienced Namal Rajapaksa who said that ‘breaking up political parties is Wickremesinghe’s hobby’.
The Rajapaksas’ strategy at this stage was to intimidate Wickremesinghe with the prospect that Dhammika Perera will be their candidate, if Wickremesinghe didn’t agree to their terms. In this high stakes game of political bluff, Wickremesinghe, a past master at this kind of duel, didn’t blink.
In what the Rajapaksas’ thought was the final gambit, they were all set to execute their Plan B, offering Perera as the candidate. That went dramatically haywire when Perera pulled out at the eleventh hour after he found that most SLPP MPs were now in Wickremesinghe’s camp. With defeat staring him in the face with no prospect of even a decent performance, he decamped.
That is when Namal Rajapaksa found that the trick he tried to play on Wickremesinghe had backfired spectacularly. There were desperate moves by the SLPP to rope in Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena as their candidate but Wickremesinghe’s old classmate politely declined.
At this juncture, the SLPP was left with three options: field no candidate, run a nominal candidate (reports say that even Johnston Fernando was considered) or thrust Namal Rajapaksa forward, putting his reputation and political career on the line.
The current interest in this step is not whether Rajapaksa will win. He won’t. It is not even about how well he will fare. It is about how bad the damage to the SLPP and the younger Rajapaksa will be. A best-case scenario will see him get a million votes. That is a very optimistic estimate, he will be happy with even half that number.
More importantly, Namal Rajapaksa will be able to test the waters vis-à-vis the general election. If he is able to muster enough votes at this election and then build on that to secure at least twenty seats in the next Parliament, he will be a happy man.
That is for two reasons. Firstly, it will enable him to become a significant power bloc in the next Parliament, most likely in the opposition. Secondly, he can then claim that he didn’t run away from what was a certain defeat but was courageous enough to face the polls and wear the consequences. Such history could come in handy when he aspires for power from the opposition benches in 2029.
However, he will have to contend with the non-Rajapaksa faction of the SLPP. This group, now aligned with Wickremesinghe, will have nothing to worry if he wins the election. In the more likely scenario that this does not happen, they will regroup in the form of a different political party, possibly led by Anura Priyadarshana Yapa with Ramesh Pathirana as General Secretary. It will comprise of quite a few heavy weights and seniors and could be a formidable political force in time to come.
Against this, with the older Rajapaksas fading away, Namal Rajapaksa has the likes of Johnston Fernando and Tissa Kuttiarachchi to support him. If matters reach that stage, Rajapaksa will have no choice but to reach out to the ex-SLPPers who still have a soft spot for Mahinda Rajapaksa and invite them back to the fold. Otherwise, it is difficult to see him having a meaningful political journey because the Rajapaksa brand, once the most marketable brand in Sri Lankan politics, is now irrevocably damaged since the events of the ‘Aragalaya’.
If the Rajapaksas and even those who defected from them are astute, they will want to avoid a situation like what exists in the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) today, divided into multiple factions, embroiled in a dozen legal tussles and with no leader in sight for the foreseeable future.
The key to a resurrection of the SLPP, if Namal Rajapaksa wishes for that to occur, is an acknowledgment that it cannot be a party for the Rajapaksas alone and that he has no birthright to its leadership. This is what all those who defected from the SLPP complain about: that, with Rajapaksa already being groomed for leadership at 38 years of age, they have zero prospects for aspiring for anything more than a ministerial portfolio.
Is Namal Rajapaksa humble enough to acknowledge that and make a sacrifice? Does he have the courage to bide his time and make way for a senior? He will have to, if he wants a political future for himself- but he has miles to go and an awful lot to learn.
