by Vishvanath
Politics is like a minefield, especially for a government in power; one wrong step could entail a huge political cost. The fuel price revision for November has triggered a wave of public resentment, with the next general election only days away.
The NPP government has been hoist with its own petard. It has had to accomplish numerous tasks that it pressured successive governments to do, when it was in the Opposition. Political slogans and election pledges may serve as effective tools to mobilize popular support and win elections, but they can prove problematic, if overdone, as can be seen from the experience of the JVP-led NPP, which has got sloganeering down to a fine art.
The JVP/NPP and its trade union arm kept on urging the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe administration to increase the state sector salaries, despite the economic crisis, and dismissed as baloney the then President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s claim that funds for pay hikes could be allocated only through the 2025 budget. It insisted that enough funds could be raised for salary increase and economic relief for the public if waste and corruption were eliminated.
As the September presidential drew closer, Wickremesinghe changed his tune and undertook to grant a pay hike to the state employees, and the NPP said it would increase their salaries biannually. Not to be outdone, the SJB also promised a much higher pay increase. Both President Wickremesinghe and SJB leader Sajith Premadasa lost the presidential race, and now President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is under tremendous pressure to grant the promised pay hikes.
The NPP is repeating what Wickremesinghe said as the President initially in response to its demand for pay hikes; it says it will be able to consider pay hikes only when the next budget is presented.
The winner of the presidency and the party that takes over the reins of government are traditionally afforded several months to commence the implementation of their key promises and policy programmes. The JVP/NPP contemptuously rejected traditional politics and made a solemn pledge to bring about a new political culture and fulfil its promises right from the word go in case of being able to win the presidential election.
The JVP/NPP gained a great deal of political mileage from its criticism of long queues for passports near the Department of Immigration and Emigration at Battaramulla. It said they were indicative of the inefficiency and corrupt deals of the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe administration and the desperation of the people to leave the country as they had lost hope. It said a government that was not capable of carrying out a simple task like issuing passports in sufficient numbers to the citizens who needed them was not worth its salt. It is now heard giving the same excuses as the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government, for its failure to sort out the passport issue.
Passport queues could not have reappeared at a worse time for the new government. Now, the boot is on the other foot. The Opposition is asking the NPP whether it has failed to rekindle hope in the people, who were trying to leave the country, and why it has not been able to have enough passports printed. It is also asking the government whether the passport issue remains unsolved owing to the inefficiency and corrupt deals of the ruling party.
As if queues for passports were not enough, the prices of rice and coconuts have increased steeply. Rice is in short supply, and the JVP/NPP, which condemned the previous administration for its inability to tame the powerful rice millers and make rice available at affordable prices, has failed to make a difference. The NPP naively claimed the credit for a sharp drop in egg prices in the aftermath of the September presidential election. But egg prices shot up shortly afterwards, leaving the NPP with egg on its face.
The JVP/NPP would also ridicule the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government at every turn for being what it called an IMF puppet, and preparing budgets according to the IMF’s whims and fancies. Its leaders said they would never ‘dance to the IMF’s tune’ and would renegotiate the extended fund facility programme, especially the Debt Assessment Analysis (DSA), the be-all and end-all of Sri Lanka’s external debt restructuring. They also promised to reduce taxes immediately after winning the presidency. Having made such pledges, the JVP/NPP government chose to agree to the DSA prescribed by the IMF, and President Dissanayake has recently said the 2025 budget will be prepared in consultation with the IMF. He has also reiterated that his government will never leave the IMF programme under any circumstances. One fails to see any difference between the JVP/policies and those of the other political parties, such as the UNP, the SJB and the SLPP where the economy and the IMF’s Sri Lanka programme are concerned.
One of the main election promises of the JVP/NPP was to trace and bring back Sri Lanka’s stolen wealth, which it said, amounted to several billions of dollars. Dissanayake himself said billions of US dollars had been stashed away in Uganda, and one of the lawyers who campaigned for him has admitted that she was economical with the truth when she said a planeload of US dollars had been dispatched to Uganda from Colombo under the Mahinda Rajapaksa government. Dissanayake has also claimed that there are more than 400 files on corrupt deals that the leaders of the previous governments and their cronies were involved in. The NPP would lose no time in launching probes and bring the corrupt to justice and recover the stolen funds, on the basis of evidence contained in those files, he said. But there are no signs of such high-profile investigations being conducted anytime soon, and the Opposition parties are daring the NPP government to catch the corrupt.
When the JVP/NPP was in the Opposition, it rejected the cost-reflective, fuel pricing formula out of hand, insisting that fuel prices remained extremely high due to unfair taxes and corruption, and it would slash them immediately if it formed a government. The people expected the new administration to fulfil its promise when the October fuel price revision was carried out. The price decreases were below their expectations, and the fuel price revision for November came as a huge disappointment to those who expected substantial reductions in the prices of 92 Octane petrol and regular diesel. The government decreased the prices of only Super Diesel and Octane 95 petrol, said to be used by the rich.
The Opposition has got hold of something to beat the government with; it keeps saying that the JVP/NPP is serving the interests of the rich at the expense of the ordinary people, especially trishaw operators who overwhelmingly backed Dissanayake in the presidential election. Most trishaws displayed his campaign posters.
The problem with campaign slogans and promises is that those who use them to win elections are required to match their words with deeds. Their failure to do so usually leads to anti-incumbency sentiments, if not public anger, as has been the NPP government’s experience.
