By Vishvanath
We are living in interesting times. The unfolding political drama at the grassroots level is full of twists and turns. The battle for the hung local councils is far from over. Elections to the posts of chairpersons in some non-majority councils have been postponed due to walk-outs staged by the Opposition against secret ballots. Thus, the process of constituting local councils is not likely to be over soon. Some NPP seniors have threatened to dissolve the councils that the Opposition has won and place them under special commissioners.
The JVP-led NPP dichotomized the Sri Lankan electorate into two camps along George W. Bush’s famous rhetorical binary—‘Either you are with us or you are with them’—to win elections. It lumped all its opponents together and demonized them as an evil force that had ruined the country since Independence (1948). Its slogan went down well with the irate people who are reeling from the country’s worst-ever economic crisis and disillusioned with the political parties that have governed this country for about 76 years.
The NPP’s intense sloganeering proved to be effective although the Opposition was far too fissiparous to be considered a united entity with a common goal and a shared future. It was thanks to a split in the anti-NPP vote between the UNP and the SJB that NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake was to secure the coveted presidency, and the NPP could win 159 out of 225 parliamentary seats in last year’s parliamentary election.
However, a common Opposition has been taking shape since the May 06 Local Government polls, with the SJB, the UNP, the UPFA, the Sarvajana Balaya, the SLMC, etc., joining forces to seize control of the hung councils where the NPP has secured pluralities. They have already bagged more than 30 hung councils vis-à-vis the NPP’s all-out efforts to secure control of them by engineering crossovers from the Opposition and winning over the Independent councilors whom it vilified as rogues. This is not a situation the NPP bargained for before the LG polls, which, it apparently thought, would be a walk in the park, given its mammoth victory in the parliamentary election. After forming the local councils where the NPP obtained working majorities, President Dissanayake declared that the NPP would gain control of all other LG institutions where it had won more seats than the runners-up. He underestimated the Opposition and unwittingly provided its rivals with a rallying point. Every hung council the joint Opposition wins is a bonus for it and a loss to the government.
The NPP finds itself in an unenviable position. It has had to rely on the very politicians it demonized to secure control of the hung councils despite its moral grandstanding, which was one of its main attractions to the electorate. It is now saddled with the task of reconciling its much-avowed commitment to good governance and the adoption of expedient measures such as mustering the help of ‘rogues’ to gain control of the hung councils. It will have a hard time, projecting itself as a clean political movement different from its rivals again in the run-up to a future election.
The Opposition will be mistaken if it thinks it can make a comeback any time soon by securing control of hung councils, without intense campaigning at the grassroots level. The fact that the government has been able to engineer crossovers, in the hung councils, points to the need for the Opposition parties, especially the SJB, to sort out their internal problems and infuse their elected representatives as well as rank and file with hope of victory. Propaganda alone will not help it achieve its goal of capturing power. There is no substitute for aggressive campaigning. The Opposition does not seem to be making a serious effort to turn itself around. It has been preoccupied with seizing control of the hung councils.
The NPP lost no time in holding a general election after winning the presidency, last year, and then it went on to hold the LG polls a few months later while its victory in the parliamentary elections was still fresh. Speculation was rife in political circles a few months ago that the government would hold the much-delayed Provincial Councils elections soon after the LG polls. But the outcome of the mini polls is very likely to cause the PC elections to be further delayed as the government now has to recover lost ground before facing another electoral contest confidently. The NPP’s winning streak has hit a rough patch, apparently making the government consider a course correction. There are other factors that may compel the government to decide against holding the PC polls expeditiously—growing public discontent due to unfulfilled campaign promises and economic hardships, various allegations against its senior members, farmers’ protests and rumbling on the trade union front, with teachers, some health workers and employees of the state banks threatening industrial action.
However, India is bound to step up pressure on Sri Lanka to hold the PC polls, which are now about eight years overdue. It was in 2017 that the Provincial Council Elections Act was amended to pave the way for the postponement of the PC polls. All political parties represented in the parliament at the time, including the JVP, the UNP, the SLFP/UPFA, the ITAK and the SLMC voted for that amendment, which was ratified in a very controversial manner. They knew it was a ploy by the UNP-led Yahapalana government to postpone the PC polls as it was wary of facing any electoral contest at that juncture, as it was concerned about disunity among its coalition members; it did not want to face an election before the 2019 presidential election, but it had to hold the 2018 LG polls, which became its undoing. Now that the ITAK has recovered some of the lost ground in the North and the East, where the NPP performed impressively well in the last general election, it is likely to push for the PC polls harder, with India’s backing. There is no way the government can ignore India’s concerns. Signs are that the NPP will find it extremely difficult to postpone the PC until it overcomes difficulties on the political and economic fronts.
