By Vishvanath
There seems to be no end in sight to efforts being made to delay the upcoming presidential election. Close on the heels of the dismissal by the Supreme Court of a fundamental rights (FR) petition which sought a determination on the length of the presidential term and an interim order to prevent the Election Commission (EC) from declaring the next presidential election pending the case, a lawyer filed another FR petition with the same objective, on Friday; it seeks to have a referendum held on the 19th Amendment (19A) to the Constitution. The petitioner has argued that 19A was implemented without a referendum, and therefore it has no legal validity. However, it was in accordance with 19A, among other things, that the last presidential election was held in 2019.
Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapaksa, speaking in Parliament, on Friday, lashed out at the person who had filed the second FR petition. He said such attempts amounted to a belittlement of the judiciary and had to be condemned. The Opposition has also taken exception to the petition in question. Despite the FR petitions aimed at putting off the presidential election, the SJB, the NPP and the UNP are intensifying their election campaigns. The SLPP finds itself in a dilemma, a huge one at that. It is not in a position even to decide whether to contest or not to contest.
Too much power could become the undoing of the governments that fail to manage their electoral gains properly. It could drive politicians to take leave of their senses, consider themselves invincible and ignore public opinion. Perhaps, nothing exemplifies this better than the fate that has befallen the SLPP, which had a meteoric rise in Sri Lankan politics and became unpopular equally fast.
Founded in 2016, the SLPP became combat-ready two years later; it trounced the UNP and the SLFP in the 2018 local government elections, and went on to win a presidential poll and a general election with huge majorities in 2019 and 2020, respectively. It obtained 145 seats in the parliament and mustered a two-thirds majority with the help of crossovers from the SJB. Its fall came sooner than expected. The Irate public rose against the SLPP government, which mismanaged the economy and bankrupted the country, and the members of the Rajapaksa family had to give up government positions; President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had to flee the country and send in his resignation. This is the price a government has to pay for being intoxicated with power.
Today, the SLPP is unable to decide whether to contest the upcoming presidential election or skip it and back a candidate fielded by some other political party. The biggest challenge it is facing is to remain relevant in national politics vis-à-vis public ire, a severe erosion of its support base and mass crossovers from its parliamentary group to the SJB. Some more SLPP dissidents led by MP Dullas Alhahapperuma closed ranks with the SJB on Thursday. The boot is now on the other foot; the SJB, which lost several of its MPs to the SLPP, is now engineering crossovers from the latter.
Chances of the SLPP being able to make a comeback in the foreseeable future are remote. Public resentment towards it will not go away anytime soon. The people are undergoing untold hardships due to the economic crisis, which has adversely impacted all aspects of their lives and, worse, the future of their children. So, there is no way the SLPP can win back popular support by making promises or boasting of its past achievements. The people will have none of it.
The SLPP therefore has chosen to play the victim card. It pretends to be the victim of a conspiracy hatched by some external forces that are hostile to Sri Lanka. It is seeking to kill two birds with one stone, in a manner of speaking. It would have the public believe that their suffering is also due to the above-mentioned conspiracy.
Ousted President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (GR) has claimed to be a victim of an external conspiracy. Even the dissident SLPP MPs, who are critical of the party leadership, are on the same page as the Rajapaksa family on this score. SLPP MP and former minister Wimal Weerawansa has authored a book, ‘Nine: The Untold Story’, based on the alleged conspiracy to remove President GR from office.
President GR himself has written a book about the conspiracy, titled, ‘The Conspiracy to Oust Me from the Presidency’. This book could be considered part of the SLPP’s strategy to win back the sympathy of the nationalistic forces which rallied behind the Rajapaksas and made their electoral victories possible in the past but have since turned against them.
What GR basically says in his book is that the forces against the Sinhala Buddhists joined forces and made use of economic issues to bring him down. The 2022 mass uprising, which came to be dubbed ‘Aragalaya’ was part of the conspiracy against him, according to his book. Weerawansa has also expressed a similar view; he has claimed that the US and India were behind those protests and they went so far as to pressure Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena to take over as Acting President following President GR’s resignation, but in vain. Interestingly, Speaker Abeyewardene said on March 21, 2024, in response to a no-faith motion moved against him that some foreign powers had asked him to take over as the Acting President. His claim arguably corroborated Weerawansa’s contention, which US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Julie Chung, has dismissed as baseless.
Speaker Abeywardena said in his special statement in the parliament: “The objective of those who made that request was to create another Libya or Afghanistan here. They did not want to resolve the crisis or restore law and order to protect this country … I was asked to name a Prime Minister and a Cabinet of ministers and rule the country.”
“However, I was determined to uphold democracy,” Speaker Abeywardena said, adding that he was surprised to see some of those who asked him to become the President of the country had signed the no-faith motion against him. “When I rejected that call, they resorted to intimidation. There were threats, too. Among those who exerted pressure on me were leading Bhikkhus and leaders of other religions. The then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called me and sought my opinion on transferring power to me. However, I knew that if I accepted that position without powers vested in me by the Constitution to do so, this country would end up in anarchy,” the Speaker said.
The Speaker’s revelation has become grist for the SLPP’s mill, and it is likely to be used in support of the SLPP’s claim that it has become a victim of a conspiracy by the very forces that strove to defeat GR in the presidential race in 2019 but succeeded in ousting him in 2022.
That the SLPP will go all out to use the conspiracy theory in question in a bid to remobilize the nationalistic forces that once propelled it to power became clear on Thursday (11), when its General Secretary Sagara Kariyawasama himself renewed the conspiracy claim at a rally in Colombo. During his speech, he asked rhetorically how come the fuel crisis had ended immediately after Ranil Wickremesinghe becoming the President although not a single dollar had come in by that time. He also asked how come gas burner explosions, which were numerous and became a huge issue in the country towards the last stages of GR’s presidency, had suddenly ceased after Wickremesinghe’s elevation to the presidency? Kariyawasam said the people were aware of the conspiracy that had upended Sri Lankan politics. He urged the public to rally behind the SLPP for the sake of the country. This is how the SLPP is planning to recover lost ground ahead of the next presidential election. It will be extremely lucky if it succeeds in its endeavor.
