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Costly defections in Sri Lanka

B. Muralidhar Reddy

Despite the latest round of defections, it is unlikely that President Rajapaksa will avoid a general election.

THE INDUCTION of a set of defectors from the United National Party, the main Opposition group, into the Sri Lankan Government by President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Sunday indicates that the politics of opportunism, one-upmanship, and blind opposition are back in the island nation. Rivalry between the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the UNP has been the bane of the island's history since independence.

Opposition for the sake of opposition practised energetically by both the parties is one of the main factors that exacerbated the ethnic conflict. The luring of UNP dissenters by means of ministerial portfolios is particularly unfortunate after the political pact reached in October 2006 between the two parties to strive for consensus on national issues including the ethnic question.

It had been hailed within and outside Sri Lanka as a landmark development with the potential to herald a new era of peace and development. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two parties, which identified six main issues for cooperation, is now reduced to a mere piece of paper.

World becoming restless

The latest development has come at a juncture when the armed forces are engaged in a war with the Tigers in the north and east, and the international community is getting restless over the inordinate delay on the Government's part in coming forward with a political package on devolution and power sharing. The exercise initiated by the President through the All Parties Representative Conference (APRC) for a `southern consensus' (a common approach by the national parties with their support base among the Sinhala majority) will suffer a blow.

The logic put forward by the managers of Rajapaksa in support of the crossovers from the UNP is that these would provide the Government the numbers needed for a simple majority in Parliament and free it from the bondage of the ultra-nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna. Before the November 2005 general election Mr. Rajapaksa had embraced the JVP as an electoral ally and entered into a MoU, promising the abrogation of the Norway-brokered 2002 Cease Fire Agreement (CFA) with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

As a party supporting the Rajapaksa Government from the outside, the JVP has been pressuring the President to honour the commitments he had made to it. This was one of the reasons for Mr. Rajapaksa leaning on the UNP and its leader, Ranil Wickremesinghe. Of course, Mr. Wickremesinghe, a former Prime Minister, had his own compulsions to team up with Mr. Rajapaksa.

Politically he considered the MoU as the best bet to hold in check some of the UNP parliamentarians who were desperate for office. Besides, as the architect of the CFA, Mr. Wickremesinghe is convinced that political dialogue and negotiations are the only means to settle the ethnic issue. He believed that the MoU could save whatever was left of the "peace process."

His plans have now gone awry. Today he faces one of the biggest challenges in his political career. The ruling party's contention that the accretions from the Opposition would strengthen the Government is dubious — to put it mildly. The minority Government will continue to be so, as the UNP members who have crossed over have decided to retain their party membership.

The truth is that the Rajapaksa Government has more to lose than gain from the inductions. Honouring the MoU with the UNP would have meant the support of its entire group of 63 parliamentarians. Mr. Rajapaksa might have pleased 18 defectors, but it is to be seen how far it will go: there is already some grumbling over sharing of portfolios. He has ended up antagonising the remaining 45 members.

The offer of cooperation made by the UNP was a blanket one and the Government could have relied on the party to counter threats from any quarters including the JVP. For reasons best known to him, Mr. Rajapaksa never embraced the MoU enthusiastically and his managers were busy behind the scenes stirring trouble in the Opposition. The Supreme Court judgment that annulled the merger of the north and east is a case in point. Despite clear hints by the UNP that it would consider support to any legislative measure to re-enact the merger, the Rajapaksa Government showed no interest.

In the long run, Mr. Rajapaksa's bid to engineer a majority in Parliament through inducements will prove to be counter-productive. The absurdity of the situation could be gauged from the fact that every single parliamentarian on the Government's side is now a Minister.

There are already murmurs of protest within the ruling party over the award of "lucrative portfolios" to the defectors. Leaders such as Mangala Samaraweera, who has been relieved of the Foreign Ministry portfolio, and Anura Bandaranaike, shifted from Tourism to National Heritage, could emerge as rallying points for disgruntled elements.

Mr. Rajapaksa has gone for a jumbo Cabinet in the name of avoiding a costly general election. However, the current situation might lead precisely to such a development.

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