EDITORIAL

Dad's Army (And Mom's Fantasy)

With the opposition UNP predictably being decimated at last week's provincial council elections, the party's political affairs committee last week at last decided to strike. Time it was, they resolved, to put an end to the opposition's succession of electoral reverses. The President's eloquent bluster has to be defied. The JVP's focus on youth has to be addressed. The propaganda-savvy Alliance government's media blitz has to be countered by people who could pop up on our television screens and hold us riveted to our seats as they tell us how the UNP would solve the nation's problems, giving lie to the Alliance's false promises. And thus the hour - or at any rate, the UNP's Political Affairs Committee - has produced the men: N. K. Weragoda is to be the UNP's General Secretary and N. G. P. Panditharatne is to chair the committee (yes, yet another committee) to advise the party on how to win the next election, failing which, the one after that, or maybe the one after that.

Inasmuch as Weragoda and Panditharatne are two sweet, harmless, elderly gentlemen, the political affairs committee's decision brings to mind the delightful song by the Gershwin brothers, It Ain't Necessarily So, gorgeously sung by Ella Fitzgerald with the intonation that makes black Americans irresistible musicians:

Methus'lah live nine hundred years
Methus'lah live nine hundred years
But who calls dat livin'
When no gal'll give in
To no man that's nine hundred years?

It is not up to The Sunday Leader to tell the UNP, as a political party, what or what not to do. However, the UNP comprises the largest segment of the parliamentary opposition, which is paid for by our taxes. They therefore have a duty and public responsibility to provide a credible opposition to the Alliance government. Chandrika Kumaratunga is given to reminding the nation ad nauseam that the UNP has lost all but two of the dozen or so elections it has faced in the past decade. And she's right. While the polls last week saw a massive downturn in voter interest, the Alliance government managed to secure more than half the votes cast. No great success, that, for almost half the people who voted for them last April failed to show up this time round. Amazingly, the UNP failed to generate any goodwill whatsoever from the Alliance having reneged on all its promises, placed the peace process in jeopardy, allowed prices to skyrocket, failed to pass a single bill in parliament and brought government into a virtual deadlock. In any other party, so ignominious a defeat would have led to open rebellion. In the UNP, it led to a desperate search for talent in Colombo's geriatric homes.

The venerable N. G. P. Panditharatne has been appointed to find out the reasons for the electoral drubbing, and propose remedial action. The octogenarian Panditharatne's claim to fame is as chairman of the UNP in its heyday, a quarter-century ago. Universally liked and respected, he is old. Very old. It is amazing and tragic that the UNP's Political Affairs Committee could not find a single person with a semblance of youth to give the party direction. Dinosaurs have had their day and nature has seen to it that they are now extinct.

And as the party's nominee as all-powerful general secretary, we have N. K. Weragoda who, not long from now, will be sending 'thank you' notes for all the presents he receives on his 70th birthday. Charming, polite and eternally supplicant, is he the UNP's answer to Tilvin Silva, Susil Premajayanth and Maithripala Sirisena, the general secretaries of the JVP, UPFA and SLFP? It is like putting Mother Theresa against Adolph Hitler. For all Weragoda's merits, two things agitate against his nomination as general secretary to a party in opposition. First, his advancing age. And second, the fact that he has no political acumen whatsoever. Invited by Ranil Wickremesinghe to contest the 2001 general election, he declined and accepted instead the post of cabinet secretary. And a very good cabinet secretary he was, too. But for all his merits, Weragoda is not general secretary material, especially to a party that is up against the wall politically as the UNP is.

It is not our place to dictate to the UNP, or for that matter its dogsbody of a political affairs committee, who it should nominate to these offices. But there is a younger generation of UNP MPs who, if no longer actually young, are at least politically savvy and apt to give as good as they get from the government. The choices of Weragoda and Panditharatne smack of a leadership that is deeply insecure and suspicious of new blood that may one day pose a threat. It may be purely apocryphal that Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse popped Champagne when told of Weragoda's appointment, but this should surely have been music to the Alliance's ears. Rajapakse has rightly seen the trend and sensed victory in the 2005 presidential election. It is in his lap.

While it is a stinging indictment of the UNP's Political Affairs Committee that it could come up with nothing better than a couple of pensioners with no political experience or credibility whatsoever to fill these key posts, it would be even more surprising if these senior citizens were actually to accept these offices, being the preux gentlemen they are reputed to be. They have in their day served their parties well: now it is time, like General Macarthur, to simply fade away. One can but hope that being the gallant gentlemen they are, they will turn these offers down and insist that younger, more politically savvy people be found. Being the party seniors they are, they should be so bold as to tell the political affairs committee to its face that it has got its wires crossed. Ranil Wickremesinghe, Karu Jayasuriya, G. L. Peiris, S. B. Dissanayake, Mahinda Samarasinghe, Malik Samarawickrama, Tissa Attanayake and the others in the political affairs committee should, by these veterans, be told a thing or two about political affairs.

With Chandrika Kumaratunga, like her mother, desperate to inflict herself on Sri Lanka's landscape until death do us part, this country is heading steadily towards a dictatorship. The constitution is set to be changed by unconstitutional means. Referenda are about to be fought and won against an impotent, ineffective and effete opposition. These are times in which the opposition should call upon its youth to come out and reason against the evil doctrine of the JVP. Ranil Wickremesinghe is fond of referring to himself as the only Sri Lankan leader to have been born after independence, on February 4, 1948. It is beyond reason that he presided over a committee that found no option but to turn to people born in the Edwardian era to fight the battles of the 21st century.

Wickremesinghe cannot be unaware that frustration is running high in his ranks, threatening to split open his party when it is most vulnerable - in defeat. As little right as he has to complain, being an appointed MP, Naveen Dissanayake has already pointed to his party's weak leadership (and his own father in law is deputy leader!). Indeed, as fragile as Chandrika Kumaratunga's government is, it is important to recognise that she will use every rule in the book, and many that aren't, to harass the opposition. Already, we have seen attempts to arrest MPs on trumped-up charges, and to blackmail others into submission. In the coming months, Kumaratunga will pick off UNP MPs one by one even as their leadership looks to old age pensioners to fight its battles.

The nominations of Weragoda and Panditharatne will now be submitted to the UNP's Working Committee for endorsement. That will be the test of the mettle of the people who sit on this all-powerful body, many of whom do the rounds of Colombo's cocktail circuit grumbling that they are not heard by the leadership. Well folks, your hour has come: let's hear it from you. Will the Working Committee stand up and demand that the party gives a place to youth and political ability, or will it pusillanimously bow to the dictates of the high command and rubber-stamp the nominations of Weragoda and Panditharatne?

And as for Kumaratunga, the UNP's latest move must be like the enactment of a fantasy. Only in her dreams might she have wished that the focus of the opposition energies would be placed on the shoulders of a grandpa. She has under her a formidable political force: the JVP's rhetoric, the state media's propaganda, and the unshakable (though invariably mistaken) resolve of the Bandaranaikes. And even as her storm troopers ready themselves for battle armed with the latest weaponry, at her borders the forces of opposition are massing: the UNP's Dad's Army of geriatrics - pensioners armed with pickaxes, shovels and the odd ekel-broom. God bless them!