Editorial

When Thieves Fall Out

After just six months in office, the JVP-SLFP union, which started off all blood and thunder is now little but thud and blunder. The blues and the reds are daggers drawn, going for each other's throats with the same gusto and brio that the Bolsheviks went for the Mensheviks in days of yore.

The JVP and SLFP are uneasy bedfellows engaged in a textbook case of what the cognoscenti call "symbiotic parasitism." Neither amounts to very much without the other and to live, each must feed off the other. Their marriage is akin to that between a tapeworm and its human host, except that it is a hard call as to which is which.

The recent spate of mudslinging began with President Kumaratunga submitting to cabinet a critique of the JVP's 10,000 tanks rehabilitation programme. Kumaratunga accused this cornerstone of the JVP's claim to achievement of lacking in transparency and of flouting the government's financial regulations. She is also worried that the entire state-funded programme is little more than a cover for the JVP to strengthen its village-level organisation, pumping government money into its political machinery. With the JVP having wrested control not just of half her parliamentary group but also almost all the provincial councils, Kumaratunga's paranoia is understandable: the SLFP is being dismembered and devoured before her very eyes.

There was a time, in Kumaratunga's heyday, when she could make arbitrary claims and indulge in calumny unchallenged. Those days are now gone, and the reds have taken to giving as good as they get. One JVP MP after another has been hurling abuse at her and her SLFP ministers, first K.D. Lalkantha, and now Anura Dissanayake. Irked by the massive slur on the reputation the JVP would like to have of being squeaky clean, the reds tried to prevail on Kumaratunga to withdraw her cabinet paper, which cast an indelible slur on their party. True to form, she refused, adding insult to injury. Unable to counter Kumaratunga's claims, which for once are well founded in fact, they went on the rampage.

Speaking in Matale last week, Anura Dissanayake lambasted the President in language that would make a sailor blush. Referring to her as "Loku Nona," a clear inference to the upper-class radala walawwa origins of which she is so proud, the JVP Minister claimed that by casting aspersions on the JVP, the President was trying only to cover up the sins of her own corrupt henchmen. River Basin and Rajarata Development Minister, Maithripala Sirisena's brother together with the Deputy Minister, Agriculture Marketing Development, he said, controls the national rice market, and is responsible for inflating - and benefitting from - the price of rice. As if this damning allegation were not enough, Dissanayake also let into Mahinda Rajapakse's Highways Ministry, alleging all manner of impropriety flourishing under Kumaratunga's very nose.

The JVP, he said, was ready to quit the government. It would not brook the rampant corruption and inefficiency for which SLFP ministers are responsible. One wonders why it is that the JVP has failed to go to the Bribery Commission with its allegations. After all, if indeed there is rampant corruption among SLFP ministers, isn't that the right and proper thing a law abiding, self-righteous party like the JVP should be doing? That Minister Dissanayake chose to level allegations of corruption against the SLFP ministers only after the President cast the first stone also proves the hypocrisy of the party when it comes to fighting corruption.

It is now obvious the JVP was prepared to turn a Nelsonian eye on corruption so long as the President adopted a policy of live and let live. Of course, what Dissanayake did not say is that the JVP itself is in serious trouble. The spiralling cost of living, one of the mainstays of the casus belli the alliance used as grounds for dissolving parliament and sending the UNF home, has got them alienated from the electorate. The JVP have found that they cannot pass the buck on the UNP any more. Rather than face the peoples' curses, they are now in the hot seat and need to find someone else to blame. And so Kumaratunga it is.

Incredibly, Kumaratunga's bedfellows are now a bigger thorn in her side than the mainstream opposition. Even as the slanging match progresses, it is sending all manner of signals not just to the international investor community, but also to the Tigers. No one has put a finger on the cracks in the government's wall more adroitly than the LTTE, which has been offering one provocation after another, comfortable in the knowledge that their adversary is as helpless as a harpooned whale. The recent abduction of two home guards from the Trincomalee District is a case in point.

No one, least of all the Tigers, has claimed that the home guards are simply hostages in the larger drama of forcing the government to release LTTE cadres in custody for various offences. For its part, the government knows its hands are tied. Having made the LTTE's lawlessness a key element of its anti-UNP platform, the alliance cannot afford to look helpless in the eyes of the electorate. Yet, to release LTTE cadres in remand in return for two home guards quid pro quo is something that would send entirely the wrong signals, for it is tantamount to the alliance giving in to terrorism. Yet, thanks to all the rhetoric it has uttered on this very point up to now, it had no choice, for the electorate was growing increasingly restless, especially in Trincomalee.

Throughout the abduction saga, the JVP maintained an embarrassed silence. What solution could it offer? After all, the release of LTTE prisoners would be anathema to its nationalist ideals. At the same time, it was coming under increasing pressure in Trincomalee and the deep south, in both of which they had a significant body of support. Faced with a stalemate, Kumaratunga caved in, and the Attorney General suddenly and inexplicably discovered that he had been wrong to insist all this time that the 10 Tiger cadres be denied bail for offences under the Offensive Weapons Act. Accordingly, they were bailed out last week, and no one will be surprised if they fail to show up in court the next time their case is called.

But the show did not end there. Hoping to cash in on the government decision to release the Tiger cadres, the JVP organised a carefully synchronised rally in Trincomalee. It had to beat a hasty retreat however, when it learned that the populace was arming itself with broomsticks and rotten eggs with which to greet the party leaders who were planning to enter Trincomalee as liberators of the home guards. Accordingly, the rally was hastily cancelled and the Reds were compelled to retreat in disarray. Peasants they may be, those people of Trincomalee, but no fools they.

Meanwhile, even as Anura Dissanayake was telling the people of Matale what a bunch of crooks the SLFP were, Kumaratunga, oblivious to this fact, was addressing a large gathering of teachers meeting in honour of the late C. W. W. Kannangara. She assured them that media allegations that there were problems between the JVP and SLFP was a load of codswallop. They were getting along just fine. A right ass she must have felt when she heard later that day of Dissanayake's "Loku Nona" talk! Notwithstanding that, Kumaratunga lectured the teachers on the three principles by which she lives: she does not cheat, she does not steal and she does not lie. She waxed eloquent on the evils of private tuition, saying it was tantamount to cheating.

Well, we will not go into painful detail of Kumaratunga's rich record as a cheat and a liar, but we will call her a hypocrite. It is shameful that she should berate underpaid government teachers, labelling them as cheats for giving private tuition, when indeed both her children used to go regularly for private tuition during their 'A' levels. And unlike children attending government schools who have no option but to seek private help, her children attended the elite Colombo International School, paying upwards of Rs. 20,000 per month each for the privilege. Despite this most expensive of all educations, they went for private tuition, too. And if Kumaratunga would like us to name the tutors, we shall. If private tuition is tantamount to cheating, Madam (which, unfortunate as it is, we do not for a moment claim is the case), then you are a liar and your children are cheats.

The SLFP and JVP are on a collision course, with each slinging mud at the other. Where then, will all this end? No one knows, except that neither of them is likely to let the government fall, thus depriving them of the fruits of office: they will merely try to paint each other black, passing off responsibility for the dire mess into which they are getting the country. Like vultures on a carcass, they will feed, albeit squawking and pecking occasionally at each other, for so long as there is meat. That, they both hope, will take them to the presidential election, the next watershed in Sri Lankan politics. Ah, when thieves fall out, are not the consequences incalculable?