An evaluation of a political leader must be historically concrete. What was the context in which he/she assumed power? What was the situation he/she inherited and what did he/she make of that inheritance? Did he/she improve the situation in respect of the central challenge or main problem, cause it to worsen, or remain unchanged? The evaluation must also factor in the actually available alternative to his/her leadership; how that alternative personality would have fared and at what cost.
It often takes a critical outsider to register the authentic dimensions of the achievement of a distant nation and its leader. Though they contributed negatively to the emergence of that challenge, how many of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s post-Independence predecessors prevailed over a challenge that was as formidable by any standard of contemporary world history; indeed of “the era”? In his recently released volume Monsoon: The Indian Ocean And The Future Of American Power, Robert D. Kaplan, member of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis writes of “…the government’s gradual victory over the Tamil Tigers, among the post World War II era’s most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations…Prabhakaran had been causing death and destruction to a much greater extent and for a much longer period than Osama bin Laden in the case of the United States. This was the kind of clear-cut, demonstrable victory that any American administration could only hope for…” (pp. 203, 210)
President Rajapaksa won his second term fairly and squarely. The debate on the 18th Amendment is irrelevant here, because that followed, not preceded his re-election and pertains to a possible third term, not the second.  Is Sri Lanka in better shape in the most basic sense at the commencement of Rajapaksa’s second term than it was on the eve of his first term? Sri Lanka, like any other country, has to be evaluated as a totality, not through the prism of its ethnic minority, though the minorities question must indubitably be part of the evaluation. Assessing Sri Lanka through the lens of the Tamil Diaspora or the Tamil question is as misleading as assessing Turkey through the lens of the Kurds, India through the Kashmiris or Nagas, the Philippines through that of the Moros, and Spain through the Basques. That would provide insights, but a partial, skewed perspective.
Things must also be classified as primary and secondary. At this point in time, has the record of achievement of the Rajapaksa presidency been in the main, positive or negative, and is the contribution made to the country and its people by him primarily good or bad?
Mahinda Rajapaksa inherited a Sri Lankan state in grave crisis, with a powerful armed enemy rooted in a part of its soil, attempting to dismember its territory. Three previous Presidents and four previous leaders, JR, Premadasa, Wijetunga, Chandrika and Ranil failed to restore the territorial integrity and unity of the country, end the war and terminate the secessionist challenge. This, Rajapaksa accomplished.  The result is that for the first time in decades, there is no deadly violence on a large or medium scale. For all this, he was freely elected to a second term. After 30 years of life in its shadow, the country and all its peoples are safe and secure from an existential threat of the most basic and awful kind.
Sri Lankan opinion and opinion on Sri Lanka are broadly divisible into two categories: those who regard Mahinda Rajapaksa’s achievement or contribution as more positive than negative and those who view it as more negative than positive.  However critical or ambivalent they may be on this or that specific policy, action or inaction on his part, there is little doubt as to which side of the divide the vast majority of Sri Lankan people are. There is also little doubt in my mind as to what history’s verdict would be, given the magnitude of his historic achievement.
Critique must not be distorted by nihilistic negation, just as recognition of the positive must not be discredited with blindness towards the negative, and a defence of achievement must not be vitiated by avoidance of that which remains to be done.  Sadly, most commentary by and on Sri Lanka is warped by one or the other distortion.
The analytically slipshod shows of erudition which wildly toss references to leaders who have been elected to power only to establish dictatorships, omits the vital datum that such leaders proceeded to bury representative multiparty democracy by violently smashing the main opposition. Mahinda Rajapaksa has not done so. Whatever his transgressions, he cannot be held responsible for a diminution of the competitiveness of representative democracy through the prolonged leadership debility of the Opposition and the dwarfing of that Opposition by his achievement of destroying the Tigers (something that he did not prevent his predecessors from doing themselves)!
Still more absurd is the attempt to equate Rajapaksa with Prabhakaran. This assumes that the strategic projects of the two (reunification vs. dismemberment of the country) can be equated, as can the lamentable compliance of Tamil society with a movement that decimated the political leadership of that community (burning alive the TELO youth, to name but one instance) with the democratic state and the Southern public sphere that resisted and rolled back anything that came close. Even so acerbic a Western analyst of the Rajapakse dispensation as Robert D. Kaplan does not fail to balance his observation that there is a  “more severe coarsening of politics in Colombo” with the repeated definition of the country as a democracy — on which he places his bet as Sri Lanka’s ultimate salvation.
The fact that our external critics depict their excessive strictures as coming from the ‘international community’ when they reflect, if at all, only a segment of it, does not mean that the international community does not exist;  it simply means that these unfair and prejudiced critics are not synonymous with it.
Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence showcased Sri Lanka’s recent and ongoing achievement in the following words to an international scholarly audience attending the 6th international conference of the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) of the National University of Singapore:
“…Sri Lanka has emerged from a decades-long civil war, and is enjoying an economic revival. It is currently the second-fastest growing Asian economy after China, a fact not lost upon the IMF, which recently upgraded Sri Lanka to middle income emerging market status…”  No two yardsticks are more important in assessing the state of a nation-state and the performance of its leadership than (a) war and (b) the economy. President Rajapaksa has won the first, has improved the second and seems to be laying the foundations for a stronger economy.
If Sri Lanka is positioned to benefit from the rise of Asia and the significance of the Indian Ocean region, it is because Mahinda Rajapaksa has cleared the way for it to do so by overcoming the most formidable obstacle: the secessionist enemy. The grade on Sri Lanka’s score card as given by an important Singaporean leader demonstrates that there is more than one view of Sri Lanka in the international system; that the primarily positive views do not limit themselves to those of allegedly ‘rogue’ or ‘maverick’ states, regarded as ‘anti-Western’; that there is a realist Asian or Eastern perspective on Sri Lanka.

Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe

Everyone’s an amateur psychologist. That’s the trouble with Sri Lankan political and civil society. Instead of listening to or reading what someone says and treating it on its merits, the name of the game is to speculate on what motivated him. What’s s/he after? Who is he with now? Thus it is that gossip substitutes for analysis.
The upshot of  the personalised normative reactions of Sri Lankan society, i.e. reacting to who is saying it rather than what is said, deprives us of learning anything of value that the writer or speaker may have to offer.
So, it goes something like this. If you are critical of Ranil Wickremesinghe you are either a supporter of Mahinda Rajapaksa who is trying to disrupt the unity of the UNP or you are a clandestine opponent of Mahinda Rajapaksa who disregards his wishes and interests with regard to the leadership of the Opposition. What if one is a supporter of Mahinda Rajapaksa but also a supporter of a healthy democracy which presupposes a viable opposition? What if what one is saying about the UNP has nothing to with Mahinda Rajapaksa at all?  Not bloody likely, you’d say, but what if it can be proved? Keep reading.
If one asserts that Sri Lankan democracy is not dead, and the country is neither totalitarian nor a dictatorship but that Sri Lankan democracy has always been unevenly developing and subject to contractions and expansions, the automatic response is that the writer or exponent of this view is attempting to whitewash the Rajapaksa rule. But again, what if the Rajapaksas do not enter the picture? Why not examine or debate the point rather than speculate about motives?
To provide one final example, if one advocates architecture for Sri Lankan foreign policy which is designed for sovereignty and security and laden in favour of Eurasia and the ‘East’, one is echoing President Rajapaksa’s predilections and prejudices with a view to currying favour. Once again, what if it is demonstrably NOT about Mahinda Rajapaksa?
Let’s test out my proposition. When was the following written, who by and how accurate is it?  “If things remain unchanged, the UNP is going to lose, and lose big, at the forthcoming parliamen­tary elections. Take cricket, for example. If we didn’t make changes at the top, that is to say the captaincy, the coach and the Board, Sri Lanka could not have pulled out of the nose­dive it got into during the last World Cup. But we did make those changes — not early enough to avoid humiliation at the World Cup, but soon after, and here we are, back in the big league and close to the top. And let us always recall that the cricket captain we had no choice but to replace (belatedly, it should have been done in ‘97) is one who led us to a historic victory in 1996; once a very popular leader and always a fine cricketer.
“By contrast Ranil Wickremesinghe has scored a hat-trick in reverse. He had led his party to consecutive defeats at three (of the four) levels of the political structure: local authority, provincial councils, presidential. And it’s three out of four only because elections have not yet been held for the remain­ing level! Nothing short of reshuffling the leadership helped restore our cricket for­tunes. Nothing short of that will work in re­storing the UNP’s political-electoral fortunes either. But the pay-off is big. Once the change is made, once the surgery is over and done, recovery time is pretty short and the take-off is almost vertical, because the potential has been lying within, locked up.
“Even the re­placed captain performs better, carrying less freight, playing his natural game. It worked for our cricket, it’ll work for our Opposition. Nothing — and I mean nothing — else will, because nothing else can.” (‘Ranil Wickremesinghe’s Game’ Weekend Express, Saturday, March 11 – Sunday March 12, 2000, P6)
Now that was published in March 2000, and written by me. I’m still saying the same thing. Mahinda Rajapaksa was merely a cabinet minister at the time, years away from the opposition leadership or the prime ministership, let alone the presidency. Ok, so was it for or against the president of the day? Who knows? I had been critical of CBK for years, but supported her at the December ’99 presidential and year 2000 parliamentary elections. From what she told S.B. Dissanayake and Mangala Samaraweera at the airport before emplaning for London after surviving the Tiger suicide bomber, she very much wanted Ranil to remain as UNP leader.
That had nothing to do with me, so I called it as I saw it, as I tend to do. What is important is whether what I wrote has stood the test of time and is evidence of accuracy in analysis.  What is even more important is that the struggle to dislodge Ranil from the UNP leadership has been on for at least a decade (in my case, from 1997).
Next up is Sri Lanka’s democracy. Consider this text:
“What are the special features and distinguishing characteristics of democracy in Sri Lanka?  I would list the following: its unevenness, its dual embattlement, its co-existence with the archaic, its zero-sum nature, its nexus with the unitary state, and finally its resilience. Lankan democracy has been an uneven democracy. Its unevenness is manifest in two senses. Firstly if one takes a decades-long view, there has been a spasmodic rhythm in our democracy. There have been periods of high democracy and low democracy. The pattern is one of expansion and contraction of democracy. And even this expansion and contraction itself has not proceeded in any regular cycle.
“The heartbeat of our democracy has been arrhythmic. The unevenness of Lanka’s democracy has been present in a second sense too. At any given time an overhead satellite photograph so to speak of Lankan democracy would reveal its uneven distribution and exercise.” (‘Sri Lanka’s Uneven Democracy’ Kandy News, March 4, 1998) Now this surely is a defence of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Mussolini-esque totalitarianism! Hang on a minute — this piece by me was published in 1998, when Mahinda was an obscure minister whose portfolio I cannot recall. Ok, so then it was probably a justification of whoever was president at the time. The problem with that explanation is that in 1998, CBK was the president and I was strongly opposed to her ‘union of regions package’. So, my political scientific conclusion with regard to Sri Lankan democracy has remained consistent and must be examined today on its own merits.  A final example from the field of foreign policy: “ In the East, that is from Russia to China through India, there is an equally powerful mood against separatist terrorism… The Chinese leadership chose the 50th anniversary of the setting up of the Peoples Republic last October to officially prioritise this threat and designate it as that of ‘ethnic splittism’… A strong Eurasian ‘heartland’ thrust, arcing from Moscow through Ankara, Tehran, Delhi and Beijing can be conceived of and operationally undertaken in the form of shuttle diplomacy and summitry.”
Both Western and Eurasian thrusts can be complimentary ‘arches’ in a single foreign policy architecture for Sri Lanka… The central pillar of our foreign policy architecture must be the relationship with India, not in contrite genuflection to anyone as a regional hegemon or because we are in anyone’s backyard but because we have certain common strategic interests.” (‘Sri Lanka’s Foreign Policy Vacuum’, Weekend Express, March 18, 2000 pp.6-7)
This is obviously a pandering to Mahinda Rajapaksa’s turn to the East and embrace of China, and written to secure an ambassadorial posting (once again). Well, actually, it is my column ‘Reflections’ in the Weekend Express of a decade ago. Was it perhaps to secure a DPL posting from the then president and foreign minister? If so, it could hardly have carried the caption that it did, namely ‘Sri Lanka’s Foreign Policy Vacuum’, a stricture hardly designed to flatter either President CBK or Minister Kadirgamar. This was published years before LK’s re-orientation towards China and even before his rapprochement with the JVP (which may have been a domestic driver of that shift).
A postscript if I may. The no confidence motion against the External Affairs Minister proved instead to be a massive vote of confidence in him. As expected, the affair proved pathetic, with the UNP unable to mobilise either its own ranks or those of the Opposition overall. Prof Peiris provided documentary proof of Wickremesinghe’s ‘behind the lines’ perfidy, echoing the LTTE propaganda during the war, and paralleling the Diaspora campaign afterwards with regard to economic pressures and cutbacks. One of the more amusing aspects of the debate was the media spokesman of the UNP’s Ranilist ‘rump faction’ lecturing the Professor and former Rhodes Scholar on the importance of ‘the highest professionalism’ in the conduct of our external relations, unmindful that the sole professional — and highest educational — qualification he can lay claim to is in dress design!
More designing than discerning, he also attempted to negate my role in the UN Human Rights Council special session vote of May 2009 (which went considerably better than the no-confidence vote did for his side), even transferring merit across the Atlantic ocean. The Economist which Karl Marx described as ‘the most intelligent defender of capitalism’ chose instead to write: “…Dayan Jayatilleka, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Geneva, who warded off the threatened UN war-crimes probe in May…” (‘Behind the Rajapaksa Brothers’ Smiles’, The Economist, August 6, 2009).

President R. Premadasa AND Vartharajah Perumal

Never again’ is the silent slogan of the Sri Lankan state, its armed forces and the majority of its people. That steely determination pertains not only to Prabhakaran’s armed secessionist saga but also to the putschist episode of Vardarajah Perumal and his North East Provincial Council (NEPC). That NEPC was dissolved 20 years ago.
Despite having two decades to reflect self-critically, the former Chief Minister remains as obtuse and obstreperous as ever, saying on the record last Sunday that “The 13th Amendment is not a good law; it prevents proper devolution and leads to more centralization.” (Sunday Lakbimanews, Oct. 3, 2010)
Karuna has placed the NEPC/Perumal experience in perspective: “The LTTE opposed the 13th Amendment. However, the LTTE could not stop the formation of provincial councils… The provincial council was formed and Vardaraja Perumal was appointed chief minister. Everything changed when he declared the North and East as an independent state in November 1989… This declaration paved the way for the then government to abolish the provincial council.” – Vinyagamoorthy Muralidaran (Karuna), (The Nation, Sept. 12, 2010)
The North-East Provincial Council (NEPC) was set up in November 1988. The next month, on 17 December 1988: the EPRLF led NEPC issued its inaugural Policy Declaration. It was two days later on 19 December that Ranasinghe Premadasa was elected President of Sri Lanka. The very wording and dating of that maiden Policy Declaration proves that Vardarajah Perumal, the Chief Minister of the Council, was not engaging in a defensive reaction to any behaviour on the part of the Sri Lankan government under Premadasa (who had not even won the presidential election) but was intent from the outset on a provocative political agenda which attempted to go well beyond the powers granted to provincial councils.
The opening policy statement of the NEPC presented to the Provincial Assembly on 17 December 1988 read as follows:
“The Provincial Government is of the view that the devolved powers offered under the 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution hardly satisfy the aspirations of the Tamil speaking people of the North-East Province. Hence it will commence negotiations with the Central Government and the Government of India with a view to working out a satisfactory package of devolution.”
The 13th Amendment itself narrowly squeaked past the Supreme Court. Nothing with augmented powers could have got through at that stage of the evolution of southern consciousness. The attempt to stretch the contours of the state was fuelling or at the very least was being instrumentalized by a serious southern insurrection and therefore, expecting more — and faster as well — was tantamount to asking the mainstream democratic political forces to bite on a cyanide capsule.
In such a context, to publicly express dissatisfaction at the sufficiency of the devolution contained in the 13th Amendment and to threaten to reopen discussions on the subject not only with Colombo (referred to as ‘the Central Government’ in a country which did not have a federal system) but also with the Government of India, betrays an attitude that was far from constructive. It indicated that a confrontation was inevitable between the NEPC and any Sri Lankan Government whatsoever. (It just happened to take place on Premadasa’s watch).
The points in that Opening Policy statement of December 17th 1988 were buttressed by the First Status Report issued a few weeks later by the Vardarajah Perumal administration, which while escalating its expressions of dissatisfaction, put forward two documents: a draft to replace the 13th Amendment and another draft to replace the Provincial Councils Law of 1987!
Ranasinghe Premadasa won the presidential election on December 19. When he took his oaths on January 2, 1988 he faced a raging insurgency.
In an interview given to Kendall Hopman and published in The Sunday Times Plus (p.9) as early as 20th November 1988 – the very month the NEPC was set up — I broke publicly from the line of ‘permanent merger of the North and East/no referendum’ and was quoted as saying “I think the referendum is a good idea”. Disengaging, I followed this up with my open letter (of resignation) to Perumal and Pathmanabha which appeared in the English and Sinhala language mainstream press in the first quarter of 1989. It suggested, inter alia, pragmatic alternatives to the protracted IPKF presence, the permanent merger and the perpetual postponement (prevention) of the referendum.
In March 1989 the interlocking NEPC/EPRLF leadership visited India, where they went public with their request to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to use pressure on the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) for ‘a more advanced form of devolution’.
Perumal’s NEPC embarked upon forced conscription. That single measure caused a meltdown of whatever support the NEPC had among the Tamil people. Thus in the second half of 1989, the NEPC and the Chief Minister’s conscript paramilitary militia were a symbol for both the Sinhalese and the Tamils.
On September 19, 1989, after the opening of the All Party Conference which Premadasa had summoned, the EPRLF delegate and chief spokesman made a statement threatening a “Tamil resistance war” against the Colombo government.
In December 1989 the NEPC/EPRLF put forward a wish list referred to by them as the 19 Point Charter. It followed this up with a resolution on March 1, 1990. These demands were presented as conditions sine qua non for the rescinding of the UDI — and presented the Sri Lankan state with an ultimatum of a year for compliance! The resolution was moved in Council by Chief Minister Vardarajah Perumal.
The list of demands presented by the NEPC at the moment of their Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in March of 1990, are shockingly revelatory. The key passages were those referring to the Sri Lankan armed forces: “Bases of the three forces [were] to be limited to the following places in the North-East: a) Palaly Army Camp b) Karainagar Naval Base c) Thalladi Army Camp d) Vavuniya Josop Camp c) Trincomalee Naval Base f) Trincomalee Air Force Base g) Ampara Kondaivedduvan Army Camp. All other bases other than those mentioned above [were] to be dismantled.
The Army should be removed from Fort Frederick in Trincomalee where the Konesar Temple is situated. This area should be declared a sacred area for Hindus and it should be brought under the administration of the North-East Provincial Government. Similarly the Army and the prison should be removed from the Jaffna Fort and the Kayts Sea Fort and these forts should be declared as museums where rare articles of value should be exhibited to the public. The administration of the forts should also come under the North-East Provincial Government.” (Points 7 and 10 of the March 1, 1990 Resolution of the NEPC)
The demands presented by Vardarajah Perumal give the lie to the tale of a sincere, eager reformism thwarted by the duplicitous Premadasa administration. In actuality Perumal’s game-plan was to trigger a ‘Cyprusization’ or a Bangladesh scenario.
Sri Lanka can never leave room, structurally, for a repetition of Perumal’s challenge to and blackmail of the State, nor permit a base for soliciting, positioning and leveraging external support for such a project.