Thus spake Wimal Weerawansa

By N Sathiya Moorthy

At a time when parent JVP is running high in opinion polls month after month in the post-Aragalaya period, NFF founder Wimal Weerawansa has been beating what seems to be a dead electoral horse that his one-time SLPP alliance leader has supposedly become.

His recent ‘revelation’ that Namal Rajapaksa was a political burden (to put it mildly) and inducting into politics was his father Mahinda Rajapaksa’s first blunder, to say the least, is crying over spilt milk. Rather, it is milk that the likes of him had spilt and spoilt (or spoilt first and then spilled) in the first place.

The reasons are not far to seek. Ever since he walked out of the JVP when it quit the first Mahinda government (2005-10) with 10 of the party’s 39 MPs in the 225-member Parliament, he was among the greatest of Rajapaksa defenders. He was the JVP’s spokesperson and the best of public speakers when the party walked out the Rajapaksa government.

In a way, the JVP had set the process in motion after contesting the 2006 local government elections independent of the then SLFP-led UPA combine under President Mahinda – and losing miserably, nation-wide. In just six months, Mahinda had simply devoured the JVP’s purported 10-plus per cent vote-share, which had earlier tempted him to continue the inherited alliance, which the Rajapaksas otherwise reportedly felt uncomfortable with.

In the years that followed and given the party’s hugely accepted clean image, the JVP was also finding itself increasingly embarrassed by corruption charges against the ruling Rajapaksa clan, whose ministries controlled nearly 80 per cent of all annual budgetary allocations. Yet, when he walked out of the JVP, Weerawansa had no qualms defending the Rajapaksas inside and outside Parliament, whatever the truth behind those allegations.

Weerawansa could now argue that he had backed Mahinda and other Rajapaksas at the time only in larger national interest, as the armed forces under their collective leadership was tasting victory after victory against the dreaded LTTE. Yet, for more than 10 years after the conclusive and victorious war, he and others were in the very same Rajapaksas, company, whether or not the latter were in power or out of it. In the second Mahinda term and the more recent failed and aborted presidency of younger brother Gotabaya Rasjapaksa, Namal was a Cabinet minister, with Wimal sitting in his company.

Dual citizenship

The truth is that the likes of Weerawansa and also Udaya Gammanpilla, founder of the centre-right PHU, the breakaway faction in turn of the JHU, had had the best of all worlds in the company of the Rajapaksas. Their electoral acumen should still be appreciated, but they are all in the past. They were among the first in the Rajapajksas’ company to turn against the family when continuing in President Gota’s Cabinet with Mahinda as Prime Minister, another brother Basil as Finance Minister later on, not to leave out Chamal, Namal and the former’s son Shasheendra, who was only a junior minister.

Yet, when the two of them began targeting Basil and the Finance Ministry under their care, only the traditional critics of the Rajapaksas, smiled. Others began wondering what had piqued them both, after decades of association. During that period, they along with other SLPP partners had taken orders from the very same man, who was the party’s national organiser.

At no point then or later did any of them question the ‘nationalist’ credentials of Gota and Bail, as they wanted to have the best of dual citizenship, in Sri Lanka and the US. Gota at least reluctantly gave up his American citizenship after he became convinced that he would after all be Mahinda’s (equally reluctant) choice as the SLPP presidential candidate in 2019, with realistic hopes of victory.

Basil, instead, would want to be Sri Lanka’s Finance Minister and also a dual citizen, something that the Supreme Court had ruled out in the ‘Geetha Kumarasinghe case’ as far back as 2017. For Basil, the Gota-Mahinda duo got Parliament to amend the law, rather than asking their dear brother to make his choice. It was incidental that Wimal, Udaya and the traditional Left, or whatever was left of it, had begun turning against Basil.

Credibility and consistency

One does not look for credibility and consistency from politicians, anywhere. It is worse in Sri Lanka, and more so in recent years. Mahinda and his 40-plus MPs had no problem serving in Parliament on the pre-split SLFP ticket, with estranged President Maithripala Sirisena as party chief – and criticising the government, both within and outside the House. Maithiri, for his part, when relationship with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe became too hot to handle, had no hesitation in making Mahinda PM – only to be over-ruled by the Supreme Court, and thankfully so.

Sajith Premadasa and his present-day SJB colleagues were all praise for Ranil when he was their leader, and are now critical of all wrong things from the past, when they were all his comrades-in-arms, or were eating their political meal out of his arms. Ranil and Mahinda, who were always civil to each other but still came from ideologically and socially different backgrounds, are today the best political buddies in the country.

Yet, Wimal and the like should realise, at least now, that their game is up and they all too might have been rendered irrelevant in the politics of the future – possibly more than the Rajapaksas themselves. They wanted to be seen as rebelling against the Rajapaksas and steal their thunder in future elections. Thus, they waited until Gota sacked them from the ministry after Wimal, Udaya and fellow Cabinet Minister Vasudeva Nanayakara went to court against letting an American firm, New Fortress Energy to purchase 40-per cent stake in the Kerawalapitya / Yugadanavi power station in 2021.

If any or all of them thought that such antics would help them in their political future, they too were short-sighted enough not to foresee President Gota’s ability to wreck the boat from within, more than the rest combined. Yes, the Aragalaya protests were unprecedented and thus they too could not have foreseen it – But they, it may have also washed away their individual political future as it might have done it to the Rajapaksas as a clan.

(The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)