By Veeragathy Thanabalasingham
The nominations for the Local Government (LG) Elections will be accepted by the Election Commission from tomorrow (17) until Thursday (20) and the long-delayed elections are expected to be held in early May.
As for Opposition parties, whether it is the old parties in the south or the Tamil nationalist parties in the north, they have been struggling to find a place and voice for themselves in the new political milieu after two national elections last year.
These parties have not regained public support and are not strong enough organisationally to prepare themselves to face another round of elections just a few months after the Presidential and Parliamentary Elections. However, there is a compulsion for them to enter the fray in order to remain in politics. Their attempts to forge alliances have not been successful.
A referendum on the Govt.
The United National Party (UNP) and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which dominated politics for many decades, do not even have the popular support that the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) had five years ago. The Sri Lanka Podujana Peranuna (SLPP) of the Rajapaksas is now a shadow of its former self.
In this context, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) led by Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa remains the second largest political force, although with reduced popular support.
Attempts by the UNP to reach an agreement with the SJB to jointly contest the LG Elections have not made any progress, as was widely expected. Politicians from both parties want to work together, but the egos of and personality clashes between former President Ranil Wickremesinghe and Premadasa have been the main stumbling block.
According to news reports, the UNP has given the SJB time until next Thursday (20) to decide on contesting the elections together for the Colombo Municipal Council. Senior UNP members have stated that if the SJB agrees to expand the alliance to other local bodies, an announcement could be made before the deadline. It is very likely that both parties will contest the elections separately.
Most parties in the south, which have lost public support significantly, are likely to contest as small alliances or separately. As for the ruling JVP-led National People’s Power (NPP), the LG Elections will be a referendum on its past six-month rule.
The people who rejected the old political parties and brought the NPP to power with great expectations are somewhat dissatisfied because they have not seen any significant relief in relation to economic hardships.
The Government has failed to fulfil promises made to the people in the last two elections. But it cannot be said that there has been a change in the minds of the people to the extent that they will support Opposition parties at the elections in a remarkable way.
An important question concerns to what extent people will be interested in the LG Elections as they have been forced to face three elections within a span of seven months and the Government they brought to power has not been able to meet their expectations.
Northern parties in turmoil
In this context, the Tamil political parties, which suffered a setback unprecedented in the electoral history of the Northern and Eastern Provinces a few months ago, have also made attempts to forge alliances to face local elections. But as usual, they were unable to reach an agreement.
Leaders of the Tamil parties do not seem to fully realise the actual reasons why President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s NPP won a large number of seats at the Parliamentary Elections in the north and east.
It was Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF) Leader Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam who was the first to make an effort to unite the Tamil parties after the Parliamentary Elections. He declared that his aim was to bring the Tamil parties together to propose solutions to the ethnic problem when the NPP Government began the process of drafting a new constitution.
Ponnambalam held talks with Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK) Parliamentary Group Leader Sivagnanam Shritharan and Democratic Tamil National Alliance (DTNA) Member of Parliament (MP) Selvam Adaikalanathan.
He also met and handed over a letter to ITAK Acting Leader C.V.K. Sivagnanam seeking his cooperation. However, his efforts were hampered after the ITAK informed him of its position on the new constitution.
It seems the response of the ITAK was based on the fact that there was no need to rush into the matter now, since the Government had announced that the process of drafting a new constitution would be carried out only after three years. The party’s position is that there is nothing for the Tamil parties to consider in the absence of any constitutional reform proposed by the Government to address the national ethnic question.
Shritharan, who was initially interested in collaborating with Ponnambalam, had to face discomfort after his party’s stance was announced. It is obvious that he is unable to exercise his influence in the Central Committee of the ITAK, which takes all decisions regarding the activities of the party.
The party is currently under the control of former Parliamentarian and President’s Counsel Mathiaparanan Abraham Sumanthiran, who lost to Shritharan in the election for the post of leader of the ITAK in January last year. However, he was able to become the Acting General Secretary of the party recently and is in full control of its activities regarding the local polls.
There is no doubt that the party’s position on the drafting process for a new constitution is based on Sumanthiran’s thinking. It seems that Shritharan, who has acted against the party’s position on several issues including the Presidential Election, is now in a difficult situation where he cannot publicly do anything in collaboration with Ponnambalam.
After the last Parliamentary Elections, Ponnambalam, contrary to his past stance, showed interest in cooperating with the ITAK, especially its parliamentary group with Shritharan as Leader. Ponnambalam openly commented that it was undemocratic for the ITAK, a party that is key to efforts to find solutions to the problems of Tamils, to be under the control of those who were rejected by the people at the recent Parliamentary Elections.
In January, the Central Committee of the ITAK appointed a seven-member committee to engage in negotiations with other Tamil parties on positions to be taken by them during the drafting process for a new constitution. Although Shritharan was a member of the committee, it would not have been difficult for anyone to understand that the action was aimed at preventing his arbitrary participation in Ponnambalam’s efforts as the Leader of the ITAK parliamentary group.
Meanwhile, Ponnambalam, in an interview with The Hindu Colombo correspondent Meera Srinivasan a few days ago, said that political parties representing the Tamil people in the north and east had no choice but to consolidate their presence in Parliament to effectively challenge the Dissanayake Government and assert the rights of the Tamil people.
“The Tamil people wanted to teach the traditional Tamil nationalist parties including us a lesson... our vote share nearly halved. If we don’t pick up the pieces and see the writing on the wall, the next election will be disastrous… we must work together in Parliament,” he further stated.
In Ponnambalam’s assessment, the electoral setback of Tamil parties was caused mainly by “an erosion” of Tamil nationalist politics.
Failure to revive the TNA
Be that as it may, ITAK Acting Leader Sivagnanam recently embarked on an attempt to revive the defunct Tamil National Alliance (TNA). To this end, he approached the leaders of former alliance partners – the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), and Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO).
The leaders of these three parties, who had convinced Sivagnanam with their views that they were interested in functioning as the TNA again, met the very next day and formed a coalition for the local elections, including six other Tamil groups with the Democratic Tamil National Alliance.
Dissatisfied with this, Sivagnanam wrote them a letter objecting to their conduct. PLOTE Leader Dharmalingam Sithadthan sent a reply to this letter explaining their position regarding the reunion and elections.
The position of the leaders of the DTNA is that there is no need to revive the TNA and that it is appropriate for the ITAK to join the DTNA already formed by them. Early last year, when Shritharan announced that he would take steps to unite all Tamil parties immediately after winning the election for the leader of the ITAK, DTNA Spokesman Suresh Premachandran asserted that there was no need for a new alliance.
Responding to Sithadthan, Sivagnanam said in a statement that the ITAK was not a small party to join the DTNA and that it was the main political movement of the Sri Lankan Tamils. The party will be contesting the LG Elections alone and vowed to capture all 17 local bodies in the Jaffna District.
Ponnambalam’s TNPF and former Chief Minister of the Northern Province C.V. Wigneswaran’s Tamil People’s National Alliance are likely to contest separately. We are likely to see the same despicable situation in the LG Elections as seen during the Parliamentary Elections in the north.
Sumanthiran recently reiterated his previous position that the best strategy was to join hands to form the administrations of the local bodies after the Tamil parties had won seats in these bodies separately. Early last year, when the ITAK took such a position, PLOTE and TELO left the TNA and declared the DTNA, which was already registered with the Election Commission, as their electoral movement.
Lessons not learnt?
It is difficult to expect that the Tamil parties, which suffered a major setback at the Parliamentary Elections, will be able to regain the confidence of the Tamil people even if they contest the LG Elections together. There is no clear indication that the leaders of these parties have conducted an introspection among themselves as to the real reasons for their rejection by the Tamil people in the north last year.
If the leaders of the Tamil parties think that the people of the north rejected them at the Parliamentary Elections only because they did not contest together, they are wrong again. The Tamil parties will be further isolated from the Tamil people if they continue to chant the slogans of nationalist politics without changing their political attitudes to suit the demands of the present situation.
Despite having captured the largest number of seats in the north and east at the Parliamentary Elections, President Dissanayake and his Government have not shown any willingness to find a solution to the political problems of the Tamil people over the past six months. The Government is not ready to talk about at least the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which has been part of the Constitution for almost four decades.
Thus, the Local Government Elections will reveal whether there has been a change of mood among the Tamil people towards the NPP or whether a situation where Tamil parties contest separately will be favourable again for the Government. (The writer is a senior journalist based in Colombo) -(Courtesy- The Sunday Morning)
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