One would have thought that after the people clearly showed that Ranil Wickremesinghe was by far the single most popular politician within the opposition that things would come back to normal, the elephant symbol and the green colour restored to their former place, and the UNP would march with confidence to the parliamentary polls at which they will get at least 40 to 45% more parliamentary seats than they have at present. However, the worries of the UNP are far from over. At the time of going to press, a tense stand off has ensued with the defeated General Fonseka and a coterie of individuals including Arjuna Ranatunga, Tiran Alles, and Senaka de Silva with the backing of the JVP insisting that they do not want to contest under the elephant symbol. The threat they hold out is that if the UNP goes with the elephant as decided last week, they will contest separately, thus splitting the opposition and UNP vote.

What we learn is that Sajith Premadasa is spearheading a campaign to retain the elephant symbol and the green colour at the parliamentary elections, Other less resolute individuals are said to be fretting over the implications of splitting the joint opposition vote by insisting on the elephant. They are also apprehensive of the possibility that the united joint opposition may dissolve into two bickering factions which may hurl more invective at one another than they hurl at the Rajapaksa government. This shows the extent to which these joint opposition strategies can undermine major political parties. The side that wants to contest under the swan does not have any votes. (Indeed it’s not known whether the Fonseka camp will get the swan symbol at all. Ravi Karunananayake has effective control of the symbol and he is said to have refused to give the symbol to anybody. The Fonseka camp is now thought to be contemplating a different symbol.)

Be that as it may, the Fonseka camp can throw a spanner in the works if the UNP fails to fall in line. The question now is whether Wickremesinghe will have the backbone to resist these pressures coming largely from outside and retain the identity of his party. The feedback we get is that the UNP parliamentary group is more or less unanimous in the view that they should contest only under the elephant symbol. However, they have no objections to General Fonseka himself and others like Arjuna Ranatunga and indeed even the JVP contesting under the elephant symbol. The problem here is of inflated egos. The reluctance of Fonseka to contest under the elephant symbol is because he would then be at the beck and call of UNP leader Wickremesinghe.

Sajith steadfast

The fact is that Fonseka was a military officer who has been saluting and taking orders from Wickremesinghe for years if not decades and he can’t possibly have a problem in continuing to take orders from Wickremesinghe especially after it was proved beyond any doubt that the latter is the most popular leader in the opposition. Some people are negotiating at the moment to make N..V.K.K. Weragoda, the Secretary and Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Chairman of the swan party. Asked who would lead this proposed outfit, the answer I get is that they expected both Fonseka and Wickremesinghe to lead it! What is remarkable is that there is an urban-rural divide opening up even with regard to this matter. In the urban areas, there is a significant minority that wants to have the cake and eat it. They want both Fonseka and Wickremesinghe and they are willing to jettison the elephant symbol to make this possible. However in the rural areas, the UNP rank and file want the elephant symbol and the green colour back, no matter what.

From what we hear, Wickremesinghe is quite resolute in the decision that the UNP has to contest under the elephant symbol and not under the swan. He has offered the deputy leadership of the UNF (not UNP) to general Fonseka but the problem is that Fonseka can no longer be chief of staff. He has to be the commander! What Fonseka has been telling people is that the UNP had been without a leg to stand on, having got only around 2.6 million votes at the provincial council elections and that he single handedly had increased that vote to nearly 4.2 million. Therefore the UNP should contest under the swan and his leadership. Tiran Alles for his part has been assiduously canvassing UNPers saying that the alliance that has been forged should not be torn apart and all those who want to split it are fulfilling a contract from Mahinda Rajapaksa! However he insists that the alliance should be preserved not by the general joining the UNP but by the UNP joining the general.

The Fonseka camp is really turning the screws on the UNP and they are targeting those whom they think would be receptive to their cry. Last week, several Buddhist monks had gone to see Karu Jayasuriya and said that the opposition alliance had to be preserved and that the UNP should remain with the swan alliance. Karu J had invited Wickremesinghe also for the meeting. What Wickremesinghe told the venerable monks was that he could not decide whether the party was going to contest further under the swan symbol and that it was a matter that the party had to decide on. He said that he had done everything possible for the common candidate, even going to the extent of announcing publicly that he did not want the prime ministership even though the UNP was by far the biggest party in the alliance. He had done that to help the JVP to get over any embarrassment they may have otherwise had to face. He also said that it was he who had found the money for the campaign and that in that manner he had done everything that was humanly possible and that anything further could be done only with the concurrence of the party.

Of course Wickremwesinghe may be smarting from the slights he had to suffer at the hands of the Fonseka camp. When the presidential election campaign started, Fonseka was addressing Wickremesinghe as ‘Sir’ as he had done for decades. As the days went by, it became ‘Vipaksha nayakathuma’ later the form of address became ‘Mr Wickremesinghe’ in the last few days it became plain ‘Ranil’. Both Wickremesinghe and Tissa Attanayake, the two key office bearers of the grand old party, were kept waiting outside Fonseka’s office while he held discussions with the likes of Alles and Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Readers will note that Fonseka never offered the prime ministership to Wickremesinghe even though he was completely dependent on UNP votes. At one point, Fonseka is said to have told Wickremesinghe that there would be no prime minister in the cabinet he would form after the presidential election! The UNP working committee is due to meet on Feb. 11 and a decision will be made either way at this meeting. All UNP parliamentarians were due to meet Wickremesinghe on Saturday night to convey their views on continuing with this alliance.

Crying foul

Apart from this tug of war within the opposition alliance, last week, we had to watch the embarrassing spectacle of the opposition refusing to come to terms with their defeat. The only opposition politician who gracefully accepted defeat in recent times was S.B.Dissanayake after the central provincial council elections last year. SB was known as the ‘vote machine’ because of his role in fixing elections during Chandrika Kumaratunga’s first term of office. For him to accept a resounding defeat at the hands of a virtual non-entity in the SLFP – even the name of his opponent, the present chief minister, is not readily known in the country and his face is not readily recognized outside the central province – would have been galling. But he swallowed his pride and accepted defeat. When did this habit of not accepting defeat and making various excuses for failing to get elected begin?

Things will become clearer if we divide the past one and a half decades into two periods – before, and after 2001.Wickremesinghe was not responsible for the 1994 defeat, so nobody blamed him for that. Even though Wickremesinghe lost the 1999 presidential election, that did not place him under siege because the manner in which the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime conducted elections was well known. People were certainly disappointed, but not many held the defeat against Wickremesinghe in the backdrop of the infamous Wayamba election held earlier in the year. The people themselves assumed it was rigged, and the leaders did not have to labour the point. The persecution of UNPers by the Kumaratunga regime was such that their primary quarrel was with the PA government and not with Wickremesinghe. There was no need to blame anybody for defeat at the 2000 parliamentary elections because the result was a hung parliament and the UNP came that much closer to overthrowing the government. Then in 2001 the UNP won convincingly. So despite massive electoral fraud by the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime, the UNP made steady political progress during those seven years and it culminated in victory for the UNP. The present woes of the UNP began to manifest themselves only after the party was defeated in 2004. People (quite rightly) began blaming Wickremesinghe for the defeat and he was increasingly placed on the defensive. It would come as a jolt to many to realize that this habit of trotting out excuses for defeat started only a few years ago and Wickremesinghe has not always been on the back foot in this manner.

It’s after the defeat at the 2005 presidential elections that this habit of refusing to acknowledge defeat came into its own. If one looks at it dispassionately, perhaps in 2005, there was some justification for making excuses. The margin of defeat was very narrow and the LTTE did not allow the people of Jaffna to vote. Wickremesinghe did win 10 districts and a large number of electorates. What really undid Wickremesinghe were the staggered provincial council elections from 2008 where the UNP was soundly beaten at every contest. By now this refusal to accept defeat has solidified into a permanent state of denial. A new dimension to this which emerged after last month’s presidential election is that what earlier ailed only the UNP has now infected the entire opposition including the JVP.

In the week after the election the joint opposition tried to build up a case claiming that the election was rigged and the main evidence they presented were comments made by and the body language of the elections commissioner himself. But the latter called a press conference last Thursday and said that the election was free and fair and lashed out at opposition politicians who were trying to distort everything he said to their advantage. The elections commissioner’s rebuff of the opposition was embarrassing to watch.

What SB says

After President Rajapaksa was elected to power in 2005, a radical new development that took place was that the identity card was made mandatory for voting and the leeway which left room for the most common election malpractice - impersonation, was done away with. Before 2005 the votes of those not in the country and the dead and a proportion of the votes of those who did not habitually go to vote, were always cast by other people. This came to a grinding halt after 2005. This country has progressed in the past few years and especially after 2005. If people are told that the per capita income of the country increased by 1,000 US $ in the past four years, whereas it took over 57 years of independence to come to the 1,000 US $ mark, the point really does not sink in even though this is a fact. We are not used to progress at that rate. Similarly, there have been other areas where progress has taken place at a blistering pace - one of them being in the area of conducting elections.

Along with the cessation of impersonation, the stuffing of ballot boxes also ceased largely after the end of Chandrika Kumaratunga’s first term of office in 2001. Scrutiny of the voting process also increased over the past decade with the proliferation of elections monitoring organizations, TV stations, FM radio channels and print media all with their provincial reporters who functioned as unofficial monitors at election time. Virtually every election related incident had a witness often with video or camera footage as well. We have now reached a situation where there are literally dozens of pairs of eyes watching each ballot box. Opposition representatives are allowed to accompany the ballot boxes to the counting centers and this has virtually eliminated old style ballot box stuffing or switching. These developments were accompanied by the election to power in 2005 of a leader who was so phenomenally popular that he had no need to rig elections in order to win.

Last week we had occasion to speak to S.B.Dissanayake, the SLFP politician who probably took election malpractices to their giddy limit. In fact he may be considered the catalyst of change that precipitated the societal backlash against election malpractices which led to the improvements in this sphere that we noted over the past few years. The infamous Wayamba PC election of 1999 for which SB has accepted personal responsibility was in that sense a turning point in the electoral history of this country. He explained that in the old days, when ballot boxes were stuffed the presiding officer would be notified beforehand and they would be told to cooperate in order to avoid trouble. Then the goons would arrive and the votes would be cast. They would not leave before getting the presiding officer to write his report saying that there were no malpractices. The goons would then confiscate the Identity Card of the presiding officer and leave. The ID card would be returned to the officer only the next day.

Today however, that kind of thing has become virtually impossible because of the greater scrutiny at every polling station between 7am and 4pm by multiple official and unofficial observers. Then opposition representatives are allowed to accompany ballot boxes to the counting centers. Over the past four years, these have become well established procedures. Even at the 2008 north central province elections, the UNP candidate Janaka Perera accepted the fact that there were no malpractices at the polling booths or when the boxes were in transit. His accusation was that ‘something’ had happened after the boxes had been brought to the counting centers. After last month’s presidential poll, the story trotted out by Mangala Samaraweera was similar. There were no accusations of ballot stuffing at the polling booths or switching or stuffing boxes which were in transit. He too claimed that malpractices had taken place at the counting centers with the connivance of the senior presiding officers themselves. Hence even the opposition accepts that stuffing or switching boxes is no longer possible. Nor is impersonation possible because of the ID card rule.

SB revealed that before last month’s presidential election the UNP made a request to the elections commissioner not to take the agricultural extension officers for election work on the grounds that they were appointed by the UPFA government. The EC accommodated that request. Then they gave lists of specific names of school principals, education directors and the like to the elections commissioner and requested that they should not be deployed for election duties because they were politically involved. The elections commissioner accommodated that request as well. But the government kept quiet says SB and did not give the elections commissioner any such lists and ask for people to be excluded on the grounds that they supported the opposition.

Allegation boomerangs

SB explained to this columnist that once the boxes are brought to the counting centers, they are opened in the presence of the counting agents of all parties, and the ballot papers are separated according to whom the vote has been cast for and tied into bundles of 50. The winning side becomes known quite quickly. By around 11.30 pm it will be known whose pile of ballot papers is bigger.

What usually happens is that when it becomes clear who is winning, the defeated leave the counting centers before dawn so as not to be found on the streets by the victorious side in the morning. This has been the usual practice at all elections and not just at last month’s presidential election. So the story that opposition members were chased out of the counting centers is not true says SB. If they left, they left of their own accord, as they had been doing at all past elections. Once the ballot papers have been sorted into piles, they are counted one after the other by two officers after which they are tied into bundles of 50. Thereafter, two other offers pick random samples from the bundles of 50 and check whether ballot papers of another candidate have been mistakenly included in the bundle. This is then rechecked by yet another officer. All this is closely watched by the counting agents of the various political parties as well as the various teams of election officers on duty. There is very little room for malpractices at the counting centre explains SB, because of all the people watching. While the counting agents of the losing side may slip away before dawn, the counting agents of the smaller parties often stay on to the very end.

It is virtually impossible to wrap ballots cast for the betel leaf around a bundle of ballots cast for the swan and pass off the whole bundle as betel leaf votes as Mangala Samaraweera had charged. This is because these bundles are checked and re-checked so many times before the final tally is made says SB. If somebody says that such a fraud was perpetrated by the senior presiding officers in exchange for huge bribes, then the implication is that virtually every officer involved in the election process had been bribed and was in on the conspiracy, not to mention the counting agents of all political parties. In any case the UNP is now faced with a new dilemma. Those who believe the poll was rigged in imperceptible way are now asking their leaders, “What steps can you take to prevent this from happening in the future?” To which no answer has been forthcoming. The worry now is that if UNP voters feel that they cannot win against such undetectable electoral fraud, they may just keep away from the polling booth altogether thus reducing the UNP vote even further.