The emasculation of the Sri Lankan right-wing is almost total and irreversible. If not etched in stone, at least it is complete. The dominance of the progressive-wing in the past few decades has been near unassailable.
If it is said that there was a brief interregnum when the Yahapalana UNP was in power, and that the right-wingers had their day in the sun, that line of reasoning would be specious. There was no right-wing in power during the brief and ill-fated era of the Yahapalana administration, as it was a cohabitation agreement in which a UNP Government shared power with a President who was formerly of the progressive side of the aisle.
That the President never converted to becoming a right-winger even though his political location was fluid. So, there was no right-wing in power, either under Ranil Wickremesinghe in 2015-19 or under him in 2022-24. In the latter period, he was led by the nose by a so-called progressive Legislature, comprising MPs elected under the Pohottuwa banner, which was by no means right-wing.
So, when were the Sri Lankan right-of-centre forces in power last? You’d have to wrack your memory to conclude that it was the far-right Government of the powerful old-timer Ranasinghe Premadasa that last had proper right-wing credentials in the remembered past.
After that, the UNP was almost completely shackled under the leadership of Ranil Wickremesinghe who, of course, had several running battles with the other frontliners over the UNP leadership.
SUCCESSION
He didn’t succeed in any bids for power in the interim, and that’s part of our modern political lore.
The party was serially defeated at elections except briefly in 2001, and at the 2015 Parliamentary polls, at which the party managed to form a Government which, of course, as stated above, was under the control of a President from a so-called progressive party, the SLFP.
The aforementioned almost total capitulation of the UNP and its successor right-wing parties to the progressive left-of-centre in this country, is an ignominious blot on the politics of the right-wing.
They cannot easily be given a label either, these UNPers and their successors, the way right-wingers are normally called Conservatives in a lot of other countries. We don’t have Conservative politics, and neither do we have liberal politics in this country, for that matter, and that presents a nomenclature problem.
But we have a right-flank in our national political arrangement which is taken to be UNP, and by virtue of succession, now the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB). Even though not easily labelled, however, the right-wing is easily identifiable and these days, it is helmed by two political old-timers, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa.
It seems that the two of them are equally jinxed. Ranil Wickremesinghe never got the UNP off the ground, and is generally credited with its declining fortunes in the post Jayewardene-Premadasa era, but it is it probably not fair to lay the entire blame for the crisis of the right-wing in this country on Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa alone.
The UNP and the SJB have both had a leadership crisis of calamitous proportions. Both parties have not been able to move the needle against the trend of victories by ‘progressive’ parties.
In some of these cases, the ‘progressives’ that defeated them were nationalist or ultra-nationalist parties in reality. It means that the SJB and UNP leaderships were completely outmanoeuvered and couldn’t read the national pulse.
The UNP chronically couldn’t find a proper candidate to run, and on many occasions, chose to go with a common candidate so called.
What does that mean? The party’s leadership vacuum was extremely serious. Moreover, the party leader probably wanted to run the country through the agency of the common candidate who was elected. This, when tried with Maithripala Sirisena, who was elected in 2015, miserably failed as a tactic.
However, the leadership vacuum in the two parties: the SJB and the UNP is not merely at the top. It runs through the length and breadth of both parties, meaning that there is no middle-level leadership or any possible candidates for succession anywhere in sight.
The people are expected to vote for these two parties in spite of these glaring shortcomings. But voters are not inclined to vote for parties that cannot get their internal act together, despite lofty promises made on election platforms.
Both parties seem to fulfill an elite and not a people’s agenda, despite cosmetic efforts on the platform to attract the centre ground. The centre-ground consisting of so-called swing voters is generally rather discerning and would not vote for parties that have weak leaderships with past track records that are far less than attractive, to put it mildly.
Direction
That both these parties lost to a new political formation at the last Presidential and general election should have told them that the people detest the direction in which they are heading.
But have they made any attempt at transformation, or projecting a new image? None whatsoever. There is no internal party reformation, and neither is there anything in the nature of post-mortems or self-appraisals after debacles at elections. Leave alone post-mortems, there is no acknowledgment that there were debacles in the first place.
This way these two parties — both taken as one entity at least for the sake of argument — are basically begging for a replacement right-wing anytime soon. Only an entirely new political arrangement would appease diehard right-wingers who would not dream of ever voting for or supporting a so- called progressive or left-leaning party in their lives.
This, then, is a terrible state of affairs for those who dominated politics in the 80s and late 70s to such an extent that there was no progressive politics that could be taken seriously in this country at all at that time.
Was it Jayewardene’s fault? Didn’t he have any type of viable succession in mind? Perhaps, it was Veluppillai Prabhakaran’s fault.
Prabhakaran decimated the viable succession plan that J. R. Jayewardene had in mind. If Lalith Athulathmudali, Gamini Dissanayake and others we’re not eliminated as a result of Prabhakaran’s killing-machine, it would be very probable that Sri Lankan politics would have taken a very different turn.
However, even if those iconic giants of the time, Lalith and Gamini were alive, by now, it would have been time for a new leadership to take over.
The same crop of leaders that have now created the shambolic vacuum in the UNP and successor right-wing parties, it can be argued, may have been the current leadership contenders even if Lalith and Gamini and the others were able to do politics until their retirement.
But had that been the case, perhaps the entire complexion of domestic politics would have been drastically different from what it is today. Perhaps a new leadership would have been nurtured by those who would have succeeded J.R. Jayewardene, hadn’t Prabhakaran’s sickening routine of elimination taken place.
Today’s emasculated right-wing means one thing, which is that there is essentially only one type of politics in the country. This effective lack of competition for the progressive parties means mainstream politics is suffering from a distortion of sorts. It’s fine as long as the people are satisfied with the status quo and major problems similar to the 2022 crisis are averted.
But this situation doesn’t augur well for a country that wants to live up to its full potential. The right-wing is bereft of ideas, bereft of leadership and is playing a very poor second-fiddle to the progressive parties that have been dominant for decades.
It means we lack essential competitiveness in our politics, which at least below the surface, shows a distortion of the structural arrangement that’s necessary for any functioning modern day democracy.
People could be the only agents of change in this situation because nothing much can be expected of the right-wing leadership, which, as said before, is satisfied with mediocre results, and being comfortably unchallenged from within their respective parties. It would have been a ridiculous state of affairs that would have been seen as such in any other country, but apparently not in ours.
