The election of a non-UNP, progressive Mayor for Colombo will be, of course, duly recorded, replete with cliches. Watershed, pathbreaking, unprecedented, breaking the mould are all descriptions that are bound to be used. However, the clichéd appellations will be correct.
The trick is not to be carried away by the extent of the change, but to look for possibilities. But delving into the history and the circumstances would not hurt.
Of the past 25 Mayors of the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) since 1944, all but one have been from the UNP. Only Dr. N. M. Perera in 1954-56 was a non-UNP Mayor, and that was clearly an aberration. (Before 1944, there were four Mayors, but more about that later.)
The UNP had been so sure of the Colombo Mayoralty that it was taken for granted. Colombo was a bastion of the bourgeoisie without a doubt. The power-equation in the local administration reflected that.
There were no two ways about it. The UNP was used to taking Colombo as of right. The SJB General Secretary said recently that there was so much money in the CMC that the SJB must have sway over it. Just like that. There was no hiding it. It was entitlement on steroids. Someone may say that the SJB is not the UNP, but you get the idea.
There were men such as Sugathadasa and M. H. Mohamed and Sirisena Cooray who had made a petty fiefdom of Colombo, and they believed to a certain extent that they were running the country if they were running Colombo. They were not, of course, but the illusion and optics could have fooled many.
From the first Mayor of Colombo, to the last, the privileged have ruled Colombo with a sprinkling of doughty fighters such as A. E. Goonesinghe being among the mix in the early days. Ratnasothy Saravanamuttu was the first Mayor of Colombo, and he had his hands full dealing with the World War II and overseeing evacuations in the face of the threat of Japanese attacks.
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There were those such as R. A. de Mel after whom Duplication Road was named very much later. All of these gentlemen knew how to exercise power on behalf of the privileged, ostensibly for the good of the ordinary people.
Did Colombo benefit? Somebody could at best muster a yes and a no. Of course, spanking new roads, spacious and tree-strewn garden city areas, were all a legacy from those days of rule by the haves for the have-nots. But until very recently at least, it was hell to walk along the crummy streets of Kotahena where slums were the order of the day, or other outlying areas of the city such as Mattakkuliya where the fate of the poor was much the same as it was for those in Colombo 13.
Some would say it was the job of the Government to uplift the poor, and that the only duty of the CMC after all was to collect taxes and provide amenities. But people couldn’t help but have the feeling that the Mayor downwards in most of the administrations took city dwellers for granted.
Why not? They and their ilk from the UNP were guaranteed to be elected each time the city ratepayers voted. People had almost no choice in the matter. The leaders in every community had aligned themselves with Colombo’s ruling party, which was unassailable.
But it seemed, beneath that calm veneer, people had always harboured a quiet sense of resentment. They were present for the community Vigilance Committee meetings and in those city flats, impossibly called condominiums, were dutifully paying heed to the rules of the residents’ Councils. Garbage disposal was not the strong suit of almost any CMC administration, but sometimes whenever necessary, people learned to live with the smell.
They also learned to live with the smell sporadically of rotten politics in the CMC administration. Once when the UNP list was rejected because they had included a juvenile under the age of eligibility among the list of candidates, a twenty-two-year-old three-wheeler driver was the proxy-Mayor on behalf of the Colombo elites.
Those worthies such as Karu Jayasuriya, they said, tried their best, but if the best they could muster was to clear the garbage and get the street names put up, people wouldn’t have minded slightly more lax administrations either, to be somewhat blasé about it.
Then came the first female Mayor Rosy Senanayake, who was the incumbent before power was snatched away from the UNP this week. She was something else. She must have believed that the best must be served up last, and so there were giddy spending splurges, millions on residential toilets, parking rackets which benefited flyby night cronies, and generally an ungainly recipe for intemperate rule under her Mayoralty.
It was a fitting end to the sense of entitlement of the UNP, that the people of the city had come to resent over the years. This Lady was basically showing them the middle-finger. Nicety was to be damned.
Residence
If she was going to spend Rs. 20 million redoing her residence, toilets and all, so be it. Her receptions were legendary too, for how lavish they were for the chosen few.
The people, for all they cared, could eat cake and stuff the garbage. But this was the modus operandi of the UNP for Colombo. Entitlement was writ large and there was a feeling that Colombo was so fashionably UNP that the people would be too shy to buck that uncomfortable historical trend.
Most of the Colombo Mayors were of a certain mould. They were filthy rich or were well networked in the party. Either that or they were used to treating Colombo as their private borough. The Vincent Perera, Muzzamil and Sirisena Cooray types were all of this mould.
It can be argued that some of the UNP Mayors had done their fair bit for Colombo and, of course, that is partially true. But that doesn’t mean people didn’t want to pass the torch to a new lot that will represent a more diverse and less privileged cohort of ratepayers.
After all, the Colombo city is not a Sports Club or a social club for the elite. It doesn’t exist for people to show of the roll of past Mayors as if it was a family heirloom.
The Colombo city, in other words, is nobody’s private fiefdom, nor a happy hunting ground for a certain class of social elites. It shouldn’t exude the vibe of a school Old Boys’ Association or a service Club such as Rotary or Lions.
The people have returned Colombo to a state that was obtainable way back in the past in the early 40s. After all, long ago, Dr. N.M. Perera was the Mayor of Colombo, and before that the champion of the labour class A. E. Goonesinghe held the post.
There was room for leftists and progressives at that time. There was no lien on the Mayoralty, and the people under the Kelaniya Bridge, or the Kalani Paalama folk, also thought their votes counted.
A word too, about how the minority vote affected the Colombo Mayoralty. Some of the more recent Mayors have serially been Muslims and this is due to the political expediency in having a member from that community as a Mayoral candidate due to the increasing Muslim population in the city. These demographic shifts are reality, and couldn’t be ignored even if people tried.
But in an unprecedented manner, a majority of Muslims switched their allegiance to the NPP at the recent electoral outings beginning last year, from the Presidential election onwards. It means that the newly elected Mayor Ms. Vraie Cally Balthazaar has support across the board, including healthy minority backing.
For the first time since the late Dr. N.M. Perera in 1954, Colombo now has a non-UNP left-of-centre Mayor, and if that doesn’t signal that Colombo is ready for change, what does?
