By Dharisha Bastians
In all spheres of life, there is such a thing as quitting while you’re ahead. It’s not rocket science and one would not need to read Machiavelli or Erskine May from cover to cover to learn that, as Lankan cricket skipper Mahela Jayawardane recently demonstrated by his master stroke resignation. Jayawardene’s decision to quit the captaincy came following Sri Lanka’s 1-4 ODI series defeat at the hands of the Indian team earlier this year. His announcement created shockwaves that were fast followed by a clamour for him to remain as Sri Lankan skipper. More importantly, he stepped down at a time when he held a strong place in the Sri Lankan side, both as a much loved captain his team mates could look up to and a world class player.
Embroiled as he is in yet another leadership struggle within his party – from which even his detractors admit he is likely to emerge unscathed – many are the lessons UNP Chief Ranil Wickremesinghe can learn from the Sri Lankan cricket captain. This is perhaps a lesson the UNP Leader learned some years ago; but complacency in his position and a group of inner circle acolytes who have brought about Wickremesinghe’s ruin by their tendency to smile and nod at his every command, has demanded that he must indeed relearn these lessons, although it may already be too late. Chief among them, the fact that a gentleman always knows when to bow out, whether on the playing field or in public life.
A cornered man
Even as this column is being written, speculation is rife that Wickremesinghe is being held hostage in parliament by his own MPs, who are demanding he change the party’s constitution unconditionally. Vajira Abeywardane, mooted for assistant leadership by Wickremesinghe, was allegedly assaulted by the UNP rebel MPs demanding reform inside the committee room where the UNP parliamentary group spent most of its time yesterday, hammering out their leadership issues. Once parliament adjourned, the UNP continued its fight at its Sirikotha Headquarters, a stormy meeting which may well result in a decision on the party leadership being forced out.
Last week, when the UNP’s reforms committee met Wickremesinghe, former loyalists including Gamini Jayawickrema Perera and Tissa Attanayake told him to step down and give way to the demands of the majority of the UNP membership. A cornered Wickremesinghe offered to step down as UNP Leader on the condition that his appointees are given due place as Deputy and Assistant Leaders. When Perera asked him to refrain from issuing conditions to his stepping down, an angry Wickremesinghe shot back – ‘remember who made you party chairman.’ It was an ugly and demeaning scene and with each passing day, Wickremesinghe looks more and more like a desperate, power hungry despot.
It was not always so
In 2005, one might be forgiven for believing that Wickremesinghe seemed to be a politician of better calibre. There he was, fresh from having the presidency snatched away from him because of a LTTE enforced boycott of the poll in the north and east – the very epitome of being hoist by his own petard, given that he lost badly in the south because the people were convinced he was a pro-Tiger traitor. And he was determined to step down from the UNP leadership and allow someone else to carry on the fight. There was an outpouring then of sympathy for the man who had been dealt an unfair hand and even though it is unthinkable in today’s context, a clamour for him to remain at the helm of the Grand Old Party. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s political career is full of missed opportunities but his decision to stay on as party leader after weeks of deliberation may well have been the one that will rewrite his story.
Lost opportunities
It was a time when the people still believed in a negotiated settlement, in a peace process and a time when the fruits of the ceasefire were still fresh in their minds. As chief architect of the process, Wickremesinghe commanded some respect, if not from the more hawkish sections of the country, at least from those who still believed in his commitment to ending the ethnic strife through political engagement rather than military means. Had he exited then, Ranil Wickremesinghe would have departed a hero.
Instead tragically, he finds himself today beset on all sides by a party rank and file that has lost faith in his leadership, loyalists who are abandoning ship and a group of hot headed rebels who are determined to get him out of the leader’s chair by force if necessary. Staying in office these last four years might have cost Ranil Wickremesinghe his place in history. To the citizenry punch-drunk on the military victories and besotted with the proponents of the war, Wickremesinghe is looking more and more like a weak and treacherous leader, a man who might have given the ‘Tigers turned pussy cats’ another lease of life had he remained in power any longer simply because he was unwilling to fight.
The question is what happened to the Ranil Wickremesinghe of 2005? When did he start believing that his career amounted to nothing unless he someday wins the presidency? It is as if Wickremesinghe, once renowned for his statesman-like stance on many things, has been reduced to a power hungry, commonplace politician, willing to go to any lengths to ensure his own survival.
Magnanimous departure
Being learned in political theory and history the way Wickremesinghe is, he must be aware of the glaring examples staring him in the face. Lee Kwan Yu, who being the longest serving Prime Minister in the world, stepped down in 1990, claiming that the time to go was when the people still wanted you to stay. Across the Palk Straits, the magnanimity of Indian Congress Leader Sonia Gandhi for instance when, after leading her party to victory, she stepped aside and allowed Dr. Manmohan Singh to lead her government. In fact the UNP’s own leadership tradition is replete with examples of great statesmen who have given way to the second tier of leadership following not successive losses but a single defeat.
Dudley Senanayake, heir apparent of the United National Party as the son of the party’s founder D.S. Senanayake, humbly bowed out in 1953 following crippling strikes all over the country, allowing Sir John Kotalawela to take over as Premier. In 1970, after facing defeat at the hands of Sirimavo’s United Front government, Dudley promptly handed over the Opposition Leadership to the energetic J.R. Jayewardene, whose task it became to remake the UNP into the party that swept the general election of 1977. Jayewardene himself bided his time within the party, rising through the ranks from as far back as the 1940s, honing his skills and carving out for himself the star status that was to finally afford him the party leadership, rather late in his life.
The waiting game
Once upon a time, Wickremesinghe’s ability to wait in the wings was compared to J.R’s. While the LTTE snuffed out the UNP’s brightest stars, Wickremesinghe remained in the shadows, until in 1994, leadership was thrust upon him. Yet in his capacity as Opposition Leader he did little to prove his mettle or similarity to his uncle, allowing the UNP to languish in the opposition for seven long years despite the government’s single member majority, until LTTE atrocities and military debacles disillusioned the people and brought the economy to a grinding halt in 2001. And he has repeated that performance in his years in opposition under President Mahinda Rajapaksa; sitting pretty and hoping for a miracle in the form of a colossal military debacle or economic disaster that will see the people hand power over to the UNP once more on a silver platter. He has failed to use this period in opposition to do anything that will render the party stronger even in the future – by creating a second tier leadership or injecting life into the party’s many associations that still command substantial political clout in both villages and cities. In his pigheadedness and desire to surround himself with ‘yes men’ of the likes of Malik Samarawickrema, Wickremesinghe has lost all sense of perspective and any connection he might have had to the people of this country. The villages, where the UNP was once strongest, are unlikely to vote for the party for decades to come and even in the towns, where the party’s appeal remains strongest, there is anger and disillusionment towards Ranil Wickremesinghe’s steering of the opposition. A large contingent of his parliamentary group and some of the UNP’s brightest stars are now leading figures in the Rajapaksa administration and despite their discomfiture with the government’s handling of affairs, they find it still preferable to returning to an UNP led by Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Time of reckoning
With the Western Provincial Council elections being another foregone conclusion and the string of election defeats behind him, it bodes well for Wickremesinghe to take stock and do some genuine soul searching before he is literally thrown out on his behind. Heaven knows he came close enough in parliament yesterday. The common, street-thug politician cap is not one Ranil Wickremesinghe wears well and yet his hunger for the party leadership has reduced him to that.
If the UNP’s great sportsman, Dudley Senanayake had been around, he would no doubt have used a cricketing metaphor to tell the present UNP Leader: When the umpire rules you out – you walk. In this eleventh hour, the question is whether sanity will prevail. Wickremesinghe has two choices: He can bet all his money on the party constitution which affords virtually unlimited powers to the leader and cling to power, resulting in a further splintering of the UNP and an erosion of its support base. Or he can look for the better man inside himself, take the gentleman’s course and remain no more where he is so clearly, not wanted.