Wickramasinghe’s hope, power and the elite

“The popularly known capitalist United National Party, UNP, after President Premadasa’s demise, has seen one of the ugliest elite campaigns in the recent past of holding on to power. Wickramasinghe, despite the Batalanda disrepute, perceived country-wide and beyond the Indian Ocean as a gentleman, deliberately failed to exhibit his gentry by refusing to step down after repeated defeats.”
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By Maduranga Rathnayake

(December 21, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) The wholly Europeanised, English speaking wealthy class, the so-called elite of all communities, sharing the common latent agenda of dominance and suppression, a lot who have been eruditely misinterpreted to be above differences, took over the governance from colonial rulers and ventured to build the so-called independent nation on the rules constructed by them, these elites, for themselves.

The Sinhala, particularly the Sinhala-Buddhist, majority was flawlessly tricked by Bandaranayake in the mid 1950s, at the cost of permanently marginalising the Tamil masses already unrest, by only partially opening up educational and employment opportunities to semi-urban and rural Sinhala society, not dissimilar to the colonial policy of creating an English speaking administrative-assistants’ class in the country, creating a generation of new servile middle and seemingly upper-middle class, most of whom still venerate the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, SLFP, and Bandaranayakes for this eternal gesture of empathy. The Bandaranyake policy destroyed the local private entrepreneurship thus nipping in the bud a local wealthy Mudalali class who could have overridden the European-mannered elites. The Tamils were equally hoodwinked by the Tamil elites who have been utterly inconsistent, often opportunistic, misusing ethnicity as means of survival, yet finally succumbing to non-vellala uprising from within. The demise of Pirapaharan, however, is a blessing in disguise for the steadily vanishing Tamil elite.

The post independence era saw a continuous process of fortification of the elite class, surviving two southern-insurrections and a thirty-year long bloody Tamil war, power at the centre always changing elite hands. One exception there was. It took two wars, JVP’s southern insurrection and the then LTTE’s northern war which was at a critical phase, for the then outgoing President Jayawardene to nominate R. Premadasa as the presidential candidate. President Premadasa was passionately hated by the elite whose wishes were vicariously granted within years by the LTTE, re-instating the elite. Mahinda Rajapakse, a lawyer, coming from a southern politician and rich landed family, though seen as ending the Bandaranayakes’ lineal claim to rule, however, strategically pursued an ultra Sinhala- Buddhist nationalistic policy supported by the new rich elites amidst allegations of corruption and nepotism of monumental proportions, thus missing an ideal fortuity to “de-elite” power at the centre.

The popularly known capitalist United National Party, UNP, after President Premadasa’s demise, has seen one of the ugliest elite campaigns in the recent past of holding on to power. Wickramasinghe, despite the Batalanda disrepute, perceived country-wide and beyond the Indian Ocean as a gentleman, deliberately failed to exhibit his gentry by refusing to step down after repeated defeats. S.B. Dissanayake’s latest cross-over and a series of previous failed attempts in the UNP to oust Wickramasinghe are evident of how deep-rooted the elitism in the UNP. It is unfortunate that Dissanayake gave in to this elitist force and chose the easy-way-out; slamming Wickramasinghe in his up-country vernacular and fleeing the UNP.

Wickramasinghe’s bold hope to “function as executive prime minister” is clearly a result of his belief in the impregnability of the elitist facade of his party, Wickramasinghe’s UNP and the Colombo elite in general. The hideous logic of Wickramasinghe’s hope; if General Fonseka is elected as the President he must immediately hand over the executive powers to Wickramasinghe upon a constitutional amendment; a divine command “let only an elite rule”?

General Fonseka, though circumstantially ineligible, constitutionally as well as from a social point-of-view is eligible to challenge Rajapakse regime democratically, if elected and not give in to anybody’s hopes, then, would certainly set a new paradigm in the country’s politics and would be a severe blow to the hereditary power-base.

-Sri Lanka Guardian