An ethnic polarisation: Preliminary observations of the Sri Lankan presidential election, 2010.

“The simple observation of the 2010 electoral demographics therefore suggest a polarisation between Tamil and Sinhala voters, which in turn suggests that the overwhelming mandate for President Rajapakse’s second term was largely bestowed by the Sinhalese, and not the newly ‘liberated’ Tamils of the North and East.”
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By Dr Kasun Ubayasiri

(January 28, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) Sri Lankan’s January 26, 2010 presidential election is the first in nearly three decades to be held without the cloud of an ethic war in the North and East. It was the first after the government’s military defeat of the LTTE in its so called ‘humanitarian operation’ to ‘liberate’ Tamils form the Tiger controlled north. For the outset it became clear the election was a two party race between incumbent President Rajapakse the political choreographer of the final assault, and General Sarath Fonseka the victorious army commander. For the Sinhala voter it was choice between two war heroes. For the Tamils it was perhaps it was no choice at all.

When the votes were counted, President Mahinda Rajapakse had secured an impressive 57.88% of the vote, decimating his much lauded opponent General Sarath Fonseka with 40.15%. Rajapakse’s landslide winning vote, shows a marked improvement from his 50.29% win over the UNP leader Ranil Wickremasinghe’s 48.43% in 2005, and is second only to Chandrika Kumaratunga’s win in 1994. Interestingly however, Kumaratunga took out the presidency with 62.3% of the national vote, her victory coming on the heels of the hugely unpopular reign of President Ranasinghe Premadasa. It could be argued that Rajapakse, having won a war, should have polled higher – the fly in the electoral ointment however, was that his opponent was no ordinary political player, but also a fellow war hero.

In crude numbers, the President’s electoral victory represents a 1,842,749 vote lead, with Rajapakse polling 6,015,934 votes against Fonseka’s 4,173,185 votes. In terms of polling districts,

Rajapakse secured 14 of the 22 polling districts, while Fonseka was able to secure only six. Rajapakse’s winning margin, while not the largest in Sri Lanka’s electoral history, is certainly resounding.

From an analytical perspective however, the final tally of results and their demographic spread is perhaps even more interesting. Of the six electoral districts secured by Fonseka, the five districts of Jaffna, Wanni, Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Digamadulla in the North and East of the country, virtually map the purported Tamil homeland of Eelam, with the exclusion of the western district of Puttalam on the west coast. While this observation does not contribute to the ideological claim of a separate Eelam homeland, it is undeniable that the regions represent the largest concentration of Tamil speaking people in Sri Lanka. The observation of a Tamil polarisation against Rajapakse, in favour of Fonseka is even more evident when the polling results of Nuwara Eliya in central Sri Lanka are taken into account. While this region is outside the so-called Tamil homeland it contains a significant population of ‘estate Tamils’ of Indian origin, those people brought to Sri Lanka as indentured labour during British colonisation. Nuwara Eliya, was the only polling district outside the North and East to favour Fonseka in an election where he lost even his home electorate of Ambalangoda in southern Sri Lanka’s Galle district.

The simple observation of the 2010 electoral demographics therefore suggest a polarisation between Tamil and Sinhala voters, which in turn suggests that the overwhelming mandate for President Rajapakse’s second term was largely bestowed by the Sinhalese, and not the newly ‘liberated’ Tamils of the North and East.

In the lead up to the elections Dr Wickramabahu Karunaratne the leader of the Trotskyist Nava Sama Samaja Pakshaya (New Social Equality Party) openly claimed his goal was to ensure that neither Rajapakse nor Fonseka received the minimum 50% vote required to prevent a second round of elections. Karunaratne, a veteran but unsuccessful leftist politician, joined forces with Tamil nationalist and former Tamil Nationalist Alliance MP MK Shivajilingham who was contesting as an independent, urging Tamils to vote for either himself or Shivajilingham. Karunaratne argued that both Fonseka and Rajapakse were essentially of the same ilk and were parts of the government ‘war machine’. He argued that army commander Fonseka and the president responsible for the military push against the LTTE, Rajapakse, were responsible for the death, displacement and even internment of thousands of Tamil civilians. In this context it is perhaps interesting to note that despite Karunaratne’s appeal, Tamils in the North and East did not feel compelled to vote for Shivajilingham – the only Tamil candidate – but continued with the established pattern of voting for a major party candidate.

Despite the presence of a record number of presidential hopefuls - 22 individual candidates, all other candidates combined, excluding Rajapakse and Fonseka, polled a mere 1.97% of all votes islandwide. However the Tamil speaking districts showed a greater percentage of votes to non-mainstream candidates. Digamadulla and Trincomalee which contain significant pockets of Sinhala and Muslim voters, despite its predominantly Tamil demographic, polled 2.14% and 2.97% respectively for the non-mainstream candidates. A similar percentage of 2.09% was seen in Nuwara Eliya. Both Batticaloa and Wanni polled 4.87% and 5.83% in favour of non-mainstream candidates with Jaffna polling a staggering 11.41% – a figure which is perhaps to be expected from what was traditionally the epicentre of the Eelam struggle, the quasi-capital of the Eelam nation. 11.53%

It can be argued that these figures are also reflective of the Tamil population’s level of commitment to a Tamil homeland. Certainly those districts which polled highest for a third-party candidate Jaffna (11.41%), Wanni (5.83%) and Batticaloa (4.87%) were, by virtue of their strategic locations, militarily and socially more engaged in the fight for Tamil Eelam in the past 20 years, than the districts of Nuwara Eliya and Digamadulla. It is therefore likely those higher polling areas have more reason to find the choice between an ex-army commander and a wartime president unappealing.

Nation-wide however the minor party candidates were insignificant. This is particularly clear when the 1.97% total for all third parties candidates in 2010 is compared with the results from the 1982 election in which Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader Rohana Wijeweera polled 4.2% of the total votes and All Ceylon Tamil Congress’ GG Ponnambalam secured 2.7% of the national vote. Similarly in 1988, Sri Lanka Mahajana Party’s Oswin Abeygunasekara polled 4.6%, while in 1999 the JVP’s Nandana Gunathilaka landed 4.1%. The election of 2010, by comparison, was clearly a two party race.

It is also worth noting Fonseka polled 63.84%, 66.86% and 68.93% in Jaffna, Wanni and Batticaloa respectively, suggesting support for Fonseka in the eastern district of Batticaloa is comparable with that of the Jaffna and the Wanni – all former LTTE strongholds. The Batticaloa results are particularly interesting since the defection of the LTTE eastern commander Karuna Amman was one of the key politico-military events instrumental in the LTTE’s military defeat at the hands of the government forces. While Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan alias Colonel Karuna may have joined Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party and been appointed Minister of National Integration and SLFP vice-president, it seems the once feared eastern commander no longer holds political sway over the east or more specifically his own home town of Batticaloa.

Given the polling statistics for the two major parties, it’s clear the Tamil voters favoured Fonseka, not only over Rajapakse but also minor candidates. There has been some suggestion that Fonseka had reached an agreement with the politically fragmented Tamil Nationalist Alliance, frequently portrayed in the south as a political nexus of the LTTE. The Rajapakse camp’s claims of a Fonseka-TNA agreement with key TNA MPs including R. Sampanthan, Mavai Senathirajah, Suresh Premachandran and even Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, may have swayed the Tamil vote in favour of Fonseka and the Sinhala vote against him. It is more likely however, that the reason for the lingua-ethnic polarisation of the vote is due to historical political realties which force the Tamils to see Fonseka not as the army commander who orchestrated the final battle against the LTTE, but as the political front of the UNP – a more conservative political partly which is likely to a offer greater compromise to the Tamils despite their obvious political and military disadvantage in Sri Lanka’s post war landscape – a concession unlikely to come from President Rajapakse’s politically dominant and overtly nationalist government. The Tamils may also fear the strengthening of the Rajapakse’s presidency and his ruling SLFP coalition would further decimate any opposition in Sri Lanka, thus delivering power to a south centric ultra-nationalist lobby which is poised to rule virtually uncontested by even its contemporary political ‘opponents’ the UNP and the JVP.

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( The writer, Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is a PhD in Media and Armed Conflict based at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and commentator of the Sri Lankan theatre.)