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Election lunacy

The details of the Saturday morning killing of a young man at Kuliyapitiya in an obviously election related incident starkly focuses national attention on the lunacy that is going on around us in the name of an election campaign. There have been attempts on the part of government politicians and the hurrah boys in the state media to make out that the rest of the press is exaggerating what is going on in the Wayamba right now. The falsity of their claims is clearly revealed in what has happened.

The details we have as this is being written are sketchy. From what we have been able to gather, there has been shooting at the home of a UNP candidate in the dead of the night of Friday/Saturday and one young man has been killed instantly and two others injured. The home that was attacked belonged to a sitting member of the now dissolved North Western Provincial Council who is seeking re-election. The reason for the attack is not clear. But it would be apparent to the smallest child or the meanest intellect that politics is at the bottom of the rot.

We had been hearing ad nauseam about the seventeen years of the UNP’s terror and corruption - dhushanaya and bheeshanaya as it is said in alliterative Sinhalese. It is because the country wanted a change that the UNP was voted out of office and the PA installed in its stead. There was certainly terror in the land, particularly during the JVP’s second abortive adventure in 1988/89. The country was in a state of near anarchy and the government then in office had to resort to extraordinary measures to meet an extraordinary situation.

The 1971 insurrection was a similar event on a lower and less frightening scale. At that time the insurgents were armed with commandeered shotguns and home made hand bombs and not sophisticated T-56 automatics and grenades as in 1988/89. Thanks to then Deputy Defence Minister Ranjan Wijeratne and the determination of the police and the security forces, Sri Lanka which was at the brink was saved from being pushed into total anarchy. This gravest threat in the country’s contemporary history was overcome, it must be said, also because the Indian Peace Keeping Force was taking on the LTTE in the north-east, freeing Lankan troops for duty elsewhere.

Undoubtedly a great deal of what should not have happened did occur in those dark days. It will be pertinent for those who today spout about bheeshanaya and tyre pyres at the drop of a hat to also remember the bodies that floated down the rivers into the sea in 1971 and the similar extra-legal measures that were used by the then United Front government of the SLFP, LSSP and CP. There were tyre pyres too at that time and the paying off of personal and political grudges. But the then opposition stood firm and supported the elected government in office to defeat the attempt to illegally topple it. But the game today is being played in a different way by those who when the chips were down and their own lives at risk did not even whimper about state terror.

What the country fears is that if a single provincial council election, when much less is at stake than at a parliamentary and general election, can generate the violence that we see in the Wayamba, how much more thuggery will be visible when the bigger prizes are up for grabs? That is why it is important for both the PA and the UNP, who seem to regard the contest that we are now approaching to be the first straw in the wind, to even now device collective means of ensuring that this election is concluded peacefully. The government must clearly show the country that justice will not only be done but appears to be done. Its past performance in the matter of police transfers in the NWP and the track records of at least some of its chief campaigners in the Wayamba hardly inspires confidence.

The UNP too, we believe, has not acted wisely in bringing an ex-police officer with the reputation of the former DIG Premadasa Udugampola actively into the fray. While it can be argued that he has not been convicted of any offense, appearances too count in these matters. Perhaps that’s why a tough ex-cop has been flaunted in the faces of supporters of thuggery. The government media is making a big play about ex-brass buttons in the UNP campaign, quite forgetting that the PA too used retired servicemen and policemen in their campaigns in 1994. Many of those who helped the incumbents into office were richly rewarded for their services.

The government media has piously cloaked the PA with great virtue by reporting that the president herself had summoned a notorious activist to 'Temple Trees’ and given him a dressing down. The fact that the wife of a man with a record such as his was given nomination in the first place is a black mark. Secondly, the presidential action followed the ha-ho over three-wheelers being required to display the picture of a particular candidate and the resulting intra-party problems between the SLFP and the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. It would be much more to the point if the leaders on both sides took pains to defuse inter-party tensions between the UNP and the PA.

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