Sri Lanka's election season commenced with a thunderbolt, a development unthinkable in those heady days six months ago, when the demise of the Tamil Tigers was celebrated with milk-rice and crackers. Most Sinhalese regard President Mahinda Rajapakse, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and Commander of the Army Sarath Fonseka as the 'heroic trinity' responsible for their historic triumph over the LTTE. Today, that war-time triumvirate has collapsed and the Sinhala South is compelled to witness the unseemly sight of its saviours battling each other for power. Until his fallout with the Rajapakse brothers, Fonseka shared most of their ideological and political predilections. A Sinhala supremacist intolerant of dissent, he was a key player in the Rajapakse project of turning Sri Lanka into a Sinhala-dominated national security state. But the Rajapakses also have dynastic ambitions; their brazen attempts at monopolising the credit for defeating the LTTE irked Fonseka, just as his brash effort to claim a lion's share of the credit alarmed the Rajapakses. In this highly charged environment, minor irritants became blistering sores, snowballs heralding the ultimate avalanche.
Dynamic candidacy
Fonseka's entrance into the race has deeply affected the political dynamics of the upcoming election. To begin with, it has united and rejuvenated the United National Party (UNP) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the two major opposition parties. A balance between the government and the opposition is necessary for the political health of any democracy. When the opposition is more powerful than the government, instability becomes endemic; when the opposition is ineffective, it gives the government a sense of power that is not conducive to moderate thinking and conduct. The Rajapakses' plan was to trounce the twice-defeated Ranil Wickremesinghe of the UNP during the presidential election, and use that victory as a springboard to obtain a two-thirds majority at the parliamentary poll, which must take place before 22 April 2010. This would have been sufficient to enable them to craft a constitution suited to their dynastic needs. The Fonseka factor wreaked havoc on this carefully calibrated plan and energised the opposition, thereby partially restoring the essential balance between the government and the opposition.
Beyond a reenergised opposition, the impartiality of Dayananda Dissanayake, the election commissioner, has also emerged as another unexpected obstacle to the Rajapakse behemoth. Through his conduct during the now-concluded nomination process, Dissanayake has already demonstrated that he is determined to ensure a free and fair election. To this end, he plans to set up a competent official body to monitor both state and private media to try and ensure impartial coverage. Dissanayake also stated that proxy candidates, most of the 22 contenders, will not be permitted to use the opportunities granted to them under the constitution to canvass for their paymasters, as has happened in the past. In addition, international election observers have also been invited. Perhaps most significantly, he warned that if polling is marred by violence, the exercise will be declared invalid in the affected constituency and the final national result delayed until re-polling is completed.
Without doubt, the upcoming campaign will be acrimonious, perhaps even bloody, and the result is likely to be a close affair. Rajapakse, with the power and the resources of the state at his command, is likely to win. But it will not be the cakewalk he and his strategists had expected when they opted for the premature presidential poll. If Fonseka can deprive Rajapakse of an outright victory by pushing the election into a second round, the fallout may limit the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) to only a marginal victory at the parliamentary election, thus preventing any legislative intervention in the constitution. The Fonseka factor has now rendered uncertain not only the outcome of the presidential election but also that of the parliamentary polls and thus the very future of the Rajapakse project.