Less than a month after the end of the Fourth Eelam War, the state-owned weekly Silumina carried a full-page interview with a Sri Lankan astrologer. 'President Mahinda Rajapakse and the Rajapakses will rule this country for a long time,' he predicted. 'The next chapter in Sri Lanka is reserved for the Rajapakses.' In Sri Lanka astrology is serious business, with politicians avidly soliciting favourable predictions. The political importance accorded to astrology by the Rajapakses was also on display when the authorities arrested an astrologer in June 2009 for making an anti-government prediction.
On 8 September, the last remaining obstacle to the establishment of this Rajapakse future crumbled. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution is a sui generis piece of legislation, designed to suit the politico-dynastic requirements of the president and his family. It enhanced the powers of the president even while removing the term limits that would bind him. Otherwise, President Mahinda Rajapakse would have had to retire from politics in 2017, an utterly unpalatable prospect from a personal perspective, and disastrously premature from a dynastic perspective. Retirement would not only deprive the president and his family of the power that comes from confirmed expectations, but in turn would make them vulnerable to political, propaganda, and perhaps legal attacks by opponents and erstwhile supporters, given the polarisation they have created in Sri Lankan politics. President Rajapakse would also want to stay president until his eldest son, neophyte parliamentarian Namal, amasses enough years and experience to succeed him.
The term-limit removal is compounded by the decisive tilting of the electoral playing field in favour of the United People's Freedom Alliance ruling coalition. The 18th Amendment empowers the president to appoint key public officials, including the election commissioner and the inspector-general of police, as well as members to independent commissions. This confluence of uncontrolled authority will render impossible even marginally free and fair elections, and the Rajapakses as a family should be able to retain power for more than a decade, via nominally democratic elections with predetermined outcomes.
In certain situations, optimism can be dangerously misleading. When the ruling coalition asked for a two-thirds mandate at the parliamentary elections in April, many believed that President Rajapakse would use this to strengthen the legislature, as promised in his election manifesto. Others believed that he would implement a reasonable political solution to the ethnic problem. Anyone who suggested that the president would use a two-thirds mandate to prolong Rajapakse rule was dismissed as suffering from Rajapakse-phobia or Rajapakse-animus. In a society where many professed to believe that a war could be conducted for four years without causing a single civilian casualty, credulity can be limitless; once you swallow the canard of 'humanitarian offensives' or that of 'welfare villages', any lie can supplant the truth, so long as it is camouflaged by beguiling words.