The latest hero to emerge on Sri Lanka’s political stage is Mangala Samaraweera. At a time when Mahinda Rajapaksa had established his dominance in the politics of the south, Mangala Samaraweera had the boldness to pose a powerful challenge to the President. By his rebellious move against the powers of the day he put forward a serious indictment against the President. Mangala’s instant revolt, comparable to a sudden cavalry attack, did not bury Rajapaksa’s government but caused grievous damage to the President and to his regime.
The ultra – revolutionary struggle begun by Mangala Samaraweera, however, initially moved forward only by one small step; he permitted Sripathi Sooriarachchi to launch the second attack and then he himself took two steps back.
But before he stopped his initial outcry, Mangala said many things. He said he would join the government only if it was prepared to change its path; he attacked the “Rajapaksa Brothers’ Company”. One of his key demands was that First Brothers Gotabhaya and Basil be removed from the administration.
However, these trumpeted conditions were not taken up at the discussions held between Mangala and the government, aimed at creating the backdrop for young Samaraweera to re-join the fold. Instead, predominance was given to what he himself would get in the event of a return to the establishment, and to the stance of the government in regard to Sripathi Sooriyarachchi and Tiran Alles.
Mangala Samarawera was furious when he realized that he was only being offered the Ministry of Water Management in place of the influential Ministry of Ports and Aviation, which he had held before being sacked from cabinet; and so he gave up the idea of re-joining the government and opted to function as a backbencher, without making public criticisms of the government.
It was quite a sudden move when Mangala and Sripathi opted to sit in the opposition. The move took place only after they had received an assurance from “someone” that they would not loose their seats in parliament if they did in fact cross-over. After the dramatic move, Samaraweera announced a new political programme to bring “democracy” back to the land. His publicized programme was similar to the one formulated by Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake when they were sacked from the UNP in 1991.
Mangala Samaraweera says that his intention is to guide the SLFP back to the middle path enunciated by its founder S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. He says that his aim is to steer the SLFP back into being a democratic party, with an inner democracy to show to the voters of this country. He also talks of the need to build a united front of democratic forces in order to rescue the country from its slide towards dictatorship. He asks why he cannot form a United Front with the UNP, if it was possible for Lalith and Gamini, who had deprived Sirimavo Bandaranaike of her civic rights, to form a united front with that lady later on in their political careers. Both Mangala Samaraweera and Sripathi Sooriyarachchi appear to have a bias towards comparing themselves to Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake.
We cannot deprive Mangala Samaraweera of the right to correct his mistakes and turn over a new leaf. According to Buddhist scriptures, Angulimala, a mass murderer, became a good man after listening to the Buddha preach. However, a bad man does not become good merely by changing sides. Angulimala, who was a villain, was able to become pure when he realized the gravity of his offence and genuinely regretted the error of his ways. Mangala Samaraweera, on the other hand, has not so far expressed regret at his own flawed conduct over the last fifteen years or so, and a discussion of this matter is vital in the light of the crisis currently facing the country.
Mangala Samarawera and Sripathi Sooriyarachchi have compared their recent political moves to those taken by Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake in the early ’90s, and so it is important to look back at the impeachment move initiated by those two senior politicians against President Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Going by facts revealed subsequently, Athulathmudali and Dissanayake initiated an impeachment motion against President Premadasa without the assurance of the minimum number of votes necessary for such a move. In that sense, the move may be considered to be a political coup, attempted with the Speaker’s support. Along with the Speaker, the two rebel UNPers believed that, in the atmosphere created by an impeachment motion, they would receive the required parliamentary support. What happened instead was that even some of the parliamentarians who had signed up with the rebels joined President Premadasa in the end. The final outcome was that the attempted impeachment failed and its plotters even lost their seats in parliament.
Although that impeachment move highlighted the people’s fear of the Premadasa government, widened the democratic space in the country, and finally contributed to a change of administration, it did not cause a structural change to take place in the political system and it failed to take the country beyond a traditional change of government. We must also not forget that the leaders on both sides of that battle ultimately lost their lives. Consequently the country lost three political giants who we could well refer to as leaders, and the country saw a period when the reign of political dwarfs began.
An accusation leveled by Mangala Samaraweera against the current head of state is that President Rajapaksa has kept the bigger part of the ministerial monetary cake for himself and distributed an insignificant part of it among the rest of the ministers in his cabinet. According to Samaraweera, the President controls the ministries with 70% of the budget allocations, while more than a hundred ministers receive the remaining 30%.
Mangala Samaraweera himself received a very big portion of that cake in the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime. At that time he was curiously silent about the injustice done to others. During the early Rajapaksa period too, one of the bigger portions of the cake, namely the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Ports and Aviation originally went to Mangala. While the President enjoyed the biggest share of the cake, Mangala enjoyed the next biggest share. When Mangala Samaraweera was served cake with a shovel, the others in the cabinet were served with a tea spoon; but in the face of this unequal serving he did not speak a word in support of equality.
The next serious allegation made by Mangala Samaraweera against President Rajapaksa is that he has taken the SLFP away from SWRD Bandaranaike’s middle path and pushed it towards a political extreme. He chooses to forget, when saying this, that he himself, along with President Kumaratunga, pushed the SLFP along an extreme racist path well before the current regime came to power. When Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP came to power in the 2002 parliamentary elections, it was Mangala who turned the SLFP into a prisoner of the JVP, in order to destabilize the UNP government. It was after this that the SLFP and President Kumaratunga were pushed along a path of Sinhala chauvinism. Mangala gave strength to the JVP and turned the SLFP into its minion. President Mahinda Rajapaksa is a logical outcome of that historical process, not its creator. The creator of that process is Mangala Samaraweera.
Mangala Samaraweera is responsible for the creation of a substantial part, if not the whole, of the crisis the country faces today. In 2002, when the power of the executive President was with the United Front, parliamentary power went to the UNP and this was considered to be a natural and logical result of the constitutional process. If the status quo had been allowed to take its natural course, the future of the country might not be as bleak as it is today. But Mangala Samaraweera was in the forefront of the programme to topple the UNP government which had clear majority support in parliament. Mangala changed the path of the SLFP by launching a campaign against the peace process and pushed the SLFP into adopting a hard-line stance on the ethnic issue. Mangala Samaraweera, and no other, created the conditions in which the United Front Government could not survive without the support of the JVP, which “artificially” won more seats in parliament than its real electoral strength should have permitted. And, after pushing the SLFP to the brink of racism, he now finds fault with President Mahinda Rajapaksa for the SLFP’s bigotry and intolerance.
And what does Mangala Samaraweera, who speaks of corruption and waste under the Rajapaksa administration, have to say about the corruption and waste that existed in the institutions that were once under his own control? When Ravaya levelled accusations at him regarding the installation of a lift costing Rs 10 million, built for his mother’s use and paid for by the Ports Authority, Mangala’s retort was that he would not be taking the lift home with him when he left office. Clearly, he did not see that ten million rupees of state funds being used for his mother’s personal benefit fell into the category of “corruption”.
Equipped with a short term memory, Mangala Samaraweera also accuses the government of pushing the country towards a semi-police state. In saying this he forgets the preposterous manner in which, in the period of Chandrika Kumaratunge’s administration, the PSD was used, with Mangala’s knowledge, to harass opponents. He forgets the role played then by the notorious underworld assassins Beddegane Sanjiva and Dhammika Perera.
While he currently levels charges against President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Mangala himself consistently defended President Chandrika Kumaratunga in public whenever charges of corruption were levelled against her. If he means to imply that Mahinda Rajapaksa is corrupt while Chandrika Kumaratunga was not, we may need to question his policy of exposing corruption in a person he dislikes and concealing the corruption of a person with whom he shares a fellow feeling. We need, in this context, to question the sincerity of his “anti- corruption policy”.
The political drama currently being presented by Mangala Samaraweera is undoubtedly thrilling; it may be exciting, it may be exhilarating, but it is not honest. Mangala Samaraweera is not opposed to deceit in general. He is only opposed to acts of deceit on the part of those he does not like.