Battling The Blues

By Uditha Devapriya –NOVEMBER 1, 2021

Uditha Devapriya

Older than the Ashes and one of the oldest encounters of its kind, the Royal-Thomian kicked off three days ago amidst a gloomy spectacle of rain and thunder. This is one of the longest running school cricket matches in the world, clocking in 142 years. It is also one of the most celebrated, certainly one of the most hyped. Its reputation rests on the fact that, as some of its more fervent spectators and fans would say, “It stops for nothing.” Having survived the rigours of two world wars, a 30 year civil war, and much political turmoil, the boast is well-earned: few school events have been held up anywhere as highly as this.

The match almost stopped last year, and almost never happened this year. That it came to be held on both occasions, even as the much older Eton Harrow encounter had to be put on hold due to the pandemic in England, belies its importance for passionate old boys. For Sri Lankans in general, it signifies a sense of continuity, the need to move on.

It’s a different story with the country’s politics. The Royal-Thomian is also called the Battle of the Blues, because of the colour blue in both schools’ crests. For the government and its opponents, and even its allies and supporters, by contrast, it’s been a case of battling the blues. With one crisis following another, only to be followed by yet another, the regime is pitted against too vast a set of forces – social, political, economic, and cultural – to think of surviving until the next bout of elections, let alone winning them. We are seeing the most acute clash of ideas to hit the streets in a long time. This is the most polarised we have ever been in living memory. The government is going through the biggest crisis of legitimacy any administration here has seen since the 1980s. And we are feeling the heat.

Two years after it came to power promising peace, prosperity, and stability, what has the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government got to show for itself? Largely owing to the pandemic, very little. To be fair, the crisis we are seeing through now has not entirely been its doing: this is why whatever judgement we can make of Mr Rajapaksa will have to wait until 2024. But for the people, what might have been offers little consolation for what is happening.

For two years the government has been trying to address problems afflicting the country and the economy, as well as the people. That it has failed to resolve them, and managed at the same time to entangle itself in several standoffs, does it no credit.

Its problems began with the constituencies that the governing party, the SLPP, pandered to and won two years ago. Postal votes are a good indicator of election results in Sri Lanka. They are a gauge of middle-class sentiment and they offer a hint as to election outcomes. In November 2019 Mr Rajapaksa won a majority of these votes: from Colombo to Hambantota, bureaucrats and government workers voted against a regime seen to have compromised on development and national security. Together with the peasantry, sections of the country’s minorities, and Colombo’s upper bourgeoisie, they made up the largest electoral bloc any administration had seen since 1977. As C. A. Chandraprema was to say of the parliamentary elections eight months later, they gave the SLPP “the mother of all landslides.”

The problem with landslides is that they are easy to win, but hard to keep. In 2015 a not-so overwhelming majority pushed Mahinda Rajapaksa out of power in the belief that replacing his family with another set of politicians would usher in development and progress. It was a rude awakening for many. Besieged by its contradictions, the yahapalana regime dissolved quickly into a battleground of factions and sects, dissolving further into squabbling within parties. By the end of the second year, a consensus had grown that if all it took to prop up the country was to keep away the Rajapaksas, their successors had failed spectacularly and a return of the Rajapaksas wouldn’t be so bad. Fears of policy turnarounds and of bartering no less than the island’s sovereignty, epitomised well by the controversial MCC agreement, stoked much discontent. A thudding defeat was in the air.

Paradoxically, the yahapalana government made it possible, not merely for a Rajapaksa restoration, but for the election of the former president’s brother. Parallels with Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew notwithstanding, there was little that stood in Mr Gotabaya’s way. He had a world to win and a country to preside over. In November 2019, then, almost every community, including sections of ethnic minorities, gave him support. Even political commentators who had penned diatribes against him raised the possibility of better days ahead under him. Few thought otherwise: among them, Dayan Jayatilleka stood out. This was as it should be: no one wanted to back a dead horse, and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP, for all its history and heritage, seemed like a relic of some distant, dark past.

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