PM’s losing battle?

Editorial-January 8, 2014, 

The campaign to oust Prime Minister D. M. Jayaratne has taken a dramatic turn with protests spilling over into the streets. Yesterday a group of Buddhist monks held a demonstration opposite his office in Colombo. Instead of drawing in his horns, he has gone on the offensive and incurred the wrath of Buddhist monks.

Curiously, the UNP has refrained from bashing the Prime Minister—not out of any love for him, we reckon, but in a bid to cause a rift in the SLFP by making the anti-PM campaign out to be part of a witch hunt against party seniors who are not in the good books of the powers that be. In fact, this was what former SLFP heavyweight turned UNP MP Mangala Samaraweera told Parliament last month.

However, MP Sajith Premadasa, who represents the UNP rebel faction, has struck a discordant note. He vents his spleen on the PM at every turn. So does the JVP, which has called for Jayaratne’s arrest. All signs are that, at this rate, the PM will find it extremely difficult to hold out longer. None of the government big guns have risen in his defence. Some of them are eyeing his post and others are wary of being seen to be his defenders because of the social stigma attached to narcotics or kudu.

The JHU is struggling to prevent Gen. Sarath Fonseka’s Democratic Party (DP) from eating into its support base. If it succeeds in forcing the PM to resign, it will have something to flaunt at future elections. The JVP is in the same predicament as the JHU with the DP faring reasonably well at provincial polls; it is also losing ground to SF. Hence, its efforts to outdo the JHU in bashing the PM and make some political mileage!

What if the beleaguered Prime Minister who is not in the best of health, buckles under pressure and throws in the towel? The government will be faced with a dilemma. There are several prime ministerial aspirants in the SLFP with some years of politics in them. The next PM, if young enough, will be President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s successor.

An incumbent Prime Minister running for president has a better chance of winning than others in the fray. So, there is bound to be an unseemly scramble among the ambitious senior SLFPers for the post of Prime Minister. This is why Presidents prefer to have elderly politicians without presidential ambitions as Prime Ministers—PM D. B. Wijetunga under President Premadasa, PM Ratnasiri Wickremenayake under President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and PM Jayaratne under President Rajapaksa. There have been two exceptions though—Ranasinghe Premadasa and Mahinda Rajapaksa; they became Prime Ministers under President J. R. Jayewardene and President Kumaratunga (during her second term) respectively. And both of them went on to become Presidents.

Surprisingly, the UNP chose to take up the cudgels for PM Jayaratne without taking time by the forelock to hijack the JHU’s campaign against him, get rid of him and gain some mileage while plunging the government into a crisis in the process.

We don’t intend to subject PM Jayaratne—or anyone else for that matter—to a media trial. His guilt or innocence should be proved in a court of law. But, we are afraid that it looks as if he were left with no alternative but to step down and face a probe. Allegations which led to former war winning Army Chief Gen. Fonseka being cashiered and incarcerated and Chief Justice Dr. Shirani Bandaranaike hounded out of her job, pale into insignificance in comparison to the PM’s admission that he issued a letter to an importer who was subsequently found to have smuggled in a container load of heroin.