TNA’s clever move

Editorial-September 29, 2013

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has reportedly made another clever political move. It is said to have invited President Mahinda Rajapaksa to visit Jaffna to swear in Chief Minister C. V. Wigneswaran and other members of the newly elected Northern Provincial Council (NPC). It apparently wants to silence its critics by pledging its allegiance to the State through that symbolic gesture while indicating, at the same time, its desire to maintain its distance from Colombo, considered a metaphor for centralised power and unitary status.

The TNA has, in fact, made a virtue of necessity. It will be a comedown for Chief Minister Wigneswaran to be sworn in before Northern Governor Maj. Gen. (retd.) G. A. Chandrasiri the TNA has gone all out to get rid of. Hence its effort to bypass him! The President is expected to make known his response shortly. It will be interesting to see whether the President accepts the invitation and goes all the way to Jaffna to swear in the new Chief Minister and others on the TNA’s terms.

Politically speaking, if he does so, it will be just swings and roundabouts for him. Will he turn down the TNA’s invitation so that it will have to bite the bullet and have Wigneswaran sworn in before its bete noire, Governor Chandrasiri or will he invite the TNA councillors to Colombo to impress on them that he is the boss?

The TNA threw in its lot with former Army Commander Gen. (retd.) Sarath Fonseka when he ran for President. It went at full pelt in an abortive bid to enable him to defeat President Rajapaksa, a civilian. It was part of the Opposition coalition which argued that the US had elected Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general turned politician, President and, therefore, Gen. Fonseka’s military background was no disqualification for him to lead the country. They also produced a list of several ex-service personnel serving as public officials at that time including Secretary of Defence Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, in support of their argument.

Had the TNA as well as its allies succeeded in their endeavour in 2010 and Gen. Fonseka won, its chief minister would have had to be sworn in before a former army chief turned President! How could it justify its campaign to remove the Northern  Governor on the grounds that he is a former Jaffna security forces commander?

The government has been equally hypocritical; its anti-SF campaign was premised on the much-publicised claim that ex-military personnel were not fit for political office, but it has no qualms about appointing them Governors!

Politicians and sportsmen

Transport Minister Kumara Welgama is reported to have lamented that defeated politicians never so much as look at winners after electoral contests unlike sportsmen who concede defeat graciously and shake hands with their competitors. Yes, if politicians come forward to contest elections to serve the public as they claim, there is no reason why they couldn’t respect popular verdicts and bow out.

But, by no stretch of the imagination could anyone expect politicians to exude sportsmanship—fairness, respect for one’s opponent and graciousness in winning or losing—because politics, as Churchill has said, is an earnest business and not a game. It was Will Rogers, famous for his not-so-lambent wit, who once remarked that politics had become so expensive that it cost a lot of money even to be defeated.

When a greedy politician loses an election and his investment goes down the gurgler with his dream of recovering it with compound interest, as it were, being dashed, it is only natural that he becomes too resentful to be gracious in defeat. Bu