CLASSIFIED | POLITICS | TERRORISM | OPINION | VIEWS

The Budget Battle is over!

Courtesy The Island 15-12-2007

The government has secured the passage of its budget hands down with a majority of 47 votes. The Opposition could muster only 67 votes while the government got 114. The JVP abstained as we editorially pointed out while many others speculated it would vote against the budget and bring down the government. Even if the JVP had voted with the Opposition, the government would still have won comfortably. The SLMC made an abortive attempt to dislodge the government by voting with the UNP. Minister Anura Bandaranaike took a blind plunge by crossing over at the eleventh hour and had a pratfall. It was yet another massive political miscalculation on his part or on the part of his advisors.

Yesterday, we saw yet another example of how the main political parties were being consumed with acrimony and animosity, if not downright hatred. Disunity among the southern politicians belonging to the main political parties is said to have stood in the way of evolving a political solution to the conflict. Political consensus is something alien to them and cooperation anathema. They seem to believe that the raison d’etre of the government is to conspire all the time to destroy the Opposition and vice versa. If they channel ten per cent of the time and energy they are expending on their campaigns to bring about the downfall of each other for nation building, this country would be a much better place in no time. They agree only on their pay hikes, better perks and privileges.

Their critics are right to some extent in arguing that the disunity among the southern politicians has prevented the resolution of the conflict as was said earlier, because they are engaged in petty political tussles at the expense of the much needed southern consensus. (However, those critics hardly blame the LTTE’s intransigence and belligerence which are two main reasons for the perpetuation of the conflict.)

The SLFP and the UNP have not only put paid to the emergence of a political consensus as regards a negotiated settlement but also made a tremendous contribution to the survival of the LTTE by playing politics with national security to achieve their political objectives. The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa made a costly blunder by resuscitating the LTTE only to pay for it with his dear life for that mistake a few years later in 1993. Before that the LTTE had obtained from him many a thing it needed for launching the next phase of its war—funds, arms and ammunition and cement.

Ms Chandrika Kumaratunga followed suit by suspending all military offensives against the outfit after she became President in 1994. (She has the predilection for standing anything on its head.) She derailed her predecessor President Wijetunga’s military campaign and the LTTE was given another lease of life only to resume war one year later. It is she who laid the foundation for the internationalisation of the conflict to the present level. Cajoled by blandishments and driven by her half-baked liberal thinking which made her play to the international gallery, she involved Norway in her short-lived peace process. The Norwegians disappeared in 1995, when the LTTE torpedoed a ceasefire with her government by striking at the Trincomalee harbour. In 2000, she unveiled her package of constitutional reforms in Parliament—Regional Councils. The UNP and the JVP got together and shot it down.

In 2002, the UNF government entered into a truce with the LTTE. Its real objective was not making peace but winning the support of the international community and creating conditions for President Kumaratunga’s ouster. The Norwegians returned and the international community came to interfere with the country’s internal affairs as never before. Today, we have the whole caboodle of foreign envoys openly criticising state policies and some of them are even trying to topple governments!

It is against this backdrop that the events in the run up to Friday’s budget vote should be viewed. Yesterday’s crucial vote had to do with anything but the budget. It was a battle between two camps, one representing the nationalists and the other non-nationalists, including separatists, for supremacy. It may be wrong for anyone to paint a black picture of the UNP and project it as a proxy of the separatists, though obviously the separatist lobby and its foreign allies banked on it to achieve their objectives albeit in vain. In 1994, the SLFP played the same role as the present-day UNP, pandering to the whims of scheming foreign powers. The two main parities have, from time to time, placed themselves as draught animals at the disposal of the separatist lobby and its foreign agents. If the UNP were waging war and seeking passage of its war budget, the SLFP would go all out to derail the war effort. So, neither party can claim to be holier-than-thou!

It is our collective misfortune that we have been burdened with such political parties and politicians who never subjugate their political ambitions to the national interest. They agree on neither waging war nor making peace. While they are at each other’s jugular over the war effort, the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) is flying with one wing without the participation of the main Opposition party, the UNP. It is like a man without a woman trying to produce a child all by himself!

The government is cock-a-hoop following its win. We hear firecrackers being lit. This is no time for celebrations. There is a half finished war and a growth retarded peace process. The people are starving. President Rajapaksa has promises to keep and a long way to go before celebrations begin. He ought to be magnanimous without going on a witch hunt against those who sought to scuttle his budget.

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