PA's campaign lacklustre without Chandrika

By Nirupama Subramanian

COLOMBO, OCT. 4. When the Sri Lankan President, Mrs. Chandrika Kumaratunga, left on a private visit to London late last week, it might have been out of sheer confidence that her party, the People's Alliance (PA) coalition, was so sure of victory in the October 10 parliamentary elections that her guidance was not required in the final crucial days of the campaign.

But surveys published over the weekend have indicated that the two major Sri Lankan political groups, the PA and the United National Party (UNP), are in a dead heat.

Even that is good news to the politicians of the ruling coalition who are battling to retain power for a second term through a campaign that has so far been totally lacklustre. Even in its traditional strongholds in central Sri Lanka and the districts in the deep south, the PA's campaign has nowhere reached the tempo it had in 1994.

One reason is that Mrs. Kumaratunga, the PA's main star, was confined to the security of her home, Temple Trees, through most of the campaign. Though she attempted to contribute to it by meeting select groups of people from various sections of society at home, the effort was led mainly by the newly-appointed Prime Minister, Mr. Ratnasiri Wickramanayke, who is singularly lacking in charisma.

In 1994, when there was a massive wave in favour of changing the UNP Government, the PA only scraped through to forming the Government. This time, PA campaign managers are nervously looking at the possibility of an even bleaker result.

For any political party that has spent six years in power, to suffer some erosion of support is natural, and this is quite true of the PA today.

Voted to power on a mandate for peace, the PA's first term in office was dominated by war after the failure of peace talks with the LTTE in April 1995.

Although there was tremendous support in the majority Sinhala community for Mrs. Kumaratunga's two-pronged plan to defeat the LTTE militarily, and simultaneously isolate it politically by ushering in a new Constitution that would address minority aspirations, the PA lost ground on both counts.

After the initial success and euphoria following the wresting of Jaffna from the LTTE, the Opposition alleges that badly conceived and ill-planned military operations allowed the Tigers to almost recapture the peninsula from the army.

More important than the loss of territory, heavy casualties for the security forces after every failed operation by it, or a big attack by the LTTE, have not helped.

The PA's image took another beating with the new Constitution Bill, which the Government had to withdraw after tabling, when it could not find the required number of parliamentarians to support it. In the process, its alleged attempts to buy over MPs and confrontational attitude towards the country's Buddhist clergy, only lost it more friends.

As a result, the PA manifesto has had to tone down its earlier stand on the Bill and repeat almost exactly what the UNP has been saying: that the party will consult all sections of society, including all political parties and religious groups, to introduce a new Constitution aimed at resolving the ethnic conflict.

Mr. Wickramanayake has suggested that the Bill had lapsed with the dissolution of the last Parliament, and that another one would be formulated only in consultation with the Buddhist Mahasangha.

But more than all this, it has been the escalation in the cost of living that is giving the PA most grief in this campaign. The intensification of the war in April this year contributed to the inflation, but the sharp hike in the prices of essential commodities such as diesel and cooking gas has been partly due to trends in the world economy, not in the control of the Sri Lankan Government. But for the UNP, it has proved a handy stick with which to beat the PA.

Unlike in the presidential election, the PA's attempts to link the UNP and its leader, Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe, with the LTTE have not yet had the required effect. Its other strategy to link him with torture and killings of suspected JVP sympathisers when he was a Minister in the Premadasa Government has also fizzled out.

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