(MENAFN- Colombo Gazette) By N Sathiya Moorthy
It takes a lot of courage for a politician-son to distance himself from the legacy of his father, however selective. It is more so when that father had been slain by an adversarial ethno-political group for what he supposedly believed in – and there is a Political legacy and electoral identity that owes to the departed leader that the son could not afford to lose out on – or, can he?
Yet, Sajith Premadasa, in a way at the cross-roads of his political career that refuses to move forward beyond a point, has displayed that courage. Responding to Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena's comment, Sajith has gone on record that he 'never approved of everything' his father did.
Sajith of course is the SJB Leader of the Opposition in Parliament. His father Ranasinghe Premadasa was the nation's President at a crucial juncture in contemporary history, taking credit for some and also discredit for some of his decisions and actions. The credit was all his but when Premadasa, Sr, discredited himself, he discredited the nation, too, with it.
On the issue at hand, PM Gunawardena had referred to President Premadasa putting down trade unions with a heavy hand in his time. His reference specifically was to the Premadasa regime sacking and sending home scores of trade union leaders, for their only crime of fighting for workers' rights.
Not going on silent mode
Any other leader in Sajith's place might have side-stepped the issue, or gone on silent mode for a while before newsmen especially forgot the issue and had moved on to another. Not Sajith, not certainly on this one. Maybe, there was a hidden message for other sections of the nation's electorate that he had an open mind on a host of issues, and was uninfluenced by his father's track-record.
Was it meant for other nations and peoples is another question that would have come up if only Sajith had said what he said in response to a newsman's question. Yet, he had the courage of conviction, so to say, to put it on Parliament's Hansard by saying what he said inside the House.
“I am not a son who follows everything done by Ranasinghe Premadasa merely because he is my father. I will only continue his important and positive programmes,” Sajith told the House.“I will reject if there had been any shortcomings. I will never say that everything done by my father is correct. I am also an independent person,”
It happened thus: PM Gunawardena was responding to a request made by Sajith Premadasa, to cancel the transfer of trade union leaders in a State institution, out of capital Colombo, where it helped their union work too. The Prime Minister, taunting the Opposition Leader, took Sajith's father's name, to contest the claim.
“The current Government does not send State sector employees home like the late President,” the PM said. However, he promised Sajith that he would discuss it with the officials concerned and look into the matter.
Maybe, the PM was not prepared for Sajith's kind of response. Yet, when Sajith spoke up and coolly and confidently distanced himself from some of his father's controversial decisions and actions, Gunawardena very openly felicitated him for it.“It is really great to see you speak on behalf of the trade union leaders unlike your father. I request the Opposition Leader to follow the correct path,” the PM said.
Quelling insurgency
Opinion is still divided, for instance, on Premadasa's handling of the Second JVP Insurgency (1987-89) – rather the brutality meted out to mostly Sinhala youth of either gender in the reproductive age-group. With emergency and media curbs in place, post facto research gave out figures not less than 60,000 and closer to 100,000.
The regime of Premadasa Sr should take the blame for possibly the single largest massacre of youth of both the nation's Sinhala-Buddhist ethnic majority and the Tamil minority than any other. Of course, war crime charges have been tossed up against the regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa close to two decades later, in the decisive Eelam War IV against the LTTE – but not against President Premadasa, for the JVP massacre in particular.
Yet, ask all those innocent victims of the JVP insurgency, and then they would tell you if Premadasa was right or wrong. After all, the President did not belong to the 'victim class' otherwise, and yet, he did what needed doing in the cause of national security. Or, so went the argument.
If one went by whispers and social media rumours about the real motive behind last year's Aragalaya protests – say, an anarchist takeover of the Sri Lankan State apparatus that was what was being plotted and executed in the JVP's Second insurgency. The question arises if it could have been quelled in anyway other than what President Premadasa thought was right.
Incidentally, the international community (read: West) and taking off from it, the Tamil Diaspora and local Tamils have tossed figures varying from 40,000 to 176,000 as the number of 'innocent' Tamils killed. There is no clarity if the figures are for the three decades of war, or of the end-war, or the end-game at Mullivaikkal, where the LTTE, after all, had collected over 300,00 innocent Tamils to serve as human-shields of Prabhakaran and his commanders.
Escaping scrutiny
When the subject is Ranasinghe Premadasa, his handling of the LTTE and the IPKF cannot escape scrutiny, however much it had been done earlier. In setting the LTTE against the IPKF, and funding, financing and arming the LTTE for the purpose, he thought that he was too smart for the other two.
The large Indian nation that had sent the IPKF on a written request from predecessor, JRJ, that 'cunning fox' was one. The other was the other the LTTE, which was already being dreaded as the world's most feared terror group of its times.
Possibly, President Premadasa wanted to tell the urban majority leadership of his ruling UNP that a plains person was as smart as the hill country Gowigama – or, whatever. Premadasa paid for it with his own dear life – as the LTTE, after having ensured that the IPKF was out, targeted him and killed him, that too in public, at the May Day rally in 1993.
It is now admitted that in trying to outsmart India and the LTTE together, in a bid to outshine JRJ, Premadasa, even while alive, exposed his utter lack of expertise and experience in diplomacy, foreign and security relations. If he thought that his tactic of diverting India-supplied weapons to the LTTE for the latter to take on the IPKF helped, it just did not.
Instead, it was his government's straight and simple talk to India, asking the IPKF to go back home, was what made it happen. It proved how the Government of India played by the rule-book and international norms in such matters, and how Premadasa was sadly ill-advised in the matter – and acted accordingly, only to fail himself and fail the nation.
Not looking beyond the nose
One, it was the time - as IPKF commanders in the field would write later and Sri Lankans would confirm - how the IPKF had cornered the LTTE, already but was still fighting the terror outfit 'with hands tied to the back'. A wise and right-thinking President in Premadasa's place would have then taken off from where the IPKF had left and finished it off before it became too late.
It became too late, and not for the LTTE, but for the Sri Lankan armed forces as a fighting force and Premadasa as President, lost out. He faltered again when he commenced political negotiations with the LTTE and gave them the proverbial time that Prabhakaran needed – and knew how to use it – to regroup, rearm and retrain.
The rest, as they say, is history. It is the kind of history that Sajith as a presidential aspirant in the current milieu can learn from – history in which the elected President of the nation refused to, or was possibly incapable of seeing beyond his nose. In this case, it was native Hambantota district politics for starters, and national politics and presidency, for a finish.
There is thus a lot more for Sajith to learn, unlearn or re-learn – in not approving all that his father did, but at the same time, learn what all needs learning.
(The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: )