JUGGERNAUT vs. STILL-WATERS

By Rajpal Abeynayake in the Southern, Uva and Sabaragamuwa provinces

This writer is presently in the so-called Sinhala heartland, where the presidential stakes 2010, could potentially be decided.
Make no mistake. The visibility of the Mahinda Rajapaksa juggernaut fades the Fonseka campaign’s visibility by far, by comparison in these districts. On a scale, say if the Rajapaksa campaign can be given 10 visibility points in these areas, the Fonseka campaign can be given 1 visibility point. The difference in scale of the propaganda machinery is that big.
The grassroots sentiment may be a different matter altogether, however, and that’s another story. The ‘vox populi’ random people’s sample done by this writer in the Southern Sabaragamuwa and Uva provinces is carried ar right on this page.
In sum, the grassroots sentiment in the south seems to be tied while in Uva and Sabragamuwa, the president seems to have an edge —- a slight edge in Uva, and perhaps a considerable edge in Sabaragamuwa. (That is discounting the plantation Tamil votes in Uva which were essentially not sampled.)

Humdinger

All of this seems to indicate to this writer that this election would be a humdinger that would go down to the wire, come the 26th.
That being said, the visibility of the Rajapaksa campaign being far more pronounced — overall on the surface, the president seems to have a visible edge in this race.
However, it necessarily has to be said that going by mere visibility in the south is no way to predict the outcome of this election as things stand now.
Obviously the Tamil and Muslim votes and perhaps the votes in Colombo and Kandy districts which seem to favour the common opposition backed candidate need to be factored into this race.
Now, about those Tamil votes:
The UNP seems to be confident of garnering an add-on Tamil vote (as Ranil Wickremesinghe puts it elsewhere in an interview in these pages...) due to the declared TNA support. The president needs the Tamil vote also badly in this dead heat poll, and therefore he too, as is known, wooed the TNA support which he didn’t get.
But he has the support of Pillayan, Karuna and Douglas Devananda which he says would garner him a large percentage of the Tamil vote.
Nevertheless, after the TNA support went to the common opposition candidate, the government made many claims that this support was gained by Fonseka by being a traitor and agreeing to the preposterous conditions of the TNA.
However, this line of attack against the opposition common candidate, each time it is launched, also risks the possibility of endangering whatever Tamil vote that the president already has. The simple equation is: If the president says the common opposition candidate agreed to certain unreasonable Tamil demands, he effectively is clear that those demands are not justified.
The Tamil population will not be happy with any politician who maintains their demands are not legitimate, and therefore, it’s clear that the traitor attack on Fonseka on the basis of TNA support, can be counter-productive to Rajapaksa vis-a-vis the Tamil vote.
It’s why this line of attack on Fonseka seems to have ended last week. Instead, the Rajapaksa election machinery is shifting the focus onto development issues, and the issues of character that concern Fonseka, as projected by the government.
These character attacks on Fonseka last week ranged the gamut from alleged HiCorp deals and some scurrilous attacks regarding certain transgressions of Fonseka, allegedly when he was in the army, which were aired on state television.
The Rajapaksa supporters in all three provinces this writer visited, are vociferous and articulate. They say their man won the war - - and his personality has been magnified in this regard. Those who cheer him on do so openly and have raised him to demi-god status.
The Fonseka support as is discernible, is more on cost of living issues - - and also on the fact that Rajapaksa, according to Fonseka supporters, cannot be credited with sole ownership of the war success. But it also appears that the Fonska supporters are not out there in society, moving and in the open, in the face of the massive and visible Rajapaksa juggernaut.
Particularly after the violence in Ranna last week in which a woman supporter of Fonseka was shot dead in a drive-by shooting, the common candidate’s supporters are muted; they will declare their support either in hushed tones, or withhold their names and identities as seen in the vox populi sampling on this page.
This could show that the surface image of a Rajapaksa edge in these polls could be seriously flawed, and that there is subterranean support for Fonseka though it is not articulated in the face of the violence and the Rajapaksa juggernaut.
But in the main — the surface visibility is miles ahead for Rajapaksa and this much is very clear, and cannot be disputed. This is both in Uva and Sabaragamuwa, though in the south, as far as this writer could see on the ground, the race is tied.
In the circumstances of this close race, which could become closer if Fonseka’s subterranean support is bigger than estimated, it is clear why the president has not given up on the Tamil vote.
Last week, the government gave Sivajilingam, the maverick TNA parliamentarian, the permission to take custody of Prabhakaran’s father’s body, which was seen as an attempt to woo Tamil votes away from Fonseka and towards himself.
The president also visited the Nallur Kovil and had successful rallies in the north and the east, with Karuna and Pillayan by his side in the east. His message was clear — if the common candidate can do something good with the Tamil voter base, we can do it better....
Of course the president constantly keeps his sights on his base — which is why he invited a child blinded in a LTTE mortar attack in Etavetunuweva, to Temple Trees last week. He bought the kid a toy car at his request and said special education for him in Braille would be arranged.
This much is clear. The lines are getting clearly delineated in these last few days before the votes are cast. The president has a big war-winning pro-Mahinda pro-Sinhala juggernaut which could still provide him a landslide in the Sinhala voter base.
The challenger the General seems to have a subterranean, essentially cost of living and grievance based protest vote in this same electorate. However, this support is essentially rather silent, and less visible.

Withdraw

The negative for Rajapaksa in having a juggernaut is that it also means people associate his campaign with the violence, and the intimidation and the misuse of media and state resources — a fact confirmed by the elections commissioner last week who threatened to withdraw the competent authority as he is being ignored by government supporters. The Mahinda juggernaut in other words though highly visible and articulate, can be also counter-productive in a certain sense.
Fonseka’s subterranean support in the south on the other hand can be negative for him for obvious reasons — it might not have sufficient visibility for him to get onto his side the floating last minute deciding votes. His war hero image also may be rather unsuccessful, if the president walks away with the Sinhala war winning Monarch’s image in a big way.
However, Fonseka’s positive in having this relative low profile in the Sinhala heartland is that if he wins a substantial subterranean Sinhala vote, the low profile he had in the Sinhala heartland may help him win the clinching Tamil votes. He may be seen as the lesser Sinhala chauvinist, giving him the distinct edge with the minorities.
Though establishing a juggernaut in the south may give him the votes he needs to tip him over the finish line, Rajapaksa in this race, if he does not get the Sinhala landslide he wants, may lose on the probably deciding Tamil votes, due to his campaign being essentially Sinhala based. Fonseka may lose on the other hand if his below-surface Sinhala votes don’t materialize.
So this is a classic chess game of positions.
It seem as if this chess contest may be heading for a draw - - but in politics there are no drawn games.
So does anybody have a gambit now to deliver to the other side the inevitable check-mate in this bitterly contested deadlocked chess? Who knows.