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Let us face it, both presidential candidates Messrs. Rajapakse and Wickremesinghe are on a now familiar trail of ‘manipulating’ the ethnic crisis as a vehicle for their electoral success each in his own way. On one hand, we have the prime minister on a bizarre course of aligning himself through written commitments with extreme Sinhala-Buddhist forces such as the JHU and JVP which espouse what tantamount to a militarist solution with minimum ‘concessions’ to the Tamils while at the same time speaking of a ‘negotiated’ solution within a ‘unitary’ constitution. Even the P-TOMS agreement which is a mere temporary aid sharing administrative mechanism for the north-east which was most affected by the 26 December 2004 Tsunami is anathema to the JHU/JVP combine . One wonders as to what he intends discussing at his proposed meeting with the LTTE leader! Clearly, Mr. Rajapakse is banking on the bulk of the Sinhala-Buddhist constituency with inroads even into the traditional UNP vote bank which does not exclude the Muslims particularly in the east.
On the other hand, his rival the leader of the opposition, projects a seemingly ‘moderate’ stance vis-à-vis the ethnic conflict with his verbal commitment to P-TOMS and a ‘federal’ form of government. Of course, the extent to which he is willing to go towards federalism has never been spelt out. It should also be noted that it was the UNP under his leadership that literally tore up in parliament the devolution proposals of 2000 which was a diluted version of the 1995 PA proposals. Even the breakdown of the post-2002 negotiation process took place under his government in April 2003 in the immediate aftermath of the LTTE being insensitively kept out of the Washington, D.C. preparatory meeting for the Tokyo donor conference. Mr. Wickremesinghe’s seemingly ‘moderate’ stance on the ethnic conflict evidently expects to harvest the vast majority of the minority vote, particularly that of Tamils of all description while keeping in tact the bulk of the traditional UNP vote bank. The opposition leader’s stance seems to be at least on paper a shrewder tactic, given the presumably general all-round reluctance to venture into another high intensity military conflict and external realities. If as is possible, the Tamil voter turn-out in the north-east is low, it could spell serious trouble to Mr. Wichremesinghe.
