By Harim Peiris

(Published in the Island of 14^th November 2018)

President Maithripala Sirisena has been crafting his own October revolution in Sri Lanka, sacking a Prime Minster, appointing a new one (who probably did not command support in Parliament), proroguing parliament, reconvening parliament, denying any attempt to dissolve parliament and finally dissolving that august Assembly, a little over three years into its five-year term. A revolution it certainly is because the President dismissed the winner of the August 2015 general elections and appointed the two-time loser (no pun intended) of the elections of 2015, in which elections the popular mandate included ending Rajapaksa rule in Sri Lanka.

The constitutionality of the President’s actions is being challenged before the Supreme Court and as the legal issues are now sub judicia, this article will not comment on the matter. However, the President’s actions besides its constitutionality has political implications and ramifications and it is the politics of President Sirisena’s October revolution which we will examine. The start of the October 2018 revolution probably began as way back as 2015 itself, when despite his shock electoral defeat, Mahinda Rajapakse decided not to retire from politics but continue. This resulted in Sri Lanka essentially having three political leaders with national electoral appeal, Maithri, Ranil and Mahinda. Any two of them combining together, effectively kept out the third. This was essentially the politics of January 2015.

Most probably due to the belt tightening following the debt driven economic growth of the second Rajapakse term, there was no good governance dividend for the electorate, which mid-term has been souring with President Sirisena and PM Wickremasinghe’s supremely ill named unity government.  It also did not require much political sagacity to realize that of the three leaders, one Mahinda Rajapakse was term limit barred from seeking election a third time for the presidency, while the other two were not and likely opponents in 2020. Also, conventional wisdom held that Mahinda and Maithri divided up the SLFP vote base, while the UNP vote bank was solidly behind Ranil Wickramasinghe. While the former continues to hold true, if there is fidelity to the 19^th Amendment to Sri Lanka’s constitution, February 2018’s Local Government election results proved the second thesis wrong. Sirisena had won over more swing voters and UNP supporters than otherwise. Also, Sirisena and his UPFA / SLFP ended up a distant third with 13% of the popular vote demonstrating that Maithripala Sirisena required to team up with one of the two political forces in the country, the UNP or the SLPP to be electorally viable nationally.

The issue is the power of the Executive Presidency

The first political issue is the manner, nature and exercise of executive presidential powers in Sri Lanka, post the war and post the 19^th amendment. Having campaigned on a platform of abolishing the executive presidency, the 19^th amendment was presented as a half way house towards that goal with a severe restriction on the unilateral powers of the presidency. Whether the letter and spirit of the 19^th amendment was violated the Supreme Court will now decide. The political issue is whether the exercise of executive presidential authority was done in an accountable manner. On the face of it, the Friday night after hours, political plans, deals and machinations, hatched in secrecy, is hardly the hall marks of transparency and procedural due process required to make democracy meaningful. Coupled with the mob led takeover of state media, the prime ministerial change had all the hall marks of a coup de eta, albeit a non-violent one.

The second political issue with the October revolution is the independent mandate of the Prime Minister and the legislature.  The office of Prime Minster, is that unlike in the days of Sri Lanka’s absolute monarchs, when the king may appoint whoever he wished as his prime minister and indeed remove the same, in our current republic, the Prime Minister has an independent mandate flowing from the general election to Parliament. The supreme legislature of the country, is indeed supreme legislatively speaking. It’s second function of holding the executive, answerable and accountable to the legislature for their actions, is a necessary feature of any democracy and is also enshrined in our constitution. Sri Lanka’s 1978 constitution creates a political situation where there is the concurrent exercise of twin popular mandates, the mandate of the executive president and the mandate of the legislature. There is a need to balance these both and not let the executive dominate the legislature. This was the letter and spirit of the 19^th Amendment, in the context that many were calling for an abolition of the executive presidency and a return of the executive to be embedded within the legislature.

A free and fair general election

The third political issue is that a general election to parliament must be both free and fair. Free elections are generally the atmosphere in which electors exercise their franchise. Fair elections require that the system in which the elections are held is a level playing field. A key aspect of fairness is the timing of an election. Timing is important in two ways. First a PM and government elected for a term of five years, reasonably expects to serve out that term as long as it commands the confidence of parliament. The middle of a term of office, is always a bad time for governments, where the euphoria of the victory has worn off and the results of its work have not yet borne fruit. Accordingly having the rug pulled under their feet at a time disadvantageous to one side, the incumbent government seriously negates the fairness of the election.   The other aspect of the same issue is should the president be entitled to sack prime ministers and dissolve parliament except within prescribed circumstances, that power may well be exercised again and again for good, bad or no cause.

President Maithripala Sirisena has sprung his own October revolution on Sri Lanka and has selected Mahinda Rajapakse to get a popular mandate to cement the change. Time will tell whether the revolution succeeds or not.

By Harim Peiris

(Published in Groundviews)

As the term of office of the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) concludes this month, Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran, elected from the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), actually from the Illankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK, the TNA not being a recognized political party or alliance), finally and formally broke with the TNA and announced his plans to form a new party, the Tamil Peoples Alliance, perhaps as the successor of the Tamil Peoples Forum which he oversaw and patronized,  for the last several years. As Justice Wigneswaran prepares to form his new political party and take on the traditional ruling elites of the Tamil people gathered under the banner of the Illankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK) led Tamil National Alliance (TNA), it would be useful to examine the track record of the man who would seek to unseat or replace, one of the current pillars of Sri Lankan politics, the veteran Rajavarothian Sambanthan, as the leader of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka.

Despite the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009 and the existence of provincial councils in the rest of the country, the Rajapakse Administration’s policy of seeking to govern in peace time, as in the time of war, meant that it was disinclined to fulfil its constitutional obligation to constitute the Northern Provincial Council. It took increasing international isolation and lack of sympathy for the hardline Rajapakse Administration internationally, to coax it to hold the first ever post-war provincial elections in the North as a concession and constitute the NPC.

Despite the stellar efforts and the example of the Eastern Provincial Council (EPC), which initiated the first step in the defeat of the Rajapakse Administration by refusing to give accent to the “Divi Neguma Bill” and initiating the successful Supreme Court challenge to the same, which consequently saw Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranaike impeached by an over-confident Rajapakse Administration, thereby commencing the slippage of its Sinhala support, who still hold the judiciary in high esteem. The Northern Provincial Council (NPC) under Chief Minister Wigneswaran became a strange creature. It neither had the political imagination nor the courage to take on the Rajapaksa’s at the center as the EPC democratically and judicially did, nor did it go about the urgent task of providing relief and bettering the lot of the people of the Northern Province, all of whom had been at the center of a war for close upon three decades. In fact, in the first year of the NPC’s administration it actually returned unspent money to the Treasury in Colombo, for projects that had been approved and funded but not implemented. In the second year, the Chief Minister engaged in a financial sleight of hand to prevent returning the money and donated all remaining funds to provincial public libraries in the North, in a process which barely passed muster with the relevant Financial Regulations (FRs).

Instead, the Chief Minister busied himself with a rather impractical and  unproductive agenda of passing an endless array of resolutions in the NPC, which dealt with various issues, mostly in the area of accountability during the war years, but this too selectively and with no mention of LTTE culpability or responsibility for the LTTE international crimes of child conscription and assassination of democratic (unarmed) political opponents and dissidents. He was also unwilling to support the resolution which called for the return of and restitution to the Muslims who had been evicted (ethnically cleansed) from Jaffna by the LTTE during the war.

With the change of government in 2015, there was a significant change of policy by the Government towards the Northern Province. For the first time since 1999 and only second time ever since 1982, the Northern Province had voted for the winner of the presidential election in Maithripala Sirisena and that by a huge margin of nearly 75% and President Sirisena was duly grateful to his constituency. An obstructionist and retired military General Chandrasiri were replaced as Governor by S.G.M.S. Palihakkara, who went with clear instructions to bring relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction to the North. This writer, as the then Chairman of the Resettlement Authority, had a ring side seat to painfully watch the Chief Minister, use the power of his office, to obstruct all efforts to use the provincial administration to serve the people, including delaying World Bank funded projects. He spent a couple of years, fighting fruitlessly with the UNDP to get an Australian national and Diaspora activist appointed as his Advisor / Consultant and used the UNDP’s needs assessment process as his weapon of choice against the UNDP.

In hindsight it might not be unfair, having watched for five years to conclude, that the C.V. Wigneswaran, in full agreement with his hardline political backers in the Diaspora and particularly the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) of Gajen Kumar Ponnambalam, was determined to prove that the provincial council was useless, even as an institution of limited devolved executive authority. As much as Velupillai Prabhakaran believed that using poor Tamil children as cannon fodder was acceptable in the greater goal of Tamil Eelam, Chief Minister Wigneswaran clearly believed that using the most vulnerable Tamil war widows, orphans, the homeless and the maimed as continuous “beggar’s wounds” was fair game or collateral damage in his quest to prove to the Tamil people and the world that the provincial council is useless. Rather like Mahinda Rajapakse before him, he has used ethnic nationalism to disguise, poor governance as well as poor service delivery in the Northern Province.  Sadly, another wasted opportunity for Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans.

It has been however in his public political challenge to the moderation and engagement strategy of the TNA and its leader R. Sambanthan, that Wigneswaran has done the most damage to the cause of post war reconciliation in Sri Lanka in general and the Tamil people in particular. Following the end of the war in 2009, the Tamil people were close to the brink of destruction as a people group. Their middle class was decimated, their brightest and best had been forced to flee abroad and worse probably for reconciliation and integration, completely alienated from the Sri Lankan State. It was into this political post war vacuum that the ITAK led TNA, headed by R. Sambanthan stepped in and adroitly marshalled the Tamil people, to use their electoral muscle to politically engage the Sinhala southern polity and seek to pursue reforms of the Sri Lankan state. Reforms which may not have progressed much, but Rome was not built in a day and the alternate of war did not achieve anything for the Tamil people either. Wigneswaran clearly differed with the engagement strategy. He would solely articulate the grievance but never provide a solution. He should then have either followed the moto of his alma mater, “disce aut discede” and resigned as the TNA‘s CM or engaged with Mr. Sambanthan on the policy in private and in intra-party conclaves and behind closed doors. Not grandstand and seek to pressure in public and thereby politically weaken Mr. Sambanthan and the TNA.  The peddling of despair by the former Chief Minister, who was elected to bring help and hope to the Tamil people, was perhaps the saddest aspect of the many missed opportunities of the now unlamented end of the Wigneswaran Administration in the Northern Province.

By Harim Peiris

(Published in the Island of 25^th October 2018)

Hon.SB Dissanayake, currently member of Parliament from the National List, is easily the most active of the political movers and shakers in the SLFP group of sixteen in opposition. He has since resigning from the Government following the failed no confidence motion against the Prime Minster, been fairly active in seeking to make things happen, rather than allow events to run their course. With the term of office of the President ending in January 2020, we should be in full blown presidential election mode, this time next year. Though Parliamentary elections are only due around August 2020, the constitution does allow the President to dissolve Parliament six months before its term is up, so about a month after the presidential election, the winner of that election may dissolve Parliament and actually would be well advised to do so, whoever he or she, may be.

But the SLFP rebel group and reportedly some of the president’s advisors whose thinking is in line with the opposition grouping of the SLFP, are impatient and desire to bring about changes in the government, a lot sooner than the natural end of the Government’s term. However, the political dynamics which drives these processes, the no confidence motion, the attempted caretaker government, whisperings of seeking to defeat the November budget, all require to be examined in the light of independent Sri Lanka’s political history to make any sense of what is going on.

Sri Lanka, like many parts of the democratic world, especially in the Commonwealth countries of former British colonies, have been governed by a basic two-party system where political power is alternated between two major power blocs through period elections. Often after one term and sometimes after two. Our executive presidential system with term limits has also ensured that though a party may continue in office, the executive president and executive authority will change after two terms.

The elections of 2015 were not a major exception to this rule. The Rajapakse Administration seeking an unprecedented third term via provisions of the now defunct 18^th Amendment to the Constitution essentially faced a unified and combined rainbow coalition of the then opposition parties, led by the United National Party and fielded a common candidate, who was incidentally from the incumbent president’s own party. This was a smart tactical move and the choice of candidate had a lot to do with a new fresh face, with no political baggage, who could be a unifying factor for the political elites, that all could rally around. Maithripala Sirisena had been seen for a long time in political circles, but not heard very much and certainly had no political enemies or detractors. Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe believes that if he was the NDF candidate, that the election would still have been and this contention is probably correct. However, it would have been impossible, in a couple of weeks to unify a deeply divided opposition around the then Opposition Leader, who while not exactly polarizing was seen as insufficiently electorally exciting and also it would have offered no incentive for even a small breakaway from the SLFP / UPFA. The rest is history.

A major group of the SLFP did not really break away with President Sirisena, the vast majority joined him after his shock win. Political theory would generally lead to the expectation that the breakaways would gravitate back to where they came from. This was certainly the experience of the UNP as well, which had experienced their own breakaway during opposition days in the form of a rebel group under then Minister Karu Jayasuriya who broke away and supported President Rajapakse, supposedly to help prosecute the war and also pass the 18^th Amendment, eliminating checks and balances in government, for good measure. However, Karu and some though not all the UNP rebels returned to the fold.

The essential political forces driving the Sri Lanka Freedom Party / UPFA back towards the Rajapakse political vehicle of the Sri Lanka Podujana Party (SLPP) is political. Essentially the election results of 2015, was  52% for the winner and 48% for the unsuccessful candidate and most of the political constituency amounting to 48% which backed Mahinda Rajapakse in 2015 are essentially returning to the fold. This is the political pressure which the SLFP has been feeling for a while and is the driving force, motivating those like Hon.S.B. Dissanayke to be as active as he is, in trying to make that happen. True believers in challenging the Rajapaksa’s and seeking to have a left of center political force in the current ruling alliance, such as Ministers Mahinda Amaraweera and Duminda Dissanayake are few and far between within the SLFP.

The Rajapaksa’s though have a serious problem and this is what gives the SLFP opposition group and some of the president’s advisers hope. Their problem is which Rajapakse is to be the presidential candidate or a dynastic succession issue within a modern democratic dynasty. Sri Lanka’s historic experience of dynastic succession during our pre-colonial monarchies are bloody, brutal and bitter. For Sri Lanka’s sake, the Rajapakses who are intent on staying in the political game, need to get it right. Mahinda is term barred, Gotabaya is a foreign (dual) citizen as is Basil, Namal is too young and Chamal does not want the job, unless he has greatness thrust upon him. It is in this situation that the SLFP rebels and their senior advisors and activists are exploring the possibility of a second term for President Sirisena in alliance with the Rajapaksa’s as the standard bearer of the center left forces with a Rajapakse as Prime Minster, even Mahinda who is not term barred for PM, under the broad umbrella of the UPFA, leaving 2025 open for a Rajapakse return to the apex. It is a long shot, but plausible and possible, even probable. Stranger things have happened in Sri Lanka. Time will tell.

By Harim Peiris

(Published in the Island of 20^th September 2018)

President Sirisena several days ago disclosed to the media that he had strongly chided the Attorney General’s Department and the Police Department, specifically the CID, with regard to investigations relating to serving military officials. This was preceded by a special cabinet meeting in which he reportedly had also expressed the same sentiments. To the extent that the President of the Republic strongly criticizes the law enforcement, prosecutorial and justice departments of the Government, the obvious parallel would be with US President Donald Trump who also uses his now famous Twitter account, to both chide his own Attorney General, former Senator Jeff Sessions, Robert Muller, the Independent Counsel investigating possible Russian interference in the US election process and at various times both the FBI and the CIA.

The reason for the US President to take to social media, especially Twitter, to express his ire at the justice system, is that in the United States, the criminal investigative and prosecutorial processes are strongly independent of the executive branch of the government. They are overseen by the legislature, the US Congress. The system of government in the United States strongly separates the three functions of state governance, the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

This is not the case in Sri Lanka. The Attorney General’s Department in particular, is the chief legal advisor to the state and in practice this has meant to the government of the day.  However, it is also meant to be an independent prosecutorial office, but the ability of the AG’s Department to be both government legal advisor and a regulator or enforcer of adherence to the law by government, has in the past always been suspect. Now clearly, they are more independent of the executive, which is why the Presidential recourse to non-performance, is political pressure through a public chiding.

The 19^th Amendment at work

The 19^th Amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka is the signature achievement of the Sirisena / Wickramasinghe Administration elected in 2015. It was seen as a stepping stone to abolishing the executive presidency, a reversal of the previous Administration’s 18^th Amendment and an attempt to strengthen democracy in Sri Lanka through ensuring that we as a nation are governed by laws and institutions and not by populist strongmen occupying the office of executive president.

Accordingly, key appointments are made by the Constitutional Council to a range of Independent Commissions, which administer critical State functions, such as elections and the police, all of which should be independent of the executive. Handing over the management of the careers of police officers, including appointments and promotions from a politicized process to a truly independent Police Commission has eliminated the need for police officers to take orders from politicians to further their own career prospects.  To that extent, the police are free to operate more independently.

Investigating military officers eliminates appearances of impunity

A key allegation against the Sri Lankan State and especially its justice system is that human rights violations and state agent violators do so with impunity. Buttressing this argument is that we have a paucity of cases in which Sri Lanka has prosecuted rights offenders and an even lesser number of convictions in that regard. It is therefore a salutary aspect of Sri Lanka’s democracy and a credit to the robustness of our institutions, if no one is deemed above the law, whether from the political, military, or civil service establishments. Also, due process and protection of the rights of suspects should not be a special privilege conferred on suspect military officers alone. It should be extended to all citizens. It is a cardinal principle of natural justice that everyone is treated equally before the law. Due consideration can and should be given to the rights of suspects including their presumption of innocence. Kishali Pinto Jayawardena in her popular most recent legal column states “In sum ensuring that fairness ensures to all citizens in equal measure in criminal investigation and detention procedures is the basic duty of the state”.

The laws delay

The substantive issue that drew presidential ire, was not per se that military officers are being investigated but that such investigations have not resulted in charges being laid, thereby leaving room for the allegation that the arrests and detentions are a witch hunt with extraneous reasons or mala fide. The frustrations expressed by President Sirisena at the lack of prosecutions or the filing of indictments (criminal charges) against corruption and human rights violation suspects is a frustration felt by a large segment of those who voted and supported the “Yahapalana” mandate for change of 2015. So even at this late stage, some progress on prosecutions would serve the cause of justice in Sri Lanka.

The long periods taken to investigate cases, must be viewed in the context of the protracted legal process in Sri Lanka, where the average case takes ten to fifteen years to conclude. The Bar Association which is busy opposing free trade agreements, may be better advised to focus on some legal reforms which can ensure a speedier delivery of justice. As the old popular adage goes, justice delayed is justice denied.

The extended period of holding suspects in remand custody should also be considered in the context of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), due to be repealed and replaced by the new Counter Terrorism Act (CTA). As Attorney at Law Senaka Perera, President of the Committee for Protecting Rights of Prisoners (CPRP) has claimed that there are one hundred and seven detainees under the PTA against whom charges have not been filed and many have been in remand for over nine or ten years. Hence the severe limitation on the period of detention orders in the new CTA. In summation, it may be fair to state, that Sri Lanka requires many reforms to ensure that society receives more effective judicial remedies.

By Harim Peiris

(Published in the Daily News on 22^nd September 2018)

Looking back after the dust had settled on the Janabala Colombata attempted mass protest earlier this month, in the overall context of the SLPP / Joint Opposition politics, several factors become clear. Firstly, with Gotabhaya Rajapaksa throwing his hat into the ring as it were to be the political heir apparent of term limit barred Mahinda Rajapaksa, this was the reminder by the eldest offspring, that there is age limit barred sons also waiting in the wings. For young Namal Rajapaksa, this was his first foray into an attempted mass mobilization, he seemingly being more familiar with the more youthful forums of social media. Accordingly, in retrospect, the most charitable conclusion we can come to is that he just about made a simple pass, or a C, if one uses the American grading system.

Despite the grandiose claims of bringing about a hundred thousand supporters to Colombo and toppling the government, in some Sri Lankan version of the Arab Spring, ultimately the real count was five hundred and fifty hired buses, which even at an average of about eighty persons per bus, would put the headcount at around forty-five thousand people. Many buses did not come very full either. Not bad, but quite a bit less than what a major political party and even the SLPP would muster at its May Day rally. The multi-ethnic, multi-religious residents of the greater Colombo area, no particular fans of the Rajapaksas, did not join the Janabala event. Protestors were bussed into the city and bussed out. Further, it was clear, that there was no cohesively articulated political message of protest and mercifully no widespread anger or hostility at the government either. The “protestors” seemed more to have come for a day outing as it were, with liquor and entertainment if not food provided freely. The organisers seemed more versed in organising big match style revelry than mass agitation.

The more glaring weakness of the Janabala event was clearly young Namal’s inability to have sufficiently coalesced the entire Joint Opposition (JO) behind the move, let alone himself. Uncle Basil was in his dual nationality, the second home of the United States, rather indifferent to the whole exercise and while Uncle Gotabhaya made his mandatory appearance, it was both less than the full-blooded support that could have been expected. The elitist organisations backing Gotabhaya, in particular, played no part in the protest, no doubt more at home in their newer environments of five-star hotels than among the constituency whose interests they claim to want to represent and lead. Various JO stalwarts and front benches were critical of the exercise and the rather open drunkenness of the crowd and other logistical and organisational weaknesses couldn’t allow them to be otherwise.

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ndia visit and Hindu interview

From mass agitation to international relations, former President Rajapaksa found himself in New Delhi, ostensibly to deliver a lecture and secured a high-profile meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The most interesting feature of the visit to India was who the former President choose to accompany him, not his brother but rather eldest offspring Namal. Now, Namal was associated in the discussions with the Indian Premier and featured prominently in the photo ops. Reportedly the Premier was his genial self, telling the young Rajapaksa to consider India his second home.

The high profile Rajapaksa visit to India, though referred to as surprising by some political commentators in Colombo, is on the contrary unsurprising and necessary for the Rajapaksa’s as they focus on the elections due in 2020. Post-war, the Rajapaksa Administration in its second term, seemingly completely ignored India’s permeant geo-strategic interests in Sri Lanka and also forgot about India’s support for the war effort including the significant Indian intelligence and even operational assistance provided to sink the LTTE arms resupply vessels, which effectively brought about the end of the war. Instead, the Rajapaksa’s in the second term, swung Sri Lanka’s foreign policy from its decades-long, post-independence delicate balance between the two giants of India and China, firmly in China’s direction. The reverberations of those policy decisions are still being felt in both Sri Lanka’s polity and especially the economy, with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe having to deny, persistent reports that Sri Lanka was in a high-interest Chinese debt trap. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Mahinda Rajapaksa was to claim in 2015, that Indian state actors had played a role in his defeat. If that was the case, rebuilding bridges in the relationship is clearly in his political interest. However, the substantive issues for the Rajapaksa camp would be more problematic. They cannot undertake for instance to do what Mahathir Mohamad recently did in Malaysia and put a stop to a couple of billion dollars of Chinese projects and related high-interest debt.

The obvious counterweight to China’s belt and road initiative in the Indian Ocean would be naval and maritime security cooperation with India as well as the Western nations. The obvious interlocutor for such a dialogue from the Rajapaksa camp would be former Defence Secretary Rajapaksa, but he was not included in the Rajapaksa family delegation to India.

Kumara Welgama opposes family bandyism

The other highlight of former President Rajapaksa’s visit to Delhi was the interview he gave to the prestigious Indian newspaper The Hindu. In that interview, asked about the SLPP / JO nominee for the next presidential election, in the context of himself being barred by term limits, the former president conceded that his brother is a contender and that his son Namal would still be constitutionally underage in 2020, the Sri Lankan constitution mandating that a presidential candidate be at least thirty-five years of age at the time of nomination.

Interestingly Mahinda did not mention the name of the brother who is a contender and seemingly considers the fact of being a Rajapaksa family member the pre-eminent requisite for securing the SLPP nomination. This was to result in a very public rebuke, via a radio interview by JO senior frontbencher and himself a distant contender for a top post, Kalutara District MP Kumara Welgama. Parliamentarian and former minister Welgama was scathing in his comments, that family bandyism led to Rajapaksa’s defeat in 2015. This was also not the first time that Welgama has taken such a stance and is seemingly opposed to a Gotabhaya candidacy.

Analysts also focus on the former president’s contention that a future SLPP candidate should be broadly acceptable to the people. It is generally recognized that while Gotabhaya is perhaps popular with the majority community, he is anathema to Muslims and Tamils. A few photo ops with minority non-entities is unlikely to eliminate that dynamic. Either way, September witnessed heightened Rajapaksa political activities, which nonetheless did not really patch up the cracks, fissures and differences within its camp.