At the end of the day, the ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka seem to have “fixed” the electoral fate of President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the Jan. 8 polls that he had called nearly two years before time. This also means the quiet “giant-killer” and one-time party and ministerial aide, Maithripala Sirisena, has his job cut out: Resolve the Tamil ethnic issue and address the more recent concerns of the nation’s Muslims and Christians who, who like the Tamils before them, had felt so very completely alienated from the outgoing regime.

A double-quick analysis of the election results would show that the relatively narrow victory margin — 1.3 percentage points over the 50 percent mandatory cut-off, as against the near 8 percent for incumbent Rajapaksa in the post-war 2010 polls — was made up by the three minority communities.

Smaller parties like the center-right Jathika Hela Uramaya, which walked out of the Rajapaksa government at the last minute, like president-elect Sirisena, and the center-left Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, apart from ex-army chief Sarath Fonseka’s Democratic Party, and of course the mainline Opposition United National Party too have a share in Sirisena’s victory. That being the case, President-elect Sirisena will have to address the minorities’ concerns internally, and be seen as doing so, before the hot iron turns cold. He and his party and coalition will be faced with parliamentary polls before long, if they have to “stabilize” the current victory and move forward. Though no great works can be expected, he will have to be seen taking the first and right step forward. At the same time, he cannot be seen as overly shifting toward the minorities, particularly Tamils and Muslims, as his nomination as the “common Opposition candidate” owed in his expected ability to split Rajapaksa’s “Sinhala-Buddhist” majority/majoritarian vote — and not in his capacity at alliance-building or wooing the minority voters, per se.

As the incoming president after 10 eventful years of Rajapaksa, Sirisena would have to busy himself with ministry-making involving coalition partners, with UNP’s Ranil Wickremesinghe being made prime minister, as a part of the pre-poll commitment to the party and the people. Together, they will also have to expedite the promised abolition of the executive presidency within the first 100 days.

Given the post-Independence history of Sri Lanka, most, if not all, post-poll negotiations would be personality-centric and issue-centric. In the case of the Tamils, it would be concepts-centric than anything else. These are the issues that the new president and his coalition partners would have to negotiate among themselves first, and with the whole nation, in due course. Whether such a negotiation with the nation’s populace would take the shape of a constitutionally-mandated referendum on the abolition of the executive presidency — or, is it going to be a watered-down presidential scheme, and if so how much and how far — is another corollary flowing from the earlier question. The new government cannot escape a referendum on certain constitutional amendments, but they could escape another parliamentary election forthwith. If so, how and how far would remain another question for the new government and its shared leadership to decide -- and unanimously, so.

India has always worked with governments that people in other nations elect, hence it would not have problems of adjustments and re-adjustments in working with the new government in Colombo.

However, for anyone in India or the US to expect that the purported high-intensity Chinese presence in Sri Lanka would vanish the day after would be oversimplifying the issues and equations. Under different regimes, Sri Lanka has had a comfortable relationship with China. An immediate foreign policy concern of the incoming government will involve a balancing of conflicting domestic concerns flowing from “accountability issues” of the conclusive “Eelam war IV.” The outgoing government had gone into a “denial mode” of a different kind. One, the Rajapaksa government held that the nation’s armed forces and/or the political leadership committed no “war crimes.”

Two, only a domestic probe, and not an international probe, deriving from a US resolution at the UNHRC, could find out facts and hold individuals and/or “accountable.” The UNHRC is set to receive the maiden report of what could be termed the “in absentia” international investigations into “accountability issues.” The main issue will be, should the international probe continue on the lines that it is now on — and if so, would Sri Lanka allow the UNHRC probe team to visit the country and record statements from the Tamil “war victims” in the North and the East. The new leadership will also have to address economic issues and deal with political issues. Having defeated the otherwise well-entrenched President Rajapaksa on the “anti-incumbency” factor, in turn deriving from “good governance” issues, the new, “collective” leadership should decide on how to proceed with the scores of corruption issues that they had flagged over the past 10 years against the Rajapaksa family but without having to produce a shred of evidence.

They will also need to enforce law and order and media freedom, which they had claimed, had been compromised through the 10 years of Rajapaksa’s presidency. The new government may have to think differently — and also want to think differently, and also know how to go about it in the first place.

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Courtesy: Rediff.com