NPP: running high on rhetoric vs. run-of-the-mill corruption

The NPP’s long and sometimes insidious struggle – as most potently expressed in the impetus it gave the Aragalaya – to critically engage the corrupt regime entrenched at the time has borne a triple-blossomed fruit. First, when AKD clinched the presidency in September 2024. Then, when the floodgates of the people’s fury swept the rank and file of a crooked parliament into the streets in November the same year. And finally, in its convincing-enough win at the LG polls last week

It would seem in the week or so past of horse-trading post local government elections that there has been a smidge of a slide in the government’s standing. And an attendant debit to its social credit ratings and political capital. If this is rumour, a reputational setback or reality – the truth be told – only a day ahead would reveal. 

While the aura of a nation is still majorly a lighter shade of red to judge from the polls results, there is cause for some governors’ countenances to go from being in the pink to puce if not purple.

Not that the incumbent administration doesn’t merit being in the pink... because until recently at least, it has toed the straight and narrow on social justice planks, and fuelled the ethically loaded fantasies – social justice, crime and punishment, etc. – of a now-forgotten citizenry. 

Who, though they’re all but juggling cost-of-living curve balls, still desire more than three basic meals a day for themselves and their children... as if lighting hopeful Vesak lanterns in the rain is better than bitterly cursing the darkness? 

But as reported severally in the media, in a discernible shift amidst the gathering gloom of more than the May-onset southwest monsoon, the National People’s Power’s ostensible abandonment of its anticorruption rhetoric has tilted the playing field a tad. 

That field is now leaning at a tangent towards moral nullity in which the old, oft-lamented political culture of deals, double-crossing the electorate and stealing election victories by hook or by crook can come creeping in on little cat feet... and try to pussyfoot around with the new tyro government’s highfalutin principles. 

The National People’s Power’s ostensible  abandonment of its anticorruption rhetoric has tilted the playing field a tad

And a smug opposition that would be better occupied turning the torchlight of scrutiny on its own twin houses – UNP and SJB, showing that political blood is thicker than the cleansing waters of AKD’s Kalawewa bucketing – isn’t pulling any punches in their fighting nose-bloodied corners. 

The latter in particular has levelled nasty allegations against the NPP political machine that is supposedly greasing the wheels of an engine gearing up against the underhand mechanism of coalition politics. 

And the literally and allegorically lost UNP was smiling all the way to leveraging itself into the CMC through the backdoor last week. Is there no limit or date of expiry to the Grand Old Party’s cynical opportunism? And has the Compass lost its sense of true north?

Fun or fury

This would be funny in a tragicomic way of sorts if it wasn’t fury-inducing. 

For one, moral mandates given must still matter in a nation that only this week embraced the peaceful, inclusive and pluralistic ethic of the thrice-blessed festival of lights that unites islanders from literally all walks of life at dansals around the country and pandals at waterlogged junctions.

The NPP’s long and sometimes insidious struggle – as most potently expressed in the impetus it gave the Aragalaya – to critically engage the corrupt regime entrenched at the time has borne a triple-blossomed fruit. 

First, when AKD clinched the presidency in September 2024. Then, when the floodgates of the people’s fury swept the rank and file of a crooked parliament into the streets in November the same year. And finally, in its convincing-enough win at the LG polls last week.

This must count for something in the larger scheme of things for a Sri Lanka that only so recently – tantalisingly – seemed poised on the cusp of a paradigm shift for nation, state, country, government, political culture and social ethos. We were about to dive off the precipice and start trusting politicians again! 

Even if the dregs of the traditional political parties appear resistant to the new brooms sweeping not so well, it is incumbent on their integrity to yield to the people’s will. But it’s arguably a bridge too far for some older political movements (GOP & Sons, Pohottuwa & Co.) that are so compromised by decades of dirty politics.

This is arguably more so since the JVP-led NPP has demonstrated not only its good faith in conducting the LG polls freely, fairly, and sans let or hazard to the electorate and electoral apparatus of state, but also proven its bona fides in a democratic osmosis into mainstream politics. 

This was a welcome departure from its student movements’ ethics in state-run universities where hammer and sickle still represent clenched fists against all comers rather than an open-handed approach to governance.

Good eggs going rotten?

Now the problem is that the good eggs are ostensibly on the verge of going the way of all flesh – towards the garbage bin rather than being served as a satisfying meal to feed a people who are hungry for more than provender. But rather, are yearning for a dish of peace with plenty of social justice to accompany it.

By some accounts the supposedly sea-green incorruptible stalwarts at the helm of a welcome anticorruption movement were allegedly manoeuvring behind the scenes earlier this week in a bid to secure the local government councils – some 100 of these – that they were in danger of losing because they were hung. 

Of course, the sterling mandarins who once preached from the highest pulpits on the campaign trail have denied it and rushed to defend their probity while their compatriots are allegedly no better than those brothers-in-arms – the SJB and the UNP – who are doing the same thing.

It is utterly reprehensible to any notional citizen who has ‘had it up to here’ with slick big city politicians who bulldoze their way over the national will in the name of realpolitik. Or on the assumption that the people will take the resigned adjustment to reality view that after all ‘politics is the art of the possible’.

Under this premise, we’ve seen one too many administrations tread the alliance path to perdition and take the nation down the high road to destruction by reneging on their much vaunted pre-election manifestoes or muddying their mid-term manners. 

Dharmishta Samaajaya did it. Capitalism with a Human Face did it. Zero Civilian Casualties did it. Good Governance did it. They all do it. So why not us eh! 

So it is with utter dismay that the polity registers and records that the NPP stands in the dock – rumouredly? reputationally? realistically? – with the worst of the detritus from a rotten, discarded, discredited set of yesterday’s politicians, looking cynically for lacunae and loopholes in the electoral system, to cling so desperately to the very power that the people so determinedly didn’t want to give them...

Can, or will, the Compass point us right again? 

(Editor-at-large of LMD | The usual 

suspects return.)