The urgent need of negotiating a political solution for Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict by establishing a consensus between the southern parties on a devolution package to be offered the Tamils is a refrain among pro-government slogan shouters. However, it is obvious such rhetoric is meant only for the South Asian and international communities. The chorus for domestic consumption is very different – it is all about winning the war militarily.A factor that lies at the root of the many variables that affect the presidency of Mahinda Rajapakse is his penchant to have as his senior decision-makers, officials who owe no allegiance to parliament for their appointments. They are his personal loyalists.

Though this is not new in the history of the executive presidency in Sri Lanka, with all incumbents of that august office from J.R. Jayewardene to Chandrika Kumaratunga appointing cronies, no one has had such complete reliance on non-elected officers for high-level decision-making as has Rajapakse.

But the contrast is starker when we compare former presidents with the present incumbent on the degree of trust they placed upon elected officials to handle national security. All former presidents, while remaining commanders-in-chief of the armed forces and more often than not being personally in charge of the defence portfolio, had senior ministers with decision-making powers on national security responsible to parliament – Lalith Athulathmudali, Ranjan Wijeratne, Anuruddha Ratwatte were all MPs. Even during the time of the uneasy co-habitation between the PA and UNP (December 2001- November 2003) there were senior cabinet ministers for defence and internal security – Tilak Marapona and John Amaratunga.

Under the present president however, things are different. Decision-making on defence matters remains with him as the minister in charge of that subject and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. However, he shares this power with an official who is not responsible to parliament or cabinet – his brother, the secretary to the Ministry of Defence, Gotabaya Rajapakse. The only parliamentarian who is even nominally involved in defence matters is Prime Minister Rantnasiri Wickremanayake (deputy minister), who we all know, is a lame duck, and not part of the inner circle.

Another shortcoming in the Rjapakse presidency is that his senior administrators have had no previous (official) experience in handling high-level matters of state, though Basil Rajapakse, another brother, was involved in carrying out certain duties of the president when the latter was holding previous appointments.

There are then (among many, many others), three interrelated shortcomings in the administration of the presidency: senior officialdom lack experience in high-level decision-making and implementation; people who matter in making decisions, especially on defence, are not accountable to parliament; the senior-most bureaucrats are siblings of the president giving rise to, for the want of a better word, ‘presidential rule.’

This has created major upsets in the parliamentary hierarchy of those who are from the president’s party, which is, usually, the pool from which political favourites are recruited. Thus, the administrative machinery of the president is not in a position to be in step with the cabinet and, more important, parliament, which in any democracy should be the source of political power. This factor, which is already creating rumbles of discontent in the SLFP, is prone to be a source of more unhappiness as time goes by, unless the president redresses the situation soon.

Be that as it may, Rajapakse presented himself in his election campaign as the choice of the Sinhala polity and that all Sinhala-nationalist forces were supportive of his candidature. Therefore, not only was he the candidate of the SLFP, but also the unanimous choice of the JVP and JHU.

Apart from the critical revelations of an alleged deal between Rajapakse and the LTTE, which Sripathi Sooriyarachchi took great delight in exposing, the present president was openly criticised by Tiger leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran himself, as inimical to the Tamil cause. Thus, in Mahinda Rajapakse we see a Rohana (Ruhunu)-based activist whose style of governance not only veers towards nepotism, but is exercised primarily through Sinhala support.

This son of the Sinhala soil had to however abide by the CFA, a treaty signed by the Ranil Wickremesinghe government and the LTTE. The core of the CFA established peaceful conditions for holding political negotiations. The document was based on certain politico-military realities, which were reflected through the establishment of areas of control or jurisdiction for the Sri Lanka government and the LTTE, the respective signatories of the CFA.

The CFA that gave the rebels territorial authority, which even the judiciary in some of its decisions recognised, was a thorn in the flesh for Kumaratunga’s political ambitions. But due to her sense of political discernment she prevented herself upsetting the status quo.

But Rajapakse was different. He, supported by the Eksath Bhikku Peramuna and the JVP, who believe in the unitariness of the Sri Lankan state from the time of the mythical Prince Vijaya, declared that he was not prepared to bargain with the island’s sovereignty with a group such as the Tigers, who were not only in their thinking and actions, but even in terms of the insignia and symbol, anti-Lion.

The Mavilaru episode in August last year translated this thinking into action. Preferring not to emulate the process initiated by Wickremesinghe, (who, incidentally, is popularly believed to be tolerant of the rebels), who weakened the LTTE in Batticaloa-Amparai by engineering a subtle coup that helped its number one leader in the East to defect in 2004, Mavilaru was a head-on military clash. It was an operation the military wanted to wage for a long time, which Rajapakse was prepared to bless. The advance into Mavilaru was extended to Muttur and Sampoor too, clearly forcing the LTTE to agree to, in the words of Prabhakaran, “a strategic withdrawal.”

But, the South perceived this very differently. The rebels’ withdrawal was understood as a military confrontation in which the Tigers were resoundingly defeated and Rajapakse was hailed as the first Sinhala warrior president. The South, emboldened by this success, clamoured for taking the East entirely out of the contested Northeastern equation. The lock, stock and barrel joining up of Muslim parliamentarians with the government, (which even forced the hand of poor Rauff Hakeem to accept a ministerial portfolio) created a ‘comfort zone’ in the East for Rajapakse.

This was followed by the Supreme Court decision blocking out the East from the North. The arrangements included separating the strategically located Trincomalee District from the Northeast administration to be run directly from the North Central Province (NCP) and the Amparai District to be administered from the provincial capital in Trincomalee. (At the level of the district, Amparai District is run from the Sinhala-dominated Amparai town than the Muslim Kalmunai though there were certain moves to cash in on the fragmented East to have it so). This leaves only the Batticaloa District to the Tamils.

Despite the profound transformation this created in Northeastern politics, due to the machinations of the breakaway Karuna and the rather long drawn out antagonisms between the Batticaloa and Jaffna-Tamil middle-classes, there was no significant protest on the de-merger of the Northeast and the special arrangements on Trincomalee except perhaps by Batticaloa TNA Member of Parliament P. Ariyenthiran.

The president was so happy and relieved at this turn of events he remarked during a visit to the Maldives that there was no more a problem in the Northeast, but only in the North.

These words, coming in the wake of the Court decision on the de-merger and the army reclaiming land held until recently in the East by the LTTE, seemed to signal the lexis of political accommodation often spoken about in Sri Lanka had dissolved into thin air. The terminology of the politics of sharing power with a peripheral, preponderantly Tamil-Muslim Northeast begins from the time of the prime minister-ship of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. The Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1959 spoke of the Northeast as a single region, which the Indo-Lanka Accord (1987) made a legal entity.

Now, in the eyes of the president and those who shared his views from the JVP and JHU, and more importantly in the mainstream Sinhala media, the merger was dissolved and what was more, one part of the merged entity – the East – was already pacified. There was only the North to be dealt with. (A Tiger-free East was announced as Rajapakse’s political gift to the Sinhala people for the Aluth Avurruddhu (New Year).

With such propaganda being recklessly fed to the masses, a new fancy caught the Sinhala mind: the inevitability of the war in wiping out LTTE ‘terrorists,’ who were already on the run anyway. An interesting slogan shift was made according to which, negotiations for peace notwithstanding LTTE ‘terrorism’ had to be defeated militarily. The president used his trips to India, especially to the SAARC summit, and the Western capitals to highlight the ‘terrorist’ dimension of the Tamil problem.

Rajapakse and his cronies’ new chant only helped any permanent solution to the problem slipping silently away.

Federalism as a possible solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict was on the cards till the Eksath Bhikku Peramuna and the JVP laid down that not an iota of the island’s sovereignty could be shared. This implies that any permanent solution through the devolution of power could only be a hollow package.

This was the bent of southern politics until Mangala Samaraweera and Sooriyarachchi highlighted new contradiction within the ruling party. The significance of the Mahinda-Mangalai discord is that Samaraweera too is a ‘Rohana boy,’ and Matara is not very far from Tangalle. But the fact is that the two need each other: each knows the other’s past and while Rajapakse might be head of state, it was Samaraweera who cobbled together alliances that led to the SLFP’s victory in the 2004 general election and the 2005 presidential polls. Therefore, the politics of accommodation appear to be working in the SLFP to reclaim the prodigal. However, dirt hits the fan when bedfellows quarrel: the strange story and allegation of the 150 crore ‘gift’ from the Rajapakse group to the Tigers is out in the open.

The crisscrossing political paths of the president’s siblings, a tawdry devolution package and quarrels within the president’s camp raise an important issue: what is happening to the Tamil problem for which Marxism has an uncomfortable term – the national question.

The implications of the term ‘national question’ should be understood fully. It means the question concerning the Nation. We hope that the significance of the term is not lost at least on the JVP, which at claims to be a Marxist party.