All At Sea On An Island

There is a paradox about women in politics in south Asia. A remarkably large number of women have thrived and captured the imagination of the masses in a region where they are historically downtrodden and ignored.

Some have achieved high political profiles: Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, Chandrika Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka, and of course, many in India. The exclusive club has another thing in common: its members are all inheritors of political legacies of prominent male relatives, unlike Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher, who made it on their own. The south Asian women leaders are seen as the repository of the charismatic legacy of the male kin who have been, in most instances, assassinated. But apart from the familial head start they got, they have also proved themselves adept in the cut and thrust of politics. Dynasty and blood have gone together in a region where the bullet, bomb and the ballot box are key determinants in politics.

 

The current crisis in Sri Lanka is clearly the severest faced by Kumaratunga in her political career. During the December 1999 presidential elections, the LTTE nearly killed her but she escaped with a serious injury in the eye. The uncharitable say that it was her images with a bandaged eye that evoked sympathy and ensured her re-election for a second term, even though she polled far less votes (51 per cent) than what she did in 1994 (62 per cent). Ever since her nomination as an executive committee member of the Sri Lanka Freedom party in 1974, Kumaratunga demonstrated the grit and determination that has been the hallmark of members of the exclusive south Asian club. But the latest LTTE offensive appears to have driven her against the wall. The Tamil rebels capturing Jaffna is not so much of a tragedy _ they had done so earlier _ as the effective scuttling of Kumaratunga's ambitious peace plan to resolve the prolonged crisis by devolving power to the Tamil minority.

In 1994, when she was first elected President, her campaign promise to end the civil war helped her win a landslide victory. Initially her efforts to call a truce with the rebels met with some success, but the situation deteriorated with Sinhalese opposition against devolving more power to the Tamils. The LTTE subsequently violated a 100-day truce, and Kumaratunga renewed the war, launching a military offensive that succeeded in capturing the Jaffna peninsula. But the initial promise of a fresh approach leading to peace was belied within six months of her election.

Says a senior diplomat: `No one could have started on a better note than Chandrika when she assumed the post of President. She came to power only with the help of the Tamil votes and the expectations were that she would make a bold initiative to give meaningful space to the Tamils. Her package deal had many novel features. But in its passage through the political and bureaucratic labyrinth, it got diluted considerably, and as was the case during earlier occasions, it is now "too little and too late". She has to carry the burden of past mistakes of the majority community and, in a sense, is a prisoner of Sinhala history'.

Clearly, if Kumaratunga is serious about restoring peace in Sri Lanka, then she has to give up the politics of confrontation and join hands with other Sinhalese parties to put up a united front against the LTTE. In the past, she has often blamed opposition parties for refusing to cooperate in Parliament on pushing through the devolution package. There are more problems in store: the economy is in a shambles--- inequitable distribution of wealth and resources has resulted in an unprecedented crime wave in Sri Lanka. Her other areas of worry are education and healthcare. Soon after she was sworn in, Kumaratunga vowed to "rid this land of death and destruction", a signal that she would fight the LTTE to the finish as part of a `war for peace' campaign. But given the island's bloody history, Kumaratunga should have known that such pronouncements are fraught with risk.

A product of Sorbonne and a participant in the famous 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, the once-socialist Kumaratunga, 55, is said to have since followed many of that `class' in making a U-turn and embracing market economy. Both her parents have been prime ministers: father Solomon Badaranaike, and her mother, Sirimavoh Bandaranaike, was the world's first woman prime minister. At the time of her election, she said politics was in her blood; her father was assassinated when she was 14 years old, and her husband Vijaya Kumaratunga was gunned down in 1989. Her stronger academic background meant that she received none of the taunts directed at her mother, who was accused by her detractors, as the local folklore has it, of being a "kitchen woman"---somebody who knew all about cooking, but nothing about running a country. The two women have often quarrelled with each other. It is ironic that someone who underwent a period of training in `political journalism' with `Le Monde', Paris, has today imposed censorship on domestic and foreign media.

It is a different matter that the current Lanka situation sees an unusual co-habitation in India between those who charioted to power on the Ram rath and those who worship Ravana (the many Tamil constituents of NDA). But Kumaratunga will now have to mull over the `only three viable solutions' available, according to the irrepressible Subramaniam Swamy: To adopt an Indian-type federal Constitution for a united sovereign Sri Lanka; the partition of the island to create an independent sovereign state of Eelam; and, the merger of the island with India. Of the three, the first is clearly the least painful for Sri Lanka, but time may be rapidly running out for its acceptance by Tamils.