Keeping control of the narrative when there is a contest for control of the political messaging is daunting, but the Government seems to have got a gift from an Opposition which wants to turn that narrative upside down to suit the moment.
They know the Geneva UNHRC sessions are coming along and think that diverting the attention towards human rights issues and other similar matters would be helpful to their cause.
But, by deciding to take on the Government on the human rights front all of a sudden, they have also conceded that internally they are unable to wrest the initiative from the Government despite all that is happening on the economic front, which we have been told is devastating to the regime.
But the Government seems to have gained on the swings what it has lost on the roundabouts, and this is a new experience in Sri Lankan politics.
Though the regime has an uphill battle containing the economic damage from Covid, its leadership seems to be in sync with the people’s aspiration to come out of the mess.
The people are relying on brass-tacks growth and looking out for themselves at the level of the grassroots. They are not focussed on the drama concerning peripheral political issues such as elections that are not being held, and purported mismanagement and corruption.
Elsewhere
They are instead laser focussed on coordinating with the regime and its administrative arm to make sure they get their lives back after the devastating phase of pandemic induced economic malaise.
Say for instance in the tourism sector, if the tourists are coming into the country, the Government does not have to tell the people how to get maximum benefits out of the influx.
The people are improvising and are turning things around essentially by themselves. This writer was in Kalpitiya, which caters to a tourism niche — that of kite-surfing.
Kalpitiya is one of three — just three — kite surfing locations around the world. There are some restaurants owned previously i.e before the pandemic hit, by foreigners and those remain closed because most of the owners seem to have given up and gone elsewhere perhaps back to their countries of origin.
But on an educated guesstimate, at least 60 percent of the restaurants and the kite-surfing training schools in Kalpitiya seem to have bounced back and ‘caught the vibe’. What is the vibe? It is that of regaining the initiative after all stakeholders, the tourists, the authorities and the people at the level of service providers, lost it to the vagaries of the pandemic.
The industry stakeholders seem to know that the tourists are as eager and apprehensive as they are, because they too are coming from countries that paid a heavy economic price due to the pandemic.
If the separate stakeholders are in sync and on the same page, it means that the tourism sector is rebounding at a pace that is to the satisfaction of all the players in the equation.
To their delight or at least to the delight of the regime and the service providers — never mind the foreigners — the Opposition pundits have chosen to ignore the tourism sector, avoiding comment on the tourism rebound precisely because they see a resurgence and some optimism, and think that they can’t find much trouble in that sector, to sow confusion and muddy the waters.
The Opposition and the Government’s detractors have been looking elsewhere to revive the playbook of human rights and issues such as media-freedom against a Government that has been surprisingly affording a great deal of space for the media to exercise their rights to free speech.
This unexpected shift in expectations from the regime has meant that the leadership has not had a target painted on its back when it comes to issues of free speech and allied human rights issues.
As a result there is some desperation almost, now, to take the attack on Chamuditha Samarawickrama as a cue to try and regain lost ground against the Government on these issues.
That the Samarawickrama episode is isolated does not seem to deter these folk who see an opportunity in an incident in which nobody sees any obvious culprit as perpetrator in the first place.
This much is obvious from the fact that even those who are trying to exploit the issue — namely Opposition and the civil society activist sector — only go so far as to say that if the Government does not solve the mystery of the crime, then by default it is the Government that would be painted as villain, also by default!
That indicates that the Opposition is trying to embarrass the Government over the issue but without any sense of conviction, which is good for the regime as that sort of tentative push also makes for shifting of narratives.
Significantly, the Government has been trying to stick the label of ‘incompetence’ to the Government but that hasn’t stuck. It has not stuck as far as the economy is concerned because the regime has managed to import extra fuel or do something at the last minute to avert an immediate crisis whenever there seems to be one developing.
The Opposition has been unable to keep up with this Houdini act and has attempted to get back to the traditional line of attack that concerns human rights, media freedom and other governance issues.
Persistence seems to be the virtue by which the regime leadership seeks to frustrate the Opposition.
The President has the experience of having done so during the terrorist battle — and he has made that his credo more or less. He did go on record saying the cynics said the same thing about the battle against terrorism “that the Government would not succeed”, but that there was a long struggle and eventually the Government’s position was vindicated.
Parties
Others may see the sudden shift in Opposition narrative as a seasonal pastime of sorts because it is that time of the year, and there are many actors in the Tamil Diaspora in particular, that want to make maximum use of the Geneva sessions to make things uncomfortable for the regime.
However, if that’s the case, it’s a dead giveaway of sorts that the human rights issues are peripheral at other times of the year when the Government’s adversaries seek to attack on economy related issues, and do not focus their attention on human rights and governance.
It gives credence to the Government’s position that the entire human rights campaign is a drama that’s enacted mostly when it is convenient, and when much leeway cannot be obtained on other issues because the Government has managed to fend off the targeting on these.
The President, meanwhile, is meeting business leaders and Diaspora investors to shift the focus away from the issues that at least in the estimation of the Government have been trumped up.
But if the regime has persistence, it’s the quantity the Opposition does not possess.
If they stuck to the issues of economy and tried to convince the voters that they’d do a better job on the economic front if they were in power, they may have succeeded in building a lasting narrative that would serve them on the long run, but their strategists do not seem to have the persistence or the patience.
That seems to be a hallmark of the Sri Lankan right-wing. It contrasts sharply with the left of centre parties that generally develop a strategy and try to see it through on a long term basis. In other words they have a playbook. The current Opposition doesn’t seem to have one and seems to enjoy lobbing various rather mistimed missile attacks, politically speaking, at the Government from time to time. It doesn’t seem to be a very mature or considered way of engaging one’s opponents, but we don’t see the Government or its leaders complaining.