Sri Lanka’s bloody 25-year conflict with the Tamil Tigers ended in May but commentators reflecting on the country’s first post-war elections last weekend expressed little optimism about a peaceful future for the Indian Ocean island.

The ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance swept to victory in Sinhalese-dominated Uva province and scraped a win in Jaffna, while the Tamil National Alliance — political allies of the defeated rebels — won control of Vavuniya. Both Jaffna and Vavuniya are just outside the shadow state which the Tigers controlled for decades.

“The victory in Jaffna, the heartland of the country’s ethnic minority Tamils and birthplace of militancy, will give the government a chance to claim it as an endorsement of its handling of ethnic relations, postwar rehabilitation and a rejection of separatism,” Krishan Francis of the Associated Press wrote in the Washington Post.

But the results do not fully reflect public opinion in these war-battered regions, with more than 77 percent of the Jaffna voters staying away and only half of the Vavuniya voters casting ballots.

The London-based Financial Times pointed out that it was hard to know what really happened in the elections - foreign journalists were banned from the north, just as all journalists were during the final stages of the war.

“But the real purpose of the poll seems to have been to test the popularity of President Mahinda Rajapaksa before he calls an early general election to secure a second six-year term, in the afterglow of military victory,” the Financial Times wrote in an editorial.

The newspaper added that the notion of devolution to deal with Tamil grievances had been taken off the table and the government no longer wishes to discuss minority rights, only individual rights within the new national identity it intends to forge.

US and British officials fear this may involve the forced dispersal of Tamils across the island so they can no longer cluster, said the broadsheet.

“Put simply, while the conflict has ended, Sri Lanka is careering back to where it was when the conflict began. Its precarious identity as a mix of ethnic and linguistic, cultural and religious influences is in danger of being swept away by a triumphalist wave of Sinhalese chauvinism,” the FT said.

ELECTIONS HELD TOO SOON

According to the Christian Science Monitor some analysts believe the elections were held too soon after the end of the war for people to vote and for democracy to be truly tested.

“Certainly, normalcy in the battle-scarred north is a long way off: Nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians are being forcibly held by the government in camps near Jaffna and Vavuniya,” wrote Mian Ridge. “Both towns are still surrounded by government checkpoints, and are largely inaccessible to non-residents. Even residents can’t leave without permission.”

Ridge added that foreign - and many Sri Lankan - journalists were not allowed to cover the elections and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said that the decision to bar the media “dashes any hope of a transparent election.”

Sudha Ramachandran from the Asia Times said the Jaffna and Vavuniya elections were seen as an important indicator of the mood among the Tamil people in the north.

“Some have interpreted the ruling party’s strong showing in Jaffna as a sign that the Tamils are endorsing Rajapakse’s approach to the conflict in Sri Lanka,” said Ramachandran. But she pointed out that this interpretation amounts to little given the poor voter turnout, especially in Jaffna.

Charles Haviland from the BBC added that poor turnout was not just down to apathy amongst Tamils, but because much of the area is depopulated with about 300,000 Tamils detained in nearby government camps after the war, and others either dead or displaced to other parts of the island.

[Nita Bhalla covers South Asia for AlertNet. She is based in New Delhi.]

[Photo - A boy cycles past a soldier on a street in Batticaloa, eastern Sri Lanka May 10, 2008. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi]

The countdown has begun in India. As political pundits peer into their tea leaves before the results of another marathon election, the question on everybody’s lips is: will the Gandhi magic work again?

Exit polls show the coalition led by Sonia Gandhi will fall short of an outright majority, but her Congress party has a slight edge over its rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
But then exit polls in India have been way off the mark in the past. Like the last election.

In the 2004 election, the Congress scored a shock victory over the BJP, which many said was a result of Sonia Gandhi’s tireless campaigning and, more importantly, the magic of the Gandhi name. Nobody, just about nobody, had expected the BJP to lose? Or the Congress to win. Not even the Congress itself.

But will Sonia Gandhi do it again this time? Will the Gandhi name work like a charm again? Nobody is willing to hazard a guess this time. Indian voters are known to throw up enormous surprises.

One of the biggest upsets in the history of post-colonial India was Indira Gandhi’s massive defeat in the 1977 election. Mrs Gandhi was considered so invincible that a slogan coined by one of her partymen — Indira is India, India is Indira — had become a household buzzword. She was almost like a Mother Goddess at the time.

And so not even the sharpest of political observers could have predicted 1977. Not even Mrs Gandhi herself.

Defying all expectations, angry Indian voters threw out Mrs Gandhi after she imposed a state of emergency when she clamped down on dissent and launched a sterilisation programme as a solution to the country’s population problem. It was the first time the Congress had tasted defeat in national elections since it began ruling the country after India’s independence from Britain in 1947.

But it wasn’t the last. Indira’s son, Rajiv, who came to power on a massive sympathy wave after her assassination in 1984, didn’t lead the Congress to a majority win in 1989. The Gandhi magic, it seems, had lost its sheen.

Five years ago, when India went to the polls everybody had written off the Congress as a spent force. Newspaper headlines screamed the party was over.

But Sonia Gandhi took the party and the campaign into her hands. Rajiv Gandhi’s widow travelled across the country relentlessly, reaching out to voters in her heavily-accented but fluent Hindi, peppering her speeches with emotional references to her family, especially her husband who was killed by a suicide bomber in 1991.

Her children, Rahul and Priyanka, also joined the fray, campaigning for their mother in Uttar Pradesh where they always got rapturous receptions.

And it paid off.

The party won a stunning victory and for a brief moment, it even seemed like a Gandhi would get the prime minister’s job again. Sonia Gandhi eventually turned down the prime minister’s post, but the country’s first family has remained firmly in the political spotlight since.

As the elections rolled around this time, Sonia and her son, Rahul, hit the campaign trail again with emotional references to the sacrifices made by the Nehru-Gandhi family, particularly Indira and Rajiv, who were both assassinated.

And again, both drew enormous crowds as they campaigned in the heat and dust of various parts of the country, with people walking or cycling for kilometres just to see them.

But will the Gandhi name work again this time? Or will India’s voters look beyond dynastic politics at other more basic issues such as water, electricity, food prices and housing?

If India’s faceless bookmakers are any guide, the ruling Congress party will probably scrape through the current election with Manmohan Singh the firm favourite to retain the prime ministership.

But then again…

As a financial journalist, covering politics and parliamentary debate is sometimes part of my job. What I witnessed on Tuesday in parliament — wads of cash being flashed around inside the lowerhouse– is something I had never bargained for.

The civil-nuclear deal with the United States will go through, and some reforms may be pushed by the government with the help of
its new allies. But politics will never be the same again, tainted by allegations of bribery and a vulgur display of money power.

Shortly after his government won a convincing victory in parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the victory sent a message to the world that “India’s head and heart was sound and India is prepared to take its rightful place in the comity of nations.”

India has attracted global attention due to its strong economic growth and aspires to be a global power. But now more than ever, it needs to fix its politics and governance so that these two key elements do not derail its ambitions.

All political parties will need to seriously think about the events of the past few days and work out mechanisms to prevent it from happening again.

Global best practices need to be imbibed to help politics and governance catch up with the demands of a globalising economy. If it does not happen soon, then ordinary Indians’ cynicism and disillusionment with their politicians will become irrecoverable.

Too much is at stake.