In his first address to the nation on September 25, the presidential candidate of Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power coalition, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was sworn in as President on September 23, did a Vajpayee: he read out from a prepared text, haltingly, and seemed completely out of sorts. Gone was the fiery speaker who could hold a massive crowd with his command over language and the manner in which he employed words for effect; gone was the rhetoric that had marked his election speeches across Sri Lanka. (Many MPs and journalists complained that after Atal Bihari Vajpayee was elected Prime Minister, he stopped his extempore and thoroughly enjoyable interventions in Parliament and outside.
During his tenure, he almost always read out from the notes supplied to him.) Dissanayake has clearly traded the “angry Sinhala man” image for a more sober “let-me-get-the job-done” person. After all, image is everything in this day and age of social media.
The fact that Dissanayake has adapted well to the era of social media was apparent right on the voting day, that is, September 21. The 55-year-old seemed to have taken a leaf out of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s book: his mother, supported by a woman on either side to help her walk, arrived at the booth in an autorickshaw (popularly called tuk-tuk in Sri Lanka). But the son, who was a prominent party leader even before the win, arrived in a luxury car, much like the National Security Guard-protected Modi.
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