A Political Alternative For New Year 2014
Kusal Perara
What’s there to talk about 2013 ?
The only good thing is, in about 80 hours from now – mid day 28 December – this year would be over. There’s nothing nostalgic about it, except in personal and private terms. Politically, much expected Northern Provincial Council elections and the much favoured electoral victory for the TNA seems no exceptional achievement in post Northern and Tamil politics. For the Southerner, casinos have been decided upon and is being half heartedly protested by “puritans”. None is asking what benefit would they have for the poor and the deprived. What social equity and what contribution to rural development, is not what is asked about. There are also NO Anna Hazares, NO Kejriwals, NO Aam Admi Parties, but a popular, Sinhala President there is, sans an opposition. There is ever growing massive corruption, fraud and extortion, shipping, transshipping and peddling of drugs reported almost every day, battalions of saffron clad rogue clerics allowed free roaming, Tsunamis of murder, rape, sexual assaults, child abuse cracking all indexes of failed and falling States and also a much feared and revered Defence and Urban Development ministry Secretary sitting tough, under whom the police and civil security is, since 2005 December.
The year also ends with the UNP Convention, its 55th since it was formed. Undemocratic as it exhibits itself to be and the convention presided over by a leader who sounded more a school’s principal sitting over a Monday morning assembly, passed four resolutions that again was mere tradition and nothing more. The first resolution says the party would work towards victory at the next elections headed by the new leadership council. Wonder why an opposition party has to pass an unanimous resolution to say it would work towards electoral victory. That’s what it obviously has to do.
The second resolution promises the party would abolish the Executive Presidency. Abolishing the presidency would take us back to a parliamentary system. We have had two parliamentary systems, with and without an upper house during the first 30 years after independence, under two different Constitutions; the Soulburry and the first Republican Constitution. The Soulburry constitution allowed for total disfranchising of Indian origin Tamils, making them stateless and then allowed the whole State to be “Sinhalised” with Sinhala language made the ONLY official language of the country. That parliament could not safeguard the right of minorities, nor could it arrest the decline in social life leading to a political crisis that paved for the first Southern Sinhala armed uprising to catalyse in late 1960s. The first Southern Sinhala armed insurrection broke loose in 1971, just a year ahead of the change in Constitution.
The first Republican Constitution ushered in thereafter in 1972 stressing the importance of being wholly independent and neutral from the British crown, allowed for politicisation of the State with the PSC brought under cabinet authority. Buddhism was written in as a very special religion to be treated exclusively under the Constitution. That parliament allowed for continuous rule under Emergency regulations that even allowed for very strict enforcement of food rationing in a tightly closed State controlled economy.
