From communal bartering to proportional bickering:The antecedents and the expectations of 20A
by Rajan Philips-June 13, 2015
I settled on the title for today’s article before hearing about the UNP-SLFPcabinet ‘consensus’ on the total number of seats the reformed parliament will have – 237, a compromise between for Champika’s insistent 255 and Ranil’s take-it-or-leave-it 225. The title might seem tad negative when a sigh of relief might be in order since another amendment showdown seems to have been averted. But the seemingly benign ending does not easily wash away the bitter taste our parliamentarians leave on everything they touch. Truth be told, the haggling over representational numbers is not something new to our current crop of politicians. They are heirs to a tortuous a history of fights over political seats, but they have taken it, down or up, to another level. To briefly recount that history and to look ahead to what the 20th Amendment may hold is my purpose today, and so I will stay with the title.