State Reform In Sri Lanka: Issues, Directions And Perspectives
By Sumanasiri Liyanage -October 15, 2013
Sumanasiri Liyanage
State Reform in Sri Lanka: Issues, Directions and Perspectives edited by Jayadeva Uyangoda
Colombo: Social Science Association, 2013
Reviewed by Sumanasiri Liyanage
With the recently concluded Northern Provincial Council (NPC) Election, the issue of state reform is back on the agenda as the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) that stands explicitly for federal system of governance was able to win the majority seats in the NPC. Mr Wigneswaran of the TNA was sworn in before the President Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Chief Minister of the NPC. It is certain that the NPC will ask for the full powers of the Provincial List of the13th Amendment to the Second Republican Constitution the full implementation of which has consciously and purposely been thwarted by the central government since its enactment in 1987. The question as to how the post-colonial Sri Lankan state should be restructured in order to accommodate the demands and aspirations of the numerically small nations in the island has once again been posed and it has to be resolved not at the deliberations of the Parliamentary Select Committee as the President Rajapaksa has proposed but at the constant negotiations between the central government and the NPC. The debate on this issue has already begun. In this context, the new book, State Reform in Sri Lanka: Issues, Directions and Perspectivesedited by Jayadeva Uyangoda is a timely addition to this important debate. The book has 6 chapters out of which 4 directly deal with state reforms.
Uyangoda in the Introduction delineates succinctly the key issue in the post-colonial Sri Lankan politics in the following words: “Should the post colonial state be re-structured and reformed and its basic institutional architecture re-designed?” (p. 1). The question of state structure in future independent Ceylon was discussed though briefly in the 1930s, the subject was not viewed from the prism of ethnicity. However, the tragedy of Sri Lanka is that since independence this issue has been looked at from the polarized national/ ethnic perspectives thus linking it with “two main ethno-nationalist projects”. As a result, the two attempts to re-structure the Sri Lankan state in 1972 and 1978 gave primacy to different immediate objectives of the political party/ front in power (socialist property relations and economic development respectively) disregarding this key issue thus distancing Tamils from those objectives interpreting them as part of the Sinhala ethno-nationalist project. Although socialist property relations and economic development transcends narrow ethnic/ national boundaries, in Sri Lanka they were given not only explicit ethno-nationalist interpretations but also ethnic twist in implementation. Political expression of these developments has produced what Uyangoda calls “ethnocratic democracy” in both Sinhala and Tamil (may be now also Muslim) imagination. “Ethnocratic democracy is a specific form of democracy that privileges ethno-nationalism as the dominant framework of political imagination, competition and mobilization” (p. 3). It is interesting to observe whether the Sri Lankan ethnocentric democracy has a specific class basis and it has prevented in many ways to make the Sri Lankan state a ‘developmental state’. In Introduction, Uyangoda has noted two broad thematic orientation of the book, namely, (1) political constitutional aspects and (2) political economy dimension. Read More
