Government keeps chickening out of elections, critics keep looking for electoral cockfights
by Rajan Philips-March 11, 2017, 7:18 pm
There is no democracy without elections, but there is more to democracy than elections. Elections are necessarily important, but what happens between elections is even more important for democracy. If the frequency of elections is the prime measure of democracy, the Rajapaksa government would have deserved an Asian award for keeping the Lankan flames of democracy leaping with election after election for local bodies, provinces, parliament and the Head of State himself. The Rajapaksas would have deserved not merely a third term but the whole country on a 99 year lease, as I poked fun in this column in November 2014, a week before Maithripala Sirisena’s historic defection. The shoe is now on the other foot. The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government is getting flak for not having enough elections - for indefinitely postponing elections to local bodies and potentially three Provincial Council elections that are due later this year.
The Joint Opposition (JO) itself is not clamouring for elections, because the JO folks are as clueless as their friends in the government about which way the votes will fall in a new election since the people, and politicians should know this, see the same political zombies and rascals in and out of parliament even after their last two electoral exertions in 2015. But JO fellow travellers are gung ho about elections and are castigating the government for shying away from elections, local now and provincial soon. Without elections they have nothing much to exercise their flabby minds about. And they are clutching on constitutional straws to make a political point where there is no worthwhile point to make in the first place.
The point about the constitution and Provincial Councils is that for nearly 30 years after their creation through due constitutional process, Provincial Councils have been de-legitimized, derided, and turned into dysfunctional bodies with little bang to show for the meagre budget bucks that are annually allocated to them. Their principal use has been to provide provincial rings for electoral mud-wrestling between the two competing national coalitions in Lankan politics. In 1998, facing a rout in a few provincial elections, then President Kumaratunga declared national emergency to stop the vote. The Supreme Court called her bluff, and she in turn punished the judge credited with the ruling by denying him promotion as Chief Justice. The professor gentleman who gave ministerial advice to the President Kumaratunga on judicial succession at that time has since been proffering even worse advice to her executive successor, Mahinda Rajapaksa, including the one to impeach the country’s only female Chief Justice whom he had earlier got President Kumaratunga to appoint to the bench. The impeachment was again punishment for a ruling that told the government, just as the 1998 ruling did, that Provinces have status under the constitution.
Despite threatening to dilute the powers of Provincial Councils or eliminate them altogether, President Rajapaksa kept them going because he saw in their elections the main reason for his political being – winning elections. Unlike his predecessor, he found a way to keep winning Provincial Council elections, staggering them at will and winning them a few at a time by selectively deploying the Rajapaksa election juggernaut. Except for two! The juggernaut got stuck at Elephant Pass during the Northern Provincial Council election in 2013, and came apart in the 2015 presidential election – haggard and overstretched. The man who wanted to win a third term became the first incumbent to lose a presidential election. But self-serving pundits and hangers-on won’t let the former president take a well-earned rest after nearly 50 years in politics. He cannot run to be president again, thanks to the 19th Amendment, but his followers want Mahinda Rajapaksa, their prize fighter, to keep leading election fights for them – local, provincial, parliamentary, and even presidential with a proxy – Gotabhaya – Rajapaksa candidate. To them election fights are like the Balinese cockfights, and they don’t like when the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe (S-W) government keeps chickening out of elections.
And they have found the chapter and verse in the constitution to assert that the government cannot postpone provincial elections. If it could be that easy to make Provincial Councils disappear at the end of five years for want of an election, why not just make them disappear by not having elections at all? Isn’t that what most commentators claim that most Sri Lankans want: get rid of the provincial councils? Now the news is that the government does want to postpone the elections due this year in the Eastern, North Central and Sabragamuwa provinces to start having elections for all the provinces altogether in one day. Having all provincial elections on a fixed single day will be a progressive departure from staggering them at the executive’s fancy as has been the practice so far. But the government’s motivations are anything but principled or progressive.
Thirty years
of Devolution
The S-W government deserves all the flak it is getting for dragging out local elections and will deserve more flak if it starts indefinitely postponing provincial elections. But the bigger question is, or ought to be: what have previous governments been doing with local bodies and provincial councils between elections, and what has the present government been doing with them for the two years it has been in power? In 2015, the present government proposed establishing constitutional or governing councils that would include the President, the Prime Minister along with the Governors and Chief Ministers of the Provinces. Why cannot the government just start the practice of holding annual gatherings of the President, the Prime Minister, the Provincial Governors and Chief Ministers? Does it need a new constitution and a referendum to do this?
The venue of annual gathering can rotate between Colombo and provincial cities. That would be a very belated fulfillment of what the Donoughmore Commission suggested nearly a century ago – to hold State Council sessions periodically in each province, to take government closer to the people. Colonial rulers thought of that, AJ Wilson called it a federalizing feature (he also called DS Senanayake’s first cabinet – cabinet federalism), and ninety years and sixteen million more people later it is still not too late. And we don’t need a referendum to take government closer to the people. The agendas and discussions at these gatherings could set the framework for identifying and addressing issues at the provincial and local levels far more practically than wasting everyone’s time over endlessly debating reserved powers and concurrent powers in the abstract. Frequent summit visits to the Provinces might shed light on otherwise opaque minds why it makes sense to have a local police force that speaks the local language, and why it makes no sense to have urban development in the provinces long-armed by an authority in Colombo. Sri Lanka can be a unitary state for ever, but it cannot be run like a City-state like Singapore, ever.
"Twenty Two Years of Devolution: An Evaluation of the Working of Provincial Councils in Sri Lanka" is the title of the monograph edited by (the late) Ranjith Amarasinghe, Asoka Gunawardena, Jayampathy Wickremaratne and AM Navaratna-Bandara. All of them are post-colonial scholars and professionals, and they are also Sinhalese and, I believe, Buddhists as well. More importantly, they are also ‘devolutionists’, and they know more about the subject than a dozen or so others who keep writing nonsense on the matter. Interestingly as well, the period of devolution (1988-2010) they cover was when the Provincial Council system functioned ‘fully’ in the southern seven provinces, limitedly in the Eastern Province, and hardly in the Northern Province. The seven provinces have had five PC elections up till 2010 and one more since. The North and East are a different story, notwithstanding their being part of a unitary history.
The book makes a strong case for continuing the PC system based on the experience of the seven provinces – in terms of the political leadership and administrative mechanisms that have taken root in the provinces despite, yes despite, every intended and unintended obstacle that has been created by "political regimes in Colombo (to) achieve their power objectives." Historically, as the authors point out, political and administrative developments after independence have totally nullified the local administrative network established under colonial rule to provide "public health, thoroughfares and utilities." SWRD Bandaranaike was the only politician who appreciated and championed, albeit unsuccessfully, the strengthening and extension of local government along with his ideas for regional government. Perhaps he understood the well-established layers of local government in Britain below the overarching unitary structure (which is no longer the case), even as he understood the political imperative for devolution – first from the Kandyans and later the Tamils. Although the Thirteenth Amendment was a response to the latter, it does have a purpose to serve in every province in Sri Lanka, but it cannot become fully functional and effective until the political regime in Colombo gives the provinces – not just elections but legal powers and fiscal and administrative resources. That is the lesson from 22, now almost 30, years of experience.
As well, the provinces can and must be given more and used more to further the present government’s twin objectives: economic development to reach the Prime Minister’s million jobs target; and national reconciliation. The reality is something else. The provinces hardly figure in the government’s megapolis economic visions and barely mentioned in its Geneva perorations. This is not only unfortunate but also stupid. Each province could and should be treated as a distinct economic unit for achieving national economic output including the much vaunted export diversification. And reconciliation would be just rhetoric until Colombo starts working with the affected provinces. A summit gathering of national and provincial leaders could be more than a symbolic start.
