Devolution Debate: Facts that should not be forgotten

by Prof. G. H. Peiris-October 9, 2017, 9:03 pm 

(Continued from Friday (06)

The fallacy of the notion that the Provincial Council system (with a supposedly interim merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces) was the outcome of an indigenous evolutionary process of compromise and consensus in mainstream politics could be grasped from the following portrayal by another illustrious De Silva – Professor K. M., a close and loyal associate of JRJ – of the ethos at the formalisation of this pernicious Accord on 29th July 1987.

"Even as the cabinet met on 27 July violence broke out in Colombo when the police broke up an opposition rally in one of the most crowded parts of the city. It soon spread into the suburbs and the main towns of the southwest of the island and developed into the worst anti-government riot in the island's post-independence history… When Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi arrived in the island on 29 July to sign the accord the security services and the police were still engaged in preventing the mobs from entering the city of Colombo intent on demonstrating their opposition to the accord. The situation in the country was very volatile at the time of signing of the accord, with news coming in of a dangerous mob making its way to Colombo on the Galle road through Moratuwa and the Dehiwala Bridge. There was every possibility that the government would have been overthrown and JR himself deposed. That explains why a request was made for Indian army personnel to take over from the Sri Lanka army in Jaffna; and above all, the sending of two Indian frigates to remain outside the Colombo harbour – placed very conspicuously – as a token of Indian commitment to protect the government, and available to evacuate JR and those who supported the accord just in case it became necessary to do so".

In order to refute another fallacy that has even greater significance to current Sri Lankan constitutional affairs, I should draw the readers' attention to the fact that Rajiv's peace efforts, featured as they were by an ostentatious pretence of moving away from his late mother's aggressively 'imperious' approach to dissention between Delhi and its peripheries both internal as well as external, entailed the signing of several 'peace accords' that turned out to be short-lived; and, contrary to what some of our pundits would like to make us believe, the Accord of 1987 does not have the status of an inviolable treaty of the type enforced by the victor on the vanquished in wars the world has witnessed over several centuries and that, in any event, it was India that failed to fulfil its Accord commitment to Sri Lanka and make it null and void.

If the Steering Committee has proposed the en bloc adoption of the ''13th A (why this is yet to be clarified through an official announcement is typical of the absurdly surreptitious constitutional reform procedures), it indicates a perfunctory approach towards its task. First of all, 'Appendix II of the 'Ninth Schedule' titled 'Land and Land Settlement' makes it abundantly clear that the real architects of the '13th A' (bureaucrats of Delhi's South Block) had a prejudiced and excessively narrow, perception of what powers and functions over 'Land' in Sri Lanka really entails. In confining their stipulations almost entirely to the distribution of state land among the rural poor, they appear to have been guided by: (a) the thoroughly discredited notion of the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka constituting an exclusive 'Traditional Tamil Homeland', (b) a belief inculcated by the TULF of land settlement (the foremost development strategy in Sri Lanka from about the mid-1930s) being a government-sponsored process of Sinhalese encroachment of that homeland, and (c) a ready acceptance of the grievance of the TULF leadership that the ongoing Mahaveli Development Programme (MDP) will accelerate that 'encroachment', in disregard of the fact that 'downstream' agrarian development in areas earmarked by the 'Mahaveli Authority' for settlers selected from the Tamil and Muslim peasantry was being prevented by their own "boys". Thus, in their haste to work out a response to the TULF demand on 'land powers' in the hope that Tamil terrorist groups could thus be appeased, they also overlooked the fact that the term ‘land’ is definitionally hazy and that the related constitutional specifications should encompass a wide spectrum of powers and functions of government stretching in their applicability from an international plane (as witnessed at the 'nationalisation' of plantations in 1975 and expected for the inflow of foreign investment in the 'Singapore Model' of the open economy), at the one extreme, to that of the individual citizen (as experienced in the employment of the Land Acquisition Act of 1950 or the Land Reform Law of 1972), at the other. They also paid scant regard to the fact that a fragmentation of authority over land could result in a political cum administrative mess for large-scale inter-provincial development projects such as the 'Gal Oya Scheme' of early independence and the 'Mahaveli Development Programme'. The considerations stemming from these deficiencies of the 'Appendix II' appear to have been of no consequence to the relevant sub-committee (disgustingly including JO representation as well) or the pretended 'constitutional law' expertise that has gone into the compilation (as the snippets of information available to us) the Steering Committee Report. That is nothing compared to the shock of reading a national newspaper report on 30 September according to which the President of the Republic had not seen the Steering Committee Report supposedly submitted to parliament 10 days earlier.

The other considerations pertaining to 'Land Powers' that ought to have been accorded careful consideration in the compilation of the Steering Committee report are (to state as briefly as possible) are: (a) that development programmes in Sri Lanka involving the harnessing of ecological resources of large areas such as the MDP and the earlier 'Gal Oya Scheme' were implemented under special statutory 'Authorities' vested with administrative powers that transgressed provincial and district boundaries; (b) that 'Land' powers should be designed to embrace a wide range of vital governmental concerns such as environmental conservation, solid waste disposal and control of atmospheric and hydraulic pollution, counteracting natural hazards including the impact of global warming that would result in acute regional water deficiencies and, as Chandre Dharmawardena with his impeccable expertise has explained in a recent issue of The Island, territorial losses along the island's maritime fringe; (c) that, as C. M. Madduma Bandara, encapsulating long years of invaluable environmental research and his experience as the Chairman of a Land Commission of the late-1980s has insisted in several publications, the present provincial delimitation, a remnant of colonial administration finalised in 1898 designed mainly to set the stage for an explosive growth plantation enterprise in tea and rubber, is totally inappropriate from the viewpoint of contemporary land-based resource utilisation.

More generally the fact that Delhi's bureaucrats who prepared the 'position papers' for the Indian 'foreign affairs' stalwarts who were engaged in Sri Lanka "negotiations" during that fateful episode paid scant regard to these considerations is no cause for surprise. The real surprise is that the present 'Steering Committee' appears to have remained oblivious to the sordid thirty-year record of Provincial Councils which indicates more than all else that, while their custodians have spared no pains in personal empowerment and aggrandisement, they have failed to make optimum use of the resources placed at their disposal by the Centre, had many lapses even in routine functions such as salary payments to their employees, created bloated administrative structures, intensified local-level electoral malpractices and at least sporadically contributed to the proliferation of politicised crime and, barring a very few exceptions, accomplished nothing for the benefit of the people that couldn't have been done more efficiently and economically by agencies of the central government with due regard to prioritising the survival of Sri Lanka.

(Concluded)