Editorial
A.T. Ariyaratne: Death of a colossus
The death last week of Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, who founded and led the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka after a long life of 92 years, has robbed the country of a colossus of his generation. His own name, as well as that of the organization he created is very well known to everybody in all homes across the length and breadth of the country. A small made, soft spoken personality with a shock of white hair and an ever present smile, he had a face that could best be described by the Sinhala word seedevi with all its many connotations. It reflected his inner calm, non-violent disposition and Gandhian values. The origin of the name Sarvodaya can be traced to Sanskrit roots – sarva (all) and udaya (uplift). Mahatma Gandhi, whose footsteps Ariyaratne sought to follow, saw it as “uplift for all.”
Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne was a teacher at Nalanda College, Colombo, when he founded Sarvodaya in 1958. He had taken a group of 40 schoolboys and 12 teachers from Nalanda to Kathaluwa, a Rodiya village of outcasts and beggars to help uplift conditions of people living there. From that small acorn, a mighty oak grew. By 1972, the growing demands of the fledgling organization compelled his retirement from the teaching profession and devote himself full time to the Sarvodaya Shramadana, a self-governance movement which among other things provides comprehensive development and conflict resolution programs to villages.The Internet says that as of 2006, “Sarvodaya staff people were active in 15,000 of 38,000 villages in Sri Lanka.” The organization estimated 11 million individual beneficiaries and financial reserves ran at Rs. 1.6 billion in that year.
Although well funded Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like the Ceylon School for the Deaf and Blind and the Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) Red Cross have been around longer than Sarvodaya, the latter arguably became one of the best funded, if not the best funded NGO in the country. Ariyaratne’s commitment and simplicity impressed the donor community which staunchly supported his movement that grew exponentially from its grassroot begining. Obviously, the organization necessarily had to present professionally produced project proposals to donors and satisfy them that their money was well spent.
During the course of time, the needed skills and capacity to run an organization as big as Sarvodaya had become was acquired. The consciousness that donor support will not continue to flow forever necessitated the setting up income generating ventures, recruiting needed personnel and adequately remunerating them within a framework of relatively modestly paid grassroots workers. Balancing an equation such as this would have been no easy task but the organization appears to have succeeded in achieving its objective.
Sarvodaya’s presence in villages countrywide and the work it was doing made it a formidable political force. Rightly or wrongly it was rumoured at one time that Ariyaratne planned to run for the presidency. President Premadasa in 1990 set up a seven-member Commission of Inquiry (COI) including two retired Supreme Court judges (one of them headed the commission) and five other eminent persons to investigate NGOs and a variety of connected matters. This COI was assisted by counsel from the Attorney General’s Department and included a police investigation unit. It was widely perceived that Sarvodaya was specially targeted and the organization was compelled to pour resources and energy to defend itself. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) commented adversely on the methods adopted at the COI. Nothing eventually came out of the investigation.
Ariyaratne was awarded the country’s highest national award of Sri Lanka Abhimana by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2007. This award can be held by only five living persons at any time. Since he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 1969, awards and accolades have been poured on him from all corners of the globe. He was also nominated for a Nobel Prize. The esteem in which he is held was demonstrated by the state funeral accorded to him at Independence Square.
Letters to the Editor
We publish today two letters to the editor casting a light on the state of our nation. One of them written by an occasional contributor to our columns, pays a rare tribute to a public official. The writer lost a son at far away Buttala in what he has described as “unknown circumstances.” This resulted in a “somewhat complicated procedure entailing an exhumation, cremation and deposition of ashes.” Since the postmortem could not definitely establish the cause of death except for some extraneous substance found in his stomach, the coroner ordered that he be buried for at least three years and if necessary cremated thereafter.
The burial was in the Anglican section of Kanatte. The family being Buddhist wished a cremation at the end of the three years and the deposition of the ashes in the family vault in the Buddhist section. The letter writer has highly commended the Cemetery Manager for the assistance rendered. In a country where the norm is dissatisfaction about shoddy services from public and local government employees, it is heartening that there are exceptions to the ‘can’t care less’ attitude of many public servants and there are people who are willing to go public with commendations for exceptional services received.
The second letter was from a young Lankan who with her Dutch partner was on what she has called a safari to Yala. Their vehicle had hit a stray dog on the road and the driver wanted to proceed on their way as this was not an unusual occurrence. His passengers would have none of it and made him turn back to the dog lying with a broken pelvis on the roadside. They sought and obtained veterinary assistance and plan to take the animal back with them to the Netherlands where they have two other rescued dogs. The compassion demonstrated to an injured animal was truly heartwarming.
Saturday 8th June, 2024
It was with shock and dismay that we received the news about death threats to COPF (Committee on Public Finance) Chairman Dr. Harsha de Silva over the ongoing parliamentary probe into the on-arrival visa scam. Dr. de Silva yesterday told Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena, in Parliament, that he was facing death threats and intimidation, and it was incumbent upon Parliament to ensure his safety. He stopped short of naming names, but revealed that some ruling party MPs were among those who had ganged up against him. The Speaker only said there had been no complaint, and he would look into the matter.
The SLPP-UNP government has been doing everything in its power to have all parliamentary committees under its thumb. The COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises), which once helped restore public faith in the legislature by exposing state sector corruption, has now become a mere appendage of the incumbent regime, thanks to the appointment of SLPP MP Rohitha Abeygunawardena as its Chairman. The SLPP-UNP combine also tried to oust COPF Chairman Dr. de Silva, but in vain. However, it knows more than one way to shoe a horse.
The COPF, under Dr. de Silva’s chairmanship, has been a thorn in the side of the government, which is struggling to cover up numerous corrupt deals. Dr. de Silva yesterday told Parliament that he found it extremely difficult to function as the COPF head due to severe resource constraints his committee was facing; he himself had to pay the salaries of some of his staff members besides burning the midnight oil.
The sheer workload he had to cope with as the COPF chief had taken its toll on his health, he said, informing the Speaker that he was at the end of his tether, and at times thought of resigning from the COPF. This is exactly what the government wants him to do; resource squeezes and threats are aimed at making him quit.
On 26 May, Dr. de Silva revealed, in an ‘X’ post, that the COPF had uncovered some vital information about the visa scam and it would reveal everything after its final meeting on the issue; the COPF was committed to exposing the truth behind the controversial tender, he added. In an editorial comment on 27 May, we warned him.
While thanking him for his bold stand, we pointed out that by making such a statement, he had thrown caution to the wind, and become a marked target, with the government making an all-out effort to delay the COPF investigation lest the truth should come out much to the detriment of its interests in this election year. Unfortunately, what was feared has come about; Dr. de Silva is complaining of death threats and government moves to strangulate the COPF financially to derail its investigations.
Dr. de Silva’s predicament exemplifies the fate that befalls the few good men and women in Parliament. It is hoped that all those who seek an end to the state sector corruption will rally behind Dr. de Silva, and bring pressure to bear on the government to ensure his safety. Let Dr. de Silva be urged to reveal the names of those who have issued threats, veiled or otherwise, to him and are trying to scuttle the COPF probes.
Friday 7th June, 2024
The SLPP-UNP government is going hell for leather to make bad laws as if there were no tomorrow. It is abusing its parliamentary majority, which has been retained with the help of some crossovers, for that purpose. The Opposition, the media and trade unions are up in arms, and understandably so. The incumbent regime is a dead man walking; it is so desperate that it is capable of anything. Hence the need for it to be restrained.
The Electricity (Amendment) Bill (EAB) plunged Parliament into turmoil yesterday, but the government secured its passage. The Supreme Court (SC) determined the entire EAB inconsistent with the Constitution and recommended changes thereto. After unveiling the Bill, sometime ago, Minister of Power and Energy Kanchana Wijesekera hailed it as an excellent piece of legislation aimed at straightening up the power sector to serve the public interest better.
The SC determination left him with egg on his face. He reminded us of the proverbial curate who, while eating a stale egg, assured his host, a Bishop, that parts of it were excellent. Wijesekera’s egg, as it were, made Parliament stink yesterday, but he sought to please his masters by praising it as a silver bullet.
EAB should have been discarded and a new one drafted in consultation with all stakeholders. But the government is apparently driven by an ulterior motive; its aim is not to serve Sri Lanka’s interests but to look after those of some moneybags.
It is not uncommon for Bills to contain some flaws, which are rectified either before or during the committee stage. But there is something terribly wrong with draft Bills that are full of sections inconsistent with the Constitution. The drafters of EAB have demonstrated their sheer ignorance of the supreme law, and that they are not equal to the task of drafting Bills. If they had read the Constitution at least perfunctorily, they would not have drafted such a bad law.
Ignorant and incompetent, they do not deserve to be paid with public funds and must be sent back to law school. They must be summoned before Parliament and questioned on their serious lapses, which have caused public faith in the national legislature to diminish.
Curiously, the MPs who demand that judges, doctors, Central Bankers, and other public officials be summoned before Parliament have taken badly drafted Bills for granted. The power sector trade unions yesterday alleged that EAB was of Indian origin and geared towards furthering the interests of Adani Group at the expense of Sri Lanka.
Most critics of EAB are agreeable in principle to the need for power sector reforms; the Ceylon Electricity Board should be given a radical shake-up, and transformed into a modern organisation capable of providing a better service at a lower cost. They only asked the government to tread cautiously, consulting all stakeholders and taking action to ensure that the country’s interests prevailed over everything else. But the government was in a mighty hurry to steamroller the Bill through Parliament, making the Opposition ask whether it was doing so at the behest of some external forces involved in controversial power generation deals here.
What is passed by the current Parliament can be either amended or abolished by a future parliament in a constitutionally prescribed manner. But that does not mean that a government is free to pass bad laws, making the country enter into long-term agreements with powerful nations and their investors. It looks as if the SLPP-UNP regime did not care two hoots about the consequences of its actions.
Thursday 6th June, 2024
The outcome of India’s parliamentary election (2024) has led to a ‘perspective ambiguity’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost no time in declaring victory for the BJP-led NDA alliance, which secured 293 seats in the 543-member Parliament, but he must be a worried man. The BJP is short of 32 seats to form a government under its own steam; it has lost 63 seats or about 20% of its parliamentary strength. It had 303 seats in the previous Parliament, and that number has dropped to 240.
Modi has become the second Indian Prime Minister to win a third term. The first PM to do so was Jawaharlal Nehru. But Nehru won an outright majority in Parliament in 1962; Modi has had to depend on smaller parties in his alliance to retain his hold on power. Modi must be reeling from a sharp drop in his victory margin in his own constituency, Varanasi; it has decreased to 152,000 from 480,000 in 2019 whereas Modi’s bete noire, Rahul Gandhi, won Raebareli by a staggering 390,000 votes.
Modi, who reigned supreme with 303 seats in the previous Parliament, is now dependent on parties such as Nitish Kumar’s JD-U and Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP to form a government. He has had to lead an alliance of strange bedfellows. Both Kumar and Naidu were bitter critics of Modi. Kumar helped form the oppositional alliance, the INDIA bloc, before switching his allegiance to PM Modi. Naidu also closed ranks with the BJP in the run-up to the election. These politicians have been described as extremely ambitious and highly unpredictable, and whether Modi will be able to manage them and consolidate his grip on the NDA alliance remains to be seen. They will demand plum ministerial posts in return for their support. The TDP is said to be eyeing Transport and Health portfolios! That is the name of the game in coalition politics, where it is not uncommon for the tail to wag the dog, so to speak. These two political leaders are however not the only problem Modi will have to contend with. The next five years will feel like an eternity for PM Modi.
Nothing would have been more shocking for the BJP than its defeat in Uttar Pradesh’s Faizabad constituency, where the Ram Mandir has been built. Modi may have thought he would be able to win the Lok Sabha election hands down after the consecration of that temple, which became a centrepiece of the BJP’s election campaign. The BJP lost that seat to the Samajwadi Party! Modi must be disappointed that the Ram Mandir hype failed to trigger a massive wave of support for his party. This particular defeat signifies a massive setback for the BJP’s ethno-religious agenda.
Modi’s divisive election campaign failed to yield the desired result. The BJP’s failure to secure an outright majority could be attributed to a host of factors, some of them being the suppression of the Opposition, the arrogance of power, chronic unemployment, and the rising cost of living. The BJP also did not care to reimage itself in a positive light to attract the youth.
Modi will hereafter see the Congress-led INDIA bloc with 223 seats, in his rearview mirror. The Congress (99 seats) and its allies have eaten into the BJP support base considerably, but they have a long way to go before being able to capture power.
The bumpy ride ahead for the BJP-led coalition government to be formed may improve the INDIA bloc’s chances of bettering their electoral performance and turning the tables on the BJP and its allies in time to come. Modi will have a lot to worry about in his third term.
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