Editorial
Duminda, Ranil and Basil
Three important happenings last week further bedeviled the country’s already vapid governance and political mess. First there was UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe’s return to Parliament nearly a year after the last election to take its single National List seat after months of foot-dragging, waffling and, indeed, prevarication. Then there was dual citizen Basil Rajapaksa’s return home (or second home?) after an absence of over a month in the USA on “personal business.” Finally there was President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s stunning Poson pardon of ex-MP Duminda Silva serving a life-term in prison following conviction for the murder of also ex-MP Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra.
There is no escaping the reality that the country is in one helluva mess. After an initial success several months ago in controlling the spread of the Covid pandemic, the vaccination process is not where it should be. Political interference in organizing preferential treatment for friends, relations and supporters created both rage and unhappiness widely displayed on television screens. A large number of vulnerable persons who received a first shot of AstraZenecca vaccine have been left high and dry not knowing when the second jab would be possible. A glimmer of light appeared at the end of the tunnel last week with reports of a delivery of a new stock from the Serum Institute of India in the short term. But there was no word about how it would be distributed.
As of now, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appears to be ironclad in not wavering on his decision on banning inorganic fertilizer imports. This despite an avalanche of scientific opinion widely publicized. At least one major television channel is campaigning vigorously against the decision with daily bulletins of angry farmer protests countrywide. Claims that there are sufficient fertilizer stocks for the next season have been roundly debunked by protesters. If true, the government is hopeless impotent to root out hoarded stocks of profiteering hoarders. A segment of the electorate that strongly supported the president and the SLPP at recent elections have clearly been alienated. All this on top of the pandemic challenges, periodic lock downs and resultant bedlam, rightly or wrongly fathered on the government, is not helping the rulers who are at a zenith of unpopularity less than a year after their election by a popular mandate.
We have in a previous comment in this space speculated on the possibility of Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe awaiting a nekatha to return to Parliament and resume a presence in the legislature that continued for 43 years until interrupted by his and his party’s stunning defeat last year. The single National List seat the UNP could salvage for itself after being reduced to zero was left unclaimed for about a year. First Wickremesinghe said he will not take the seat. Perhaps he remembered his party’s declaration that it will not admit defeated candidates to the legislature through the back door. Then other names were thrown up as possibilities for the vacancy. Eventually the people were told that Wickremesinghe was under pressure to accept the vacancy and was the unanimous choice of the UNP’s working committee.
Now Ranil is back in the House occupying an opposition frontbench seat; and, clad in his immaculate western suit, has made his first speech in Sinhala, generally not the language of his choice when he has to perform at his best. Before he took his oath last week, the four times prime minister and longtime opposition leader exposed himself to a no-holds-barred television interview where, even the ranks of Tuscany must admit, he acquitted himself reasonably well facing a volley of googlies bowled at him. Spurning rhetoric and wild swings at real and perceived enemies, he kept his cool and emerged unscathed if not victorious. But suspicions remain that he is open to playing footsie with the Prime Minister Rajapaksa, something he has been accused of doing before. With his long experience as prime minister and opposition leader and a very long stint as leader of the UNP, it is suggested that he can give good advice to the government.
Whether the president and the government are open to such advice is an open question. In his first intervention in Parliament following his swearing, Wickremesinghe while not adopting a belligerent tone, faulted the government for its lack of a plan in the current crisis situation, militarization of civil services including the response to the Covid pandemic, rapidly depleting foreign reserves and granting tax relief to “big people” while imposing hunger on “small people.” He sought a parliamentary debate to discuss the transfer of parliamentary power to the military, urging cabinet leadership in meeting the daunting challenges confronting the country.
There is widespread speculation as this is being written that Basil Rajapaksa will return to Parliament via the creation of a National List vacancy and assume an important ministry dealing with economic affairs. The finance ministry, currently held by the prime minister, has also been mentioned in this connection. Whether this will or will not happen remains to be seen. Nevertheless it must be said that most people believed the 20th Amendment provision enabling dual citizen to enter Parliament was intended for Basil. No hasty appointment, however, was made. He did not run at the last election due to the 19th Amendment prohibition and his unwillingness to renounce his American citizenship unlike brother Gotabaya. His admirers, admitting that the people are shouldering unbearable burdens, openly promise that Basil will wave a magic wand. Will a fuel price reduction be the first of these concessions?
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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