Editorial
The coming colour
The forthcoming local government elections, widely considered a litmus test on the popularity, or the lack thereof of the government, weighs on the minds of the people or at least some of them. As many, or a greater number, cannot care less. As far as they are concerned, the means of surviving the day trumps all else. For the large majority, there is no lesser evil among the political contenders. In their view, all of them are as bad as the alternatives. Yet the conflicting signals now emerging on whether these long overdue elections will be held by March as required by law is a matter of both intrigue and speculation. Will they be held as scheduled or will they not? That is a big question in today’s politics.
The work involved in updating the electoral lists have now been completed. Nimal Punchihewa, the Chairman of the National Elections Commission, whose continuance in office was a matter of conjecture not so long ago, is firmly on record that the elections will be held on time as required by law. He gazetted the Returning Officers and their assistants a few days ago. No less than President Ranil Wickremesinghe has said that the enormous 8,000 or thereabouts of local councilors fattening on the public purse must be halved. Former Elections Commissioner Mahinda Deshapriya has been appointed to head a Delimitation Commission to re-demarcate local authority wards. Predictably, many regard this as an election delaying tactic though Deshapriya has done his best to debunk that suspicion.
The general public has been privy in recent days to all kinds of signals suggesting that these elections will not be held on schedule. There were reports that the ruling SLPP and the president’s UNP are in talks for an electoral alliance. SLPP Secretary Sagara Kariyawasam has confirmed as much. The constitution empowers Wickremesinghe to dissolve parliament after February 20 next year but he has made very clear that he is not going to do that. Parliament may also be dissolved by its own resolution carried by a simple majority. But nobody will be simple minded enough to expect that to be even a remote possibility. Too many sitting MPs await the passing of five years of parliamentary service to be entitled to a life pension which their wives will continue to draw after them. Many more fear the people’s verdict on their disastrous performance and an election is the last thing on their minds. So a parliamentary election is obviously a long way down the road.
Provincial Council elections, although overdue, and promised in the first quarter of next year by no less than Basil Rajapaksa before he quit the finance ministry, are very unlikely before local elections. This despite the anxiety of the Tamil parties to hold such elections and Indian pressure on the same matter. The local government minister has twice postponed local elections and according the law he is not empowered to do so again. The vast majority of Sri Lankans are familiar with the corruption within local bodies and the self-serving activities of their elected representatives. The councillors regard local bodies as the bottom rung of a ladder to parliament. The people would be happy to be relieved of half the burden of supporting local councillors. So the president’s proposal is surely a popular one although its implementation will require the postponing of elections.
The SLPP and UNP getting into an alliance must obviously be with an election in view. But which one? The pecking order as it now stands is first local elections, then provincial council elections and finally parliamentary elections. Beyond that, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, elected not by the people but by the Rajapaksa-led SLPP majority in parliament, must surely dream of winning a people’s mandate for himself and would look forward to becoming a president truly elected by the people. An SLPP-UNP alliance will serve that objective too. But the big question for now is whether we are going to have the local elections before next March or whether they will be put off sine die. We must hold these elections according to the law as it stands. The law, of course, can be amended and there are whispers this might happen early next year.
Within the last few days we have heard Mr. Akila Viraj Kariyawasam, once a cabinet minister and the UNP’s general secretary and then its assistant leader, now a defeated candidate (like all who ran from the green party in August 2020 not excluding the present president) saying that the local elections will cost billion of rupees. Do the people want such elections, he questioned, at the cost of power cuts, and scarcity of essentials down the road? SLPP functionaries too have been heard expressing similar thoughts. It was only on Thursday that the state-controlled Daily News gave front page prominence to an SLPP stalwart, former Bar Association President, UR de Silva, PC, saying that it was “not the correct time for LG polls.” He went on record saying that spending a huge amount of money for LG polls was a futile exercise at the moment and urged that first the prevailing law regarding such polls must change and there must be a right environment to hold them.
The SJB and other opponents of government are strenuously urging that the election be held and threatening to otherwise bring people on to the streets. They are super-confident that the government’s unpopularity will be crystal clear in the results. The SLPP showed Yahapalana the coming colour in the local election prior to GR’s November 2019 landslide. The SJB is now drooling at the prospect of doing likewise.
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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