Editorial
Absolute Power
John Dalberg-Acton, or Lord Acton, a British historian of the late 19th and early 20th century famously said that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely…” Absolute power is what the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) of the Rajapaksas won last Wednesday and the biggest challenge for President Gotabaya and brother Mahinda, who will continue as prime minister, is to ensure that Acton’s words do not come true in Sri Lanka. Theirs was a stunning victory belying even the wildest expectations of their most optimistic supporters. Conventional wisdom that nobody can obtain a two thirds majority under proportional representation, as JR Jayewardene intended, went with the wind with the SLPP and its allies tantalizingly close to that mark. One hundred and forty five was the official tally, seats won in the electorates plus the national least places – just five short of the magic number. But one must add Douglas Devananda’s two seats in the north to that total, as he is very much a part of the SLPP, having served even in the caretaker cabinet, and the single seat the SLFP won. Even former President Sirisena chose to run under the purple banner as did many other blues who knew the coming colour. No doubt the SLFP will be offered to the Rajapaksas and the UNP will strive to re-unite.
Who would believe that the greens would fail to get even a single MP elected? Most expected the Sajith Premadasa faction, which is also UNP, to do better than Ranil’s team notwithstanding the possession of Siri Kotha and the recent court judgment. Both Wickremesinghe and Premadasa must take the blame for the debacle they have suffered. It is not rocket science that united you stand and divided you fall. That is what has happened to both sides of the UNP. Ranil loyalists say Sajith was too greedy, having been anointed as the presidential candidate last November and been appointed the chairman of the Nomination Board.. He demanded the party leadership as well although his Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) had the UNP’s imprimatur. Premadasa chose not to remember that he had agreed to let Wickremesinghe lead the party till 2025. But Ranil also was greedy, having attained the party leadership by “fortuitous circumstances” (we borrow the words from W. Dahanayaka who used them when he succeeded SWRD Bandaranaike as prime minister) and continued for 27 long years through thick and thin.
He became prime minister and party leader following the assassinations of both Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake. two UNP stars of the JR era, eclipsed by Ranasinghe Premadasa who first became prime minister and then president. Wickremesinghe had four innings at the prime ministerial crease, though he didn’t serve a full term on any these occasions. He was unlucky to have lost the presidency to Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005 as the LTTE closed entry to the polling stations at that election and prevented voters living in areas they controlled from exercising their franchise. These were votes that Ranil would have polled. But that was not to be. He must also be given credit for subordinating his own interests in 2015 and throwing the UNP’s weight behind Maithripala Sirisena who the combined opposition fielded against Mahinda Rajapaksa as the common candidate. Siresena could and would not have won that election without UNP backing. Thereafter Wicremesinghe, whatever his own ambitions, conceded his party’s presidential ticket to Premadasa last November.
What the UNP would do with the solitary National List seat it has won has not been decided at the time of writing. A wag remarked that Wickremesinghe would appoint another one of those committees he’s famous for to decide who should take that place! A correspondent, in a letter we publish today quotes Mangala Samaraweera saying that Ranil was the best president we never had. Karu Jauyasuriya was also described as the best leader the UNP never had. That was Ranil’s doing. Despite his admiriation of Wickremesinghe, Samaraweera, notwithstanding his subsequent backdown, threw in his lot with Premadasa as did the vast majority of the UNP’s 106 MPs in the last Parliament. They eloquently expressed the overwhelming majority view within the party of who the better leader would be – at least to win the election. But Wickremesinghe chose not to listen. That he lost even his own seat at Colombo Central, one of the UNP’s strongest bastions, was the result.
What now? The leaders of the two main parties, the SLPP and both factions of the UNP, failed the people massively by nominating the vast majority of those who sat in the last Parliament for re-election. Most of them, certainly from the Pohottuwa, have been re-elected despite the questionable reputations of many. This is the nature of politics – especially landslides when herd instincts takeover. Will the Rajapaksas, faced with the stiffest possible economic challenge in the wake of the Covid pandemic and its aftermath, be willing to take the impossibly hard decisions that the situation demands? There is a strong conviction within knowledgeable circles that big business firmly believes that President Gotabaya is the country’s only hope. He has demonstrated ability to deliver not only as Defence Secretary during the war, but also as Secretary for Urban Development thereafter. There is optimism that he would do what is right leaving the politics to brothers Mahinda and Basil.
Constitutional change, or at least amendment by repealing 19A, was spoken of from most SLPP platforms during this campaign and the one before which propelled GR into office. This was despite a severely adverse minority vote. But the majority community ensured his comfortable election althopugh it did give the victory a racial tinge. Hopefully the baby will not be thrown with the bathwater and the two-term limit, the Constitutional Council, Right to Information, and the Independent Commissions will, with appropriate changes, remain in the statute. After all the Elections Commission ran a fine election, in the teeth of many difficulties, for which it must be congratulated. So also the different political parties and their hot blooded supporters for keeping this election violence free.
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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