Editorial
Aragalaya machine being re-cranked?
Although the country situation has somewhat eased after the crippling fuel and gas shortages were resolved to a great extent, how long supplies will be maintained is an open question. That, of course, is totally dependent on the country’s ability to pay for fuel imports. There was a somewhat reassuring comment the other day from Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe that we are now, touch wood, able to fund our essential imports and that we can survive without bridging finance. The recently implemented QR system for equitably distributing available fuel stocks to as many consumers as possible has been acclaimed as a forward movement. Many, if not most, would agree with this in the context of the kilometers long petrol/diesel queues no longer being a feature in our evening television news bulletins. But the question arises on why it took as long as it did to implement such a decision. Clearly it came far too late.
It is not necessary to labor the fact that shortages spawn rackets. A shortage as big as our recent experience over fuel naturally created massive rackets in the shape of a black-market in petrol and diesel. Three-wheelers on which a considerable proportion of the workforce depend on for a living were widely blamed for what happened. But it must be said in fairness to the tuk-tuk drivers that in the context of a critical shortage of fuel supplies which made it impossible for them to offer their vehicles for hire, they were compelled to make a living by black marketing petrol. It made more sense for them to spend most of their time in the endless queues, tank up, sell whatever they got at a premium, and rejoin the queue. This was obviously more profitable than burning petrol cruising for hires. Who can blame these people, many of whom obtained their vehicles on expensive lease arrangements, from making the best of a bad situation.
Hopefully all that is water under the bridge. Although the fuel supply disaster is no longer as visible as it was as far as motorists are concerned, farmers and fishermen remain affected. The former continue to be starved of, or at best inadequately supplied, with fuel for their agricultural machinery. As is usual in this country, promises have been made but have not been honored provoking protests. Fishermen too are in a bind with no kerosene, mainly, to go out to sea. Their protests are now becoming more strident. Beached fishing craft have had the obvious result of rocketing fish prices sending consumers reeling. A kilo of the once inexpensive salayas now costs up to Rs. 900. Chicken, egg and dried fish prices have gone through the roof and the poor compelled to drop animal protein from their diet. Dhal (lentils), an excellent substitute vegetable protein, too has become so expensive that even the middle classes find it too costly to include in their food baskets.
While the cascading effects of the fuel shortage that touched most aspects of the national economy have now eased somewhat, consumers can hope for some respite from the galloping inflation that has been this country’s lot for the past several months. President Ranil Wickremesinghe, in the course of a wide-ranging interview with The Economist has gone on record that he worries “especially on food.” Not just Wickremesinghe but nobody would want people to go hungry as is happening now. The president admitted that the middle class was expanding but the government has been compelled to cut on the living standards of middle income families. People above the poverty line have fallen below it. He restated that taxes will have to be raised and wealth and capital taxes are on the way.
But nobody can deny that equity, the basic tenet of taxation, is totally absent in Sri Lanka. Nobody has credibly justified why tax exemptions on emoluments, pensions, duty free vehicle permits etc. are granted to public servants, parliamentarians and other preferred animals while private sector employees are taxed on similar incomes. The nouveau riche displaying their affluence is all too visible via the high-end vehicles they ride and the crowds five star dining venues attract even during these hard times. Many such people do not pay income tax and they are allowed to get off Scot free while squeezed lemons with tax files are further squeezed.
It wasn’t very long ago that Wickremesinghe told the Wall Street Journal that he did ot think the time was opportune for former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to return to Sri Lanka. He believed his predecessor’s return will inflame passions. Since then GR who first fled to the Maldives, then to Singapore and in now in Thailand is anxious to return home, possibly because he has nowhere else to kick his heels while awaiting the outcome of an application to return to the US where he once held citizenship. He renounced it to run for president but has requested permanent residence on the ground of his wife’s citizenship of the United States. Whether the U.S. will permit our former president to butter his bread on both sides remains to be seen. Meanwhile the SLPP that elected RW to serve the balance of GR’s term wants the incumbent president to facilitate his predecessor’s return.
Colombo helped Rajapaksa with his Thai visa but with another confrontation between the Inter University Students Federation (IUSF) and law enforcers on Thursday, complete with teargas and water cannons, whether Wickremesinghe will still feel the time opportune for GR’s return remains to be seen. Aragalaya has certainly lost steam but attempts are afoot to crank up the machine. How much support it can muster remains an open question for the time being.
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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