Editorial
Dismantling brakes of a juggernaut
Saturday 5th September, 2020
The 20th Amendment (20A) bill is now in the public domain. The Attorney General is of the view that it requires only a two-thirds majority in Parliament for enactment. The government has 150 MPs on its side, and the passage of 20A is only a matter of time. Reflected in this constitutional amendment is the strategic thinking of the present dispensation.
It was thought, before last month’s general election, that 20A would be a slightly amended version of 19A as there was a need to help the President wriggle out of the constitutional straitjacket he found himself in. But 19A has been eviscerated. Only the five-year presidential term and the two-term limit seem to have been retained.
The general consensus is that 19A contains some salutary features, which must be retained although it was intended to keep the Rajapaksa family at bay, strip President Maithripala Sirisena of some executive powers and vest them in Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The number of terms a President could serve was limited to two to prevent former President Mahinda Rajapaksa from contesting a presidential election again. Dual citizens were banned from entering Parliament or running for President because the yahapalana leaders wanted to prevent Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Basil Rajapaksa from seeking political office. Namal Rajapaksa was their obvious target when the minimum age limit for contesting a presidential election was raised to 35.
Wickremesinghe and Sirisena did everything in their power to ruin the political future of the Rajapaksas, but their plan went pear-shaped, and the boot is now on the other foot. Wickremesinghe is in the political wilderness; Sirisena, who left the SLFP as a powerful minister of the Rajapaksa government to contest the presidential election successfully, in 2015, having failed to realise his prime ministerial dream, is now playing second fiddle to the Rajapaksas, as an ordinary MP.
Dual citizens will be able to contest elections, and the minimum age for presidential candidates will be 30 if 20A is enacted. The path has been cleared for the Rajapaksa family.
The Constitutional Council (CC) is to be replaced with a Parliamentary Council (PC) under 20A. True, the CC functioned as a rubber stamp for the yahapalana government and was responsible for some controversial appointments which should not have been made. But the incumbent government could have changed the CC to make it more effective. What 20A proposes to set up is another rubber stamp council; the President will have the power to make all key appointments to the Election Commission, the judiciary, etc. Fear is being expressed in some quarters that the Auditor General’s Department will end up being an appendage of the government.
The government will be able to appoint any number of ministers if 20A is enacted, and this will help lure Opposition MPs into joining its ranks. A jumbo Cabinet will serve the purpose of only self-seeking politicians craving power and positions. Ideally, the Cabinet should not have more than 15 members. The number of ministers must not exceed 30 under any circumstances.
Worryingly, legal experts have pointed out that there is no provision in 20A for fundamental rights (FR) cases to be filed against the omissions and commissions on the part of the President. At present, FR cases can be filed against the Attorney General over presidential actions, but if 20A becomes law in its present form, people who feel that their fundamental rights have been violated by the President will not be able to invoke the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Instead, they will have to settle for going to the Appeal Court. The constitutional provision for FR cases anent presidential actions should be retained.
Overall, President Rajapaksa has done well despite 19A, which is annoyingly restrictive in some respects, and earned praise even from his critics. He certainly needs some more constitutional leeway to be able to live up to the expectations of the people who elected him and deserves the Defence portfolio among other things, as we have argued in previous comments. But 20A seeks to vest in the presidency excessive powers, and it in its present form is likely to cast him in an unfavourable light.
Framing a Constitution or amending it is a solemn task which requires sincerity and foresight, which the drafters of 19A sadly lacked; they played politics with it at the behest of their political masters. The architects of 20A have failed to be different. The yahapalana government went to one extreme, and the SLPP administration is set to go to the other. We are afraid that 20A will have a corrosive effect on the brake system of the SLPP juggernaut, causing it to go careening down the hill.
One can only hope that the government will heed concerns being expressed about 20A and consider watering it down instead of seeking a reversion to the status quo ante.
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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