Editorial
‘Diyawanna Post Office’
Tuesday 22nd September, 2020
Former Speaker Karu Jayasuriya has warned that the proposed 20th Amendment (20A) to the Constitution, if passed, will reduce Parliament to a mere post office. One cannot but agree with him that 20A seeks to strengthen the position of the President at the expense of Parliament, and everything possible should be done to prevent its passage in its present form.
However, it is doubtful whether the Opposition and the civil society outfits backing it will be able to drum up enough public support for their campaign against 20A by merely highlighting what is likely to befall the legislature, for people do not care whether Parliament will be reduced to a post office or not; such is their disillusionment with the national legislature. Parliament has not lived up to the expectations of the public. While people are struggling to find turmeric, which is in short supply, due to a ban the government has imposed on spice imports, among other things, to save foreign exchange, it has been reported that the MPs will be given duty free vehicle permits soon.
When the Prime Minister and the President happen to represent different political parties, the former becomes more powerful than the latter owing to flaws in the present Constitution. This, we have seen thrice since the introduction of the presidential system of government, in 1978. Prime Minister Chandrika Kumaratunga emerged stronger than President D. B. Wijetunge, in 1994. They, however, cooperated. But the country found itself in chaos when the Prime Ministers and the Presidents came from different political parties.
From 2001 to 2004, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe (UNP) undermined the position of President Chandrika Kumaratunga (PA). He went so far as to sign a disastrous ceasefire agreement with the LTTE without the President’s knowledge. The 2001 regime change also led to the divestiture of some state-owned cash cows such as Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation. The LTTE consolidated its power and made preparations for its final war.
The country suffered again when the Prime Minister became more powerful than the President, in 2015, owing to the 19th Amendment (19A) to the Constitution. PM Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Maithripala Sirisena were at loggerheads. The President’s position became so weak that the then Speaker Jayasuriya refused to carry out presidential orders during an abortive constitutional coup in 2018. The biggest ever financial crime—the bond scam—was committed while the legislature was stronger than the Executive. Then came the Easter Sunday bombings, which snuffed out more than 250 lives and left hundreds of others injured besides dealing a body blow to the economy. What has transpired so far before the Presidential Commission of Inquiry probing those terror strikes shows that national security was in the hands of a bunch of total misfits from 2015 to 2019. It was only natural that the people wanted a strong President to bring order out of chaos and elected Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
We do not argue that the people’s lot improves when the PM happens to play second fiddle to the President. The point we are trying to make is that even the PMs who could act independently succumbed to the arrogance of power and bulldozed their way through, giving the lie to the claim that the interests of the people are better served when Parliament is strengthened.
The success of any protest campaign hinges on the ability of its organisers to mobilise the public. Those who have taken it upon themselves to spearhead the campaign against 20A are the ones who had 19A tailored to further their political interests and, therefore, failed to convince the public that the powers of Parliament had to be restored to ensure checks and balances and better governance. The incumbent government is craftily using the bunglings of the previous dispensation to bolster its claim that the country needs an extremely powerful President, and 20A is the only way to achieve that end.
The ongoing campaign against 20A is characterised by a severe trust deficit, which the Opposition has failed to overcome. Sri Lankan intelligentsia is divided along party lines, and this has stood in the way of the formation of public opinion on some crucial issues. The government has managed to confine the issue of 20A to the political front, where it is strong. But let the SLPP leaders be urged to learn from their past mistakes and refrain from steamrollering 20A through. They had better remember that they employed the same method to secure the passage of the 18th Amendment but lost power about four years later, in January 2015.
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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