Double whammy in the offing

Tuesday 15th December 2020

The government has reportedly undertaken to expedite the process of conducting the much-delayed Provincial Council (PC) elections. Why is it in a hurry? Nobody feels the absence of the elected PC members who hardly render any service to the public. In fact, the PC system has become a white elephant, and there have been calls for abolishing it, saving funds wasted on maintaining them and preventing the duplication of administration, but Sri Lanka has no say in the matter; it has to do as India says. The revocation of Kashmir’s special status has made a mockery of India’s advocacy of devolution in this country, but duplicity is a luxury that only powerful states can enjoy.

The government will have to hold the PC polls due to external pressure, but the people will not gain anything therefrom. The Northern PC (2013–2018) considered clashing with the government its raison d’etre. It only passed a host of stinging resolutions, out of spite, and instead of exercising the powers already vested in it to serve the public, it kept on demanding more. In other parts of the country, too, the PC members hardly did anything useful; they only enjoyed their perks, and some male Western PC members were once caught watching pornographic films on their official computers during the annual budget debate.

In a strange turn of events replete with irony, the TNA, (which demands more devolution), the UNP, (which created the PCs and resorted to unbridled state terror to make them work, initially), and the JVP, (which plunged the country into a bloodbath, in the late 1980s, in an abortive bid to abort the PCs), joined forces, in 2017, to postpone the PC polls. Scared of facing electoral contests, they amended the Provincial Council Elections Act in the most despicable manner by introducing a slew of changes thereto at the committee stage, without judicial sanction, to provide for the postponement of the PC polls indefinitely. The original Bill, gazetted, presented to Parliament and scrutinised by the Supreme Court, sought to increase female representation in the PCs to 30%, but what was ratified with a two-thirds majority was vastly different from it.

The process of holding the PC polls will necessitate the resolution of several serious delimitation issues which stood in the way of the adoption of the new electoral system for the PCs, under the previous government. Interestingly, the incumbent administration, some of whose leaders are critical of the PC system and even called for its abolition, while they were in the Opposition, will have to go out of its way to finish what the yahapalana government purposely left undone to postpone the PC polls.

Meanwhile, some medical experts have argued that what we are experiencing is not the second wave of COVID-19 but the first one, which went out of control due to serious lapses on the part of the government. The general election held some moons ago must have facilitated the transmission of coronavirus owing to mass gatherings and blatant violations of the health guidelines, thus paving the way for an explosive spread of the disease, later on. Another electoral exercise is very likely to lead to a community spread of COVID-19, causing the healthcare system to be overwhelmed and increasing the death toll. The general election had to be held because the country could not do without an elected Parliament; funds had to be allocated and laws made, but it does not make sense to hold the PC polls at this juncture and expose the public to the danger of contracting COVID-19.

One should not be so naïve as to expect the government to give in to pressure from the nationalistic forces that propelled it to power and abolish the PCs, or let them wither on the vine by postponing elections thereto indefinitely. It may bellow rhetoric for the consumption for its support base, but will not dare antagonise India lest it should get another ‘RAW deal’ from New Delhi. It may be recalled that in March 2015, Mahinda Rajapaksa told the South China Morning Post newspaper that India’s premier spy agency was among the external forces that engineered the 2015 regime change here.

However, there is something the government can do for the sake of the people who will have to cough up more funds to maintain the PCs to be elected. That is to scrap the new electoral system, which will inevitably result in a huge increase in the number of PC members leeching off the public; it caused the number of local government members to be doubled in 2018. Otherwise, the pandemic-hit public struggling to keep the wolf from the door will face a double whammy.