Enact a new Constitution NOW

by Kumar David

Of the three constitutions of Ceylon/Sri Lanka within living memory the most liberal was the Soulbury Constitution, then the Sirima-Colvin enactment; JR crafted the most authoritarian. From this experience people of my parent’s generation draw pleasant conclusions about old British times, but I have to let that discourse pass. However, one question I must ask is: was government less corrupt then? The period after Independence has brought material prosperity to the people – advances in healthcare and education, mega-projects (Gal Oya and Mahweli to name just two) and a more complex and industrialised economy. In this one para introduction I have noted two important points; a new constitution must provide opportunities for the economy to expand and secondly the ethical worthies of the public service and if possible – and that is a big if – the moral integrity of political classes must be fortified. Having said this, allow me to move on to the contingent circumstances accompanying the constitution making processes.

Starting 2015 numerous parliamentary committees toiled for hours, toured the country taking statements and burnt the midnight oil preparing the ground for a new constitution to replace JR’s monster. All that material remains locked up in various parliamentary archives. There was a change of government in 2020 and the Rajapaksa bandwagon that came to power was more determined than ever to retain an executive presidency and authoritarianism. Whatever was achieved before 1920 is now lost at least in part. The fight to enact a democratic constitution in Sri Lanka is going to be a Sisyphean task, uphill all the way. Interestingly the foreign interests (imperialism, IMF, or corporate powers) that collaborated with JR then have, to a degree, melted away thanks to universal human rights movements and global political competition have taken their fortunate toll.

In the context of Sri Lanka at this time there are (in addition to the economic anxieties of the masses and attempting to control the immorality of the political classes) three additional imperatives of national significance whose solution the constitution must facilitate. I will use the terminology by which they are widely known, these are.

The National Question
The aspirations of Youth
The protection and preservation of Democracy and Human Rights

I will now expand on this but it is impossible to avoid repeating what I have written about in my previous pieces in this column during the last six to eight weeks. Of particular significance is the recession facing global capitalism, the emergence of anarchist (Blanquist) trends in Lanka’s radical youth movements, the global inflation vs. interest-rate conflict and the universal expectation that there will have to be a great deal of belt-tightening before growth can resume in Lanka.

This nonsense of ethnic extremism has been going on for long enough and has destroyed the body politic of Sri Lanka; enough is enough. Firm legislation must be enacted to put an end to it. One vital step is that monks and other persons in yellow robes who provoke ethnic violence must be incarcerated without mercy. There should be no constitutional impediment to these essential measures. Second, the radical youth groups such as the Frontline Socialists and the JVP which have in the past dirtied their hands by messing around with communal extremism should no longer be allowed to get away with it. In the case of the JVP the problem is already half solved thanks to the NPP which is committed to devolution of responsibilities to communities and to provinces. The NPP must not relax pressure; if anything the pressure on the JVP to stop its communalism must be increased.

A problem is likely to be the media, sections of which may take to arrant racism in the guise of free speech. The rules of the Press Council and the laws in general must be strengthened as necessary. This time when international human rights pressure is being focussed on Sri Lanka is an appropriate moment to get tough. The next concern regarding the national question is what to expect from liberal capitalist entities? Commercial ventures, businessmen and grandees have become accustomed to purveying racist poppycock as their right. If Germany can declare Holocaust Denial a criminal offence, we can take a leaf from this copybook. Of course, one can cross the t’s and dot the i’s differently but my bottom line is that it is necessary to get tough on racism.

Making progress on the National Question, meeting the expectations of the young and cajoling the people to put up with the period of hardship to permit say a decade of economic improvement are all predicted on one variable. Is the economy improving and is it visible to the different social classes and political agents? This is not historical materialism gone haywire, on the contrary there are two ways in which material factors control society. The first is what I have said here, improving material conditions assuage social and political pressures. The second is crude personal materialism that governs daily life. What is commonly called greed, excessive and un-Buddhist desire for more, a willingness to sell even one’s mother down river in the commercial free-market if it is profitable to do so. This is a fact of daily life within and outside families, among friends and among commercial partners. It will be so for as long as homo sapiens exists as a species. Darwin’s survival thesis, Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (Memoriam AHH 1850) etc.

One point of theoretical interest is the thesis that material benefit alone dictates the evolution of society and culture and the state are mere appendages that tag along. Is it reasonable to say that the different stages of historical evolution are a movement of society from slavery to serfdom, from classical (Greco-Roman, Xian China or pre-Mohenjo-Daro Indus Valley) to feudal, serf, medieval and capitalism today? That is too simplistic because each stage in social evolution carried in the transition, vestiges of the culture and statecraft of its origin.

Certainly there would have been little of this nature to carry over in the earliest stages of “Out of Africa ll” when homo sapiens moved out of Africa about 100,000 years ago over the Middle Eastern land mass, entering India, moving north across Central Asia into China and maybe 50,000 years ago crossing over into New Guinea and then Australia. The available anthropological and scientific literature is rich and these two paras are intended to no more than to point you in these directions.

What is very likely is that in the hunter-gatherer societies that preceded settled civilisation, initially in the Tigris-Euphrates Valleys, the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia commencing about 12,000 BC, social organisation was very rudimentary. There are hardly any cultural symbols (burial sites) or methods of state-craft are known to have been carried over from say 30,000 years ago. Prehistoric, in our case pre-Balangoda Man simply existed. His state-craft and cultural artefacts are lost.

In more recent times migration has crafted a course of worldwide penetration quite distinct from the aforesaid Out of Africa ll experiences. They have left dominant markers – Chinese cuisine without challenge the most diverse and best in the world, has spanned a legion of China towns all over the world. Indian indentured labour built the railways of North and South America or settled down into stable plantation communities all over Asia and Africa. None of this is to be confused with human pre-history.