It’s franchise, stupid

Thursday 1st February, 2024

Dr. Laksiri Fernando has, in his column published on the opposite page today, reminded us that the Voters’ Day of Sri Lanka falls on 01 Feb. The Election Commission (EC) conducts special programmes on this day to educate voters on matters such as the basic qualifications required for registration, and the steps to be taken to have their names included in the electoral register. According to the EC website, previous events to mark the Voters’ Day took place under catchy themes, some of them being ‘Vote is your right ‘, ‘Vote is your right, your power’, ‘Sovereignty of the people is meaningless when there is no universal franchise’, and ‘Vote is your right; besides it is your responsibility’. Going by the manner in which politicians and political parties fool the Sri Lankan voters, one wonders whether the Voters’ Day should be held on 01 April instead of 01 Feb., in this country.

The Voters’ Day has dawned this year while the people are brimming with anger that the incumbent government has arbitrarily postponed the local government elections, depriving them of their right to vote. The government cited lack of funds due to the current economic crisis as the reason for the poll postponement, but the massive wasteful expenditure it incurs has belied its claim of pecuniary woes. This year’s Independence Day celebrations will cost the public an arm and a leg; they will only boost the egos of the ruling party leaders who have made this country a burden on other nations by ruining its economy.

It requires much more than voter education to safeguard the people’s franchise. The need for a concerted effort by the public, the EC, civil society organisations, the media, etc., to prevent governments from suppressing franchise cannot be overstated.

In 2017, the UNP-led Yahapalana government postponed the provincial council polls by amending the Provincial Council (PC) Elections Act. The Amendment Bill was stuffed with a large number of sections sans judicial sanction before being rushed through Parliament. The TNA, which helped the Yahapalana government make the PC polls disappear, so to speak, is now lamenting that the PCs are without elected representatives!

The J. R. Jayewardene government, which introduced an amendment to the Parliament Elections Act, in 1988, pertaining to the National List (NL), smuggled into the Amendment Bill the words—‘any person’—after its ratification by Parliament. Thanks to this unauthorised addition, political parties can appoint their NL members as prescribed by the Constitution, and then bypass the supreme law by engineering NL vacancies to appoint persons of their choice to Parliament. All attempts to have this highly undemocratic practice terminated have been in vain. Such appointments are antithetical to people’s franchise and democracy, and therefore the parliamentary election laws must be amended to stop them. Similarly, the constitutional provision that permits the appointment of defeated candidates as NL MPs has to be done away with.

The governments that postpone, do away with, or rig elections are a danger to democracy. The extension of the life of Parliament by the J. R. Jayewardene government, with the help of a heavily-rigged referendum, in 1982, was one of the main causes of the second JVP insurrection, which plunged the country into a bloodbath in the late 1980s. If a free and fair general election had been held instead of that referendum, the irate people would have been able to give vent to their pent-up anger democratically, and the JVP would not have been able to mobilise the youth to stage its second uprising. But President Jayewardene wanted to retain his five-sixths majority.

Besides ensuring democratic representation, the expression of political will of the people, peaceful transfer of power, civic engagement and the participation of the public in governance, elections serve as safety valves that release pressure build-ups in the polity in a democratic manner. When the people are denied their right to vote, opportunities present themselves for the political forces with sinister agendas to tap public anger to fuel their anarchical projects. This is something the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe regime bent on suppressing the democratic rights and freedoms of the public and bulldozing its way through ought to take cognizance of; it is skating on thin ice.