Editorial
Modi bottom trawling Tamil Nadu votes
Few Lankans would have been surprised that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, now campaigning to lead his Bharatiya Janatha Party to ‘threpeat’ its election victories for the third consecutive time, has raked up a long dead Kachchativu issue to win votes in Tamil Nadu where the BJP fared badly at the last two elections. Both Modi and his suave External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, a retired career diplomat, have waded into this issue, blaming the Indira Gandhi Congress government of “ceding” this barren, uninhabited Palk Strait island which only comes to life during the annual Catholic festival which Indian fishermen boycotted this year. This festival is dedicated to St. Anthony, the patron saint of fishermen, in whose honour a shrine stands at Kachchativu.
While it was a Congress government led by Mrs. Gandhi which signed the agreement stating that the islet stood on the Sri Lanka side of the maritime boundary demarcating the two countries, the BJP target is neither Congress nor the Gandhis this time round. The attack is focused on the DMK of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, whose father, Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi was aligned with Mrs. Gandhi when the Kachchativu agreement was reached.
Modi and the BJP are looking at winning some votes along the Tamil Nadu coast by dangling a carrot of regaining Kachchativu allowing Indian fishermen who have been poaching in Sri Lanka waters for decades to continue their illegal practices. Apart from poaching, Indian fishermen blatantly and brazenly use bottom trawling methods destroying the marine environment in the seabed. Efforts to prevent these incursions costing fishermen in Sri Lanka’s north dearly have proved futile over the years.
We in Sri Lanka are all too familiar with what has been going on for a very long time. Indian fishermen had carte blanche over these waters during the war when Sea Tiger activity required prohibition of northern fishermen venturing out into the deep sea. That gave Indian fishermen freedom to exploit the fisheries resources of Lankan waters at will. After the war ended the incursions continued. Sporadic arrests on Indian poachers and their craft by the Sri Lanka Navy continue. Offenders are charged in magistrates’ courts, sometimes warned and occasionally imprisoned. Political pressure is applied on New Delhi by Tamil Nadu and Delhi in turn pressures Colombo.
Arrested fishermen are freed and the cycle repeats itself. There has been no effort whatever on the Indian side to prevent their fishermen from crossing the international maritime boundary. India preaches that the issue be treated as “a humanitarian problem.” That seems to mean that Indian fishermen be permitted to plunder a neighbour’s resource at will simply because they have been doing so for a long time.
The forthcoming election period in India will, no doubt, see strident demands for the “retrieval” of Kachchativu by vote seeking Indian politicians. On this side of the Palk Strait, Fisheries Minister Douglas Devananda has for quite some time been feeling the heat of his northern constituency totally disheartened by Colombo’s impotence to do something meaningful about their predicament. They have long been complaining of losses of catch as a result of the Indian incursions into Lankan waters.
A few days ago Devananda went on record saying he’d told the Tamil Nadu fisheries minister on the phone that the Indian fishing fleet must not be allowed to fish in our waters “under any circumstances” and that a request made by the Tamil Nadu government in this regard could not be granted. He is of the view that Tamil Nadu fishermen could not be allowed access to Lankan waters until a permanent solution, acceptable to both countries, is reached. Meanwhile he is pushing for sterner naval action against Indian poachers. How effective his demands will be is an open question.
It was recently reported that Mr. Sagala Ratnayake, the president’s chief-of-staff and advisor on national security during a visit to New Delhi to discuss proposed connectivity matters between India and Sri Lanka would also take up the long running fisheries issue. Although Ratnyake is back in Colombo, there has been no news on whether this subject was in fact taken up. If it was, both sides appeared to have agreed to maintain a diplomatic silence on the matter. Whether the mandarins in the Indian capital, at the time of the Ratnayake visit, were aware that both India’s prime minister and her external affairs minister were about to make Katchchativu a campaign issue, we do not know. What we do know is that the poaching issue, regardless of Kachchativu, will be a hard nut to crack.
Delhi is always conscious of what Indian diplomats called “sub-regional sentiment” at the time our neighbour permitted the terrorist LTTE to train and base in India. Then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MG Ramachandran had a very close relationship with Prabakaran. The Indian center was for long complicit with assistance rendered to the Tigers in India. But for the infamous ‘parippu drop’ in 1987, Operation Vadamarachchi would have ended the terrorist war long before it was actually accomplished in 2009. There is no escaping the reality that Sri Lanka, during the recent economic crunch, is immensely beholden to Indian assistance. India probably will not eventually demand the “return” of Kachchativu though the island was never India’s in the first place. But Prime Minister Modi and his BJP have clearly signaled that they are not above trawling for Tamil Nadu votes on this issue.
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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