Suffering and suffrage

Friday 12th February, 2021

The much-delayed Provincial Council (PC) polls can be held within a couple of months if Parliament passes necessary laws urgently, the Election Commission (EC) is reported to have said. The task of making laws is child’s play for the incumbent government with a two-thirds majority in Parliament; the Opposition will also be left with no alternative but to support legislation to obviate the legal impediments to the conduct of the PC elections. Having swept the parliamentary polls, the SLPP was initially keen to hold the PC elections, but it lost interest subsequently, maybe due to the plummeting of its popularity ratings.

The EC is there to conduct elections, and, therefore, its urge to hold the much-delayed PC polls is understandable. Elections are the lifeblood of democracy; ideally they must not be postponed. But the question is whether it is advisable to hold the PC polls soon, given the severity of the national health emergency. The Election Secretariat has been closed temporarily following the detection of a COVID-19 infected worker. So, how can the EC claim to be able to conduct the PC polls while the pandemic is ripping through the country? Some government doctors are of the view that the country is now facing the community transmission of COVID-19, and there will be an exponential increase in infections unless tough measures are adopted to curb the spread of the virus.

The EC may be able to ensure the safety of elections officials and the voting public on the polling day. In fact, it did so when the parliamentary election was held last year. But the problem is not voting as such but electioneering. Politicians and their supporters threw caution to the wind and blatantly violated the health regulations in the run-up to the 2020 general election. There were countless rallies, where physical distancing was conspicuous by its absence. A few months later there was an explosive spread of COVID-19. The election must have made a huge contribution to the rapid transmission of the virus although the ‘second wave’ of infections is said to have been triggered by a group of workers brought here from a neighbouring country without being properly quarantined.

The general election was held to elect 196 representatives in the 225-member Parliament, which has 29 appointed MPs. The PCs, numbering nine, have 455 members. The higher the number of contestants in the fray, the more intense an electoral contest. Even if the PC elections are staggered, they are bound to aggravate the health crisis in the provinces that go to the polls, and infections will spread to other areas.

If the PC polls had been held when the terms of the PCs expired under the previous government, the present situation would not have arisen; the people would have had to pay through the nose to maintain 455 politicians, but they would not have been exposed to health risks. Unfortunately, the UNP, the SLFP, the JVP, the SLMC, the TNA, and all others supportive of the yahapalana government joined forces to postpone the PC elections as they were scared of facing electoral contests. They unashamedly secured the passage of the Provincial Council Elections (Amendment) Act of 2017 after stuffing it with sections sans judicial sanction, at the committee stage, for that purpose.

It is being argued in some quarters that the PCs are useless, and therefore, one should not make an issue of the postponement of elections to them. True, the PCs are a herd of white elephants, as it were, and its members hardly rendered any service to the public during the last three decades. But the postponement of the PC polls is not a solution to the problem. The PCs are functioning although there are no elected representatives. They are being run by some bureaucrats and the Governors appointed by the President.

If the PCs are useless and a drain on the public purse as the opponents of the 13th Amendment argue, they must be abolished. Prolonging the postponement of elections to them in the hope that the problem will solve itself with the passage of time is not the way to set about tackling the problem. The fact, however, remains that it is not advisable to conduct an electoral contest at this juncture; priority should be given to the alleviation of suffering rather than the exercise of suffrage.