Why JVP-NPP leader AKD would flunk political science

By Dr Dayan Jayatilleka

At a whistle-stop rally on the recent motorised propaganda tour by the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), its leader Kumar Gunaratnam made a clear, bold statement that in defence of the interests of the working people and youth, his party’s mass organisations were ready to work together with the trade unions, peasant unions, teachers unions and women’s organisations of the rival JVP. The highlight of the speech was on the TV News.

One would have expected an immediate positive response from the JVP leadership or that of its allegedly autonomous avatar, the NPP.

Several days later, there has been not a word of response by the JVP and/ or NPP leadership to this important outreach by the FSP leader, which if accepted and acted upon would decisively multiply the strength of the left by unifying in action, the left-led mass movement.

The non-reciprocity and deafening silence that has followed is hardly evidence of the sincerity or seriousness of the JVP-NPP.

However, that is not the point that this article seeks to draw attention to. Instead, it focuses on a horribly wrong answer the JVP-NPP leader has given to one of the most fundamental, basic and central questions of Sri Lankan politics. That blunder is strategically dangerous in a situation of extreme crisis such as that we are living through.

AKD on the presidential system

Dr Siri Gamage, Associate Professor at an Australian university translated into English and posted on a leading website, an interview given by JVP-NPP leader, or is it JVP and NPP leader, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, MP. Dr Gamage obviously translated it because he recognised it as a definitive statement of AKD’s vision and an authoritative statement of the perspective of the NPP which he heads.

For purposes of convenient assimilation and critique. I have taken the liberty of breaking up the answer into separate sections, while leaving nothing out.

This is the question AKD was asked.

Q.3. Many people talk about the executive Presidency. If you become the President, what will you do? Will you change it?

This is the complete answer he gave

“Since 1947 until 1977, our country was governed by a system centred on the parliament. Between 1977-2021, the system was centred on the executive President. If we look back, we can observe that the executive Presidential system has not been successful.

In the tribal societies, the leader controls everything including the formulation of laws, administering justice and meting out punishments. He holds legislative, executive and judicial powers. As civilisations grew, instead of a governance system centred on one person, a system based on collectivity emerged. This became the norm. Our country went back to the uncivilised (Ashista) world/era. Instead of the rule by various structures/institutions, the power was concentrated on one individual.

Take the examples like change of the Litro gas chairman, the decision to stop importing fertilizer, change of four secretaries in the Ministry of agriculture. The last secretary was an expert in the field. He could not stand the decisions made (by the government). Some professors with expertise were removed.

It is the executive power that led to the problematic situation we face. Under this any (momentary) thought that comes to the mind of the executive President can be implemented without checks and balances.

In our country, leaders do not have a higher mindset suitable for the position. He can set free someone already punished by the courts. He can implement half judgement, delay, and stop. Release someone from the prisons. Why is such a power given (to the President)? If a person is wrongly accused then he can intervene. Thus, the leader should have a mind suitable for the power he holds. Authoritarianism has been strengthened through the 20th Amendment to the constitution.

Given all the difficulties we face, we think the executive President system is not suitable for us.

Therefore, it should be changed. We will bring necessary legislation to do so before the Parliament. This is a decision of our collective movement –not my individual view. I am only one factor here. Ours is a collective effort. We have to take the power back to this collective. We can bring about a positive change that way. We have a group of people who are sincere, dedicated to the task of changing this society.” (From Revolution (Viplavaya) To Transformation (Parivarthanaya): AKD’s Response To 10 Questions – Colombo Telegraph)

Red, but not well-read

AKD has the weirdest idea of the genesis of the presidential system: “In the tribal societies, the leader controls everything including the formulation of laws, administering justice and meting out punishments. He holds legislative, executive and judicial powers. As civilisations grew, instead of a governance system centred on one person, a system based on collectivity emerged. This became the norm. Our country went back to the uncivilised (Ashista) world/era. Instead of the rule by various structures/institutions, the power was concentrated on one individual.”

The reality is quite the contrary. The first presidential system arose in the USA when the founding fathers had to decide on a system, have fought and won the American war of Independence against England; a war which was also known as the American revolution because it was waged against a monarchy.

Well acquainted with the English parliamentary system and parliamentarianism, the USA rejected it in favour of a Presidency, with checks and balances. One of those checks -and-balances was of course a bi-cameral legislature (a parliament) and the other, the judiciary.

In opting for and designing a Presidential system, the Founding athers relied heavily on the histories of the Roman Republic, a high point of proto-democratic society and civilization, before Rome became an Empire run by the Caesars.

Simon Bolivar, the great Liberator who having united much of the Latin American continent after waging war against the Spaniards, opted to follow the USA in choosing a system of government.

One of the world’s top leftist theoreticians Antonio Negri, a Professor of State Theory at the University of Padua and lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris who spent 24 years in prison and exile for his membership of Workers’ Autonomy, a far-left Italian movement, was principal author of the famous (and massive) volume ‘Empire’ (Harvard), written in Rome’s Rebibia prison. In it and its sequel, Tony Negri celebrates US Constitutionalism or what he calls ‘the US constitutional project’ by revisiting the influence on the American Founding Fathers, of Greek historian and political analyst of the Roman period, Polybius.

Aristotle made the breakthrough classification of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy, and identified the tendency of each to degenerate into its opposite and the cycle to begin again. Polybius found the solution to be a ‘mixed system’ which accommodated all three forms but used them to check and balance each other. The American constitutionalists consciously studied him and built a mixed system with the elected presidency, judiciary, and bicameral legislature.

AKD is obviously completely unaware of the glowing letter of support written by Karl Marx on behalf of the First Workingmen’s International, to American President Abraham Lincoln on his war to defend the union against the Confederate breakaway, and to free the slaves. AKD is also obviously unaware that had Lincoln not had the executive powers of the presidency (which he decisively used) and decisions were left to the legislature, the North could not have won the Civil War.

So much then for AKD’s garbled and imaginary history of the social and historical origins of the Presidential system, which is the basis of his denunciation. You cannot be politically illiterate about what you are fighting against and which you denounce as the chief evil or fount of all our present discontents.

If this interview were a tutorial or examination paper in Political Science, I would have given him the same ratings that S&P’s, Fitch and Moody’s give Sri Lanka under Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Presidency or Parliament?

Furthermore, AKD confuses the Presidential system as exists in Sri Lanka, with the Presidential system as such.

Sri Lankans have a Presidential system – which is more advanced than a parliamentary model–albeit badly distorted by two swings to opposite extremes: the over-centralization of the 18th and 20th amendments and the dysfunctional deadlock of the 17th and 19th amendments.

AKD has a garbled reference to checks and balances: “It is the executive power that led to the problematic situation we face. Under this any (momentary) thought that comes to the mind of the executive President can be implemented without checks and balances. In our country, leaders do not have a higher mindset suitable for the position. He can set free someone already punished by the courts. He can implement half judgement, delay, and stop. Release someone from the prisons. Why is such a power is given (to the President)? If a person is wrongly accused then he can intervene. Thus, the leader should have a mind suitable for the power he holds.”

What is the JVP leader trying to say? If it is that checks and balances are necessary but absent in Sri Lanka, then why not advocate a Presidential system WITH the separation of powers which provides checks and balances as do the US and French presidential systems?

Latin America and South East Asia have witnessed far more autocratic rule than has Sri Lanka so far – for instance that of Pinochet, Suharto and Park Chung Hee—but no Latin American or Far Eastern revolutionary, radical, leftist, progressive or democrat has advocated the abolition of the presidency, and many have run for and been elected President without regarding it as their duty to abolish the office!

AKD concludes that “Given all the difficulties we face, we think the executive President system is not suitable for us.” By “we” he obviously means the JVP and the NPP, separately or together.

So, “we think the executive President system is not suitable for us”—which means the executive presidential system as such; as a system; not the 1978 model or the post-20th amendment model.

He gives the most easily refutable reasoning and the skimpiest possible evidence for his conclusion: “If we look back, we can observe that the executive Presidential system has not been successful.”

To start with, what would have happened to the war, when the JVP pulled out of the coalition with Mahinda Rajapaksa while the war was on, IF SRI LANKA DID NOT HAVE THE EXECUTIVE PRESIDENTIAL SYSTEM?

The resultant political instability would have enhanced the power of those parliamentary formations which officially regarded the LTTE as “the sole legitimate representatives of the Tamil people”. There would have been instability in the rear of the state and the armed forces, which would have helped the racist-fascistic enemy, Prabhakaran and his Tigers.

No political system can be evaluated in the abstract. It must be evaluated comparatively, and in the case of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, it has to be evaluated as against our experience with the parliamentary system. AKD’s blithe condemnation of the executive presidency is utterly unconvincing when we review the real history of this country.

Every single centrifugal, supremacist act that dragged this country from being ahead of the rest of South Asia to lagging behind it, took place under Ceylon’s/Sri Lanka’s Westminster model.

The disenfranchisement of the hill-country Tamils of Indian origins, the Sinhala Only policy, the takeover of private Catholic schools, the policy of district-wise and media-wise standardization of marks at university entrance, the Constitutional declaration of Sinhala as the sole official language, and conferral of primacy of place for Buddhism, took place under parliamentary democracy (and the nostalgically admired first-past-the-post electoral system).

Not a single such piece of discriminatory legislation was promulgated under the 1978 Constitution (and the system of proportional representation).

The 1958 anti-Tamil riots occurred; the JVP, the Tamil New Tigers (TNT) and its successor the LTTE were formed; separatism became mainstream Tamil politics (Vadukkodai resolution 1976); and armed insurgencies were born–all during the Parliamentary period of our post-Independence history.

To prevent arbitrary appointments by the President and to de-politicize public service appointments, which AKD keeps talking about in this answer, one simply has to return to the situation prior to the abolition of the independent Public Service Commission; opt for restoration of the pre-1972 PSC.

In the USA, the executive is checked not by commissions consisting of unaccountable NGO members, but by legislative oversight in the form of strong Congressional committees. In Sri Lanka, that would forestall any backlash.

Attributing all contemporary ills to the executive Presidential system, while upholding the parliamentary model, is palpably dishonest and hypocritical.

If you get the fundamentals wrong, whatever you get right, you will not make it beyond a point. If you get the answers to fundamental questions wrong, you cannot provide, let alone be, the real alternative.