The April 25 poll, is the stability election. It’s the electoral contest in which the years of near anarchy spawned by a hapless UNP led regime has to be turned around and reversed in a way that’s solid and confidence inspiring, if not permanent.
It’s true that there are other reasons people will vote. They want a better economy, they want better opportunities for their children, and they want hope. But primarily they will seek to bring back the stability that was wholly absent during the five years of so called Yahapalana rule.
The ‘liberal’ and ‘licchavi’ experiments failed. The UNP led government attempted to consolidate its tenacious hold on power purely by the strength of spin during a bizarre five year tenure of serial missteps and melodramas.
Eventually, they spun everything out of control, and it became difficult to name anyone that was not sick of them. They tried to machine wash and tumble dry everything, but delivered nothing.
The result was an anarchy that has given way to the new symbiosis between the security forces and the Government led by the former war winning duo, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa. It’s no accident that military men play a reasonable role in this Government. It’s not so much the security forces per se, but armed forces personnel, particularly those who have a record of delivering the goods, that have been given high ranking positions in a variety of state led enterprises and state led efforts.
UTOPIA
Why did the people opt for a considerable degree of security forces involvement in a civilian government? The people did prefer such an arrangement because they knew when they voted that this would be one result of a Gotabaya led administration to come.
The bad taste in the mouth left by anarchic Yahapalana rule is not to be underestimated. The 19th Amendment was primarily designed to vest power with the head of the legislative branch but the net result was that there were two contending executive power centres.
This was not a liberal idea of utopia. It was a constitutional amendment made in hell. It brought about such friction between the then Prime Minister and the President that the whole country was reduced to a daily drama of anarchy which was highly contagious. When there was anarchy in the top echelon of governance, it was natural that there was anarchy everywhere else, from the petrol pump to national grid, to the most important matter of national security.
It’s purely an accident of timing, but absolutely fitting that the 2020 general election takes place just four days past the first anniversary of the terror attacks of April 21 that claimed 250 lives of innocent men women and children, and left many more injured. There appeared to be no command responsibility for letting these attacks happen, because everybody claimed they were not in command.
So called ‘liberal’ free spirits that went into raptures about the 19th Amendment when it was enacted, didn’t claim any responsibility either.
The army stepped in quietly into the breach. Politicos of the liberal persuasion that had insulted the army at every turn kept silent as the the joint forces tried to restore some semblance of order amid the debris and carnage left by the 19th Amendment and its induced ‘power vacuum.’
As the new President said, only two brothers can handle the contending power centres left in the wake of the 19th Amendment which has brought about a ludicrous situation in which the IGP cannot be removed even amid glaring negligence on his part in the face of information about last April’s terror attacks. One member of the Elections Commission is acting as if he is a law unto himself. But yet these are called ‘independent’ Commissions.
Unelected officials among others rejected the then President’s recommendations for appointments to the superior courts on more than 14 occasions. In the USA the President appoints the Supreme Court judges. In the UK a Selections Panel consisting of senior officials of the judiciary appoint them, but these appointments have to be ratified by the Lord Chancellor and then the Prime Minister. The examples of the UK and the US are being considered here because the ‘liberals’ who were ecstatic about the 19th Amendment are generally in awe of these two Western powers. But these powers do things differently. They do not let a politicised body of unelected officials rule the roost, creating a power vacuum as they get about their ostensibly independent functions. That happens in Sri Lanka.
LOPSIDED
But somebody should write a book about Jayampathy Wickremeratne and the ‘liberal’ coterie of pen-pushers and constitutional fantasists who dreamed up the 19th Amendment and actually made it into law. They ignored all tenets about a healthy separation of powers.
There is hardly any need to debate the fact that the Constitutional Council (CC) as constituted during the former UNP regime was anything but independent. How could it be impartial in any way when the Leader of the Opposition, a key member of the CC himself was not legitimate, because the Speaker had chosen to make somebody who led a party with less MPs than the largest party in Parliament the Leader of the Opposition.
Obviously, the Constitutional Council was lopsided and was made into an instrument of the UNP or a power centre under the thumb of the UNP, whose leadership appointed most of its ‘independent’ members as well.
CONSTITUTIONAL PUNDITS
The body that was meant to depoliticise the public sector was a sham, and it was more overtly political than the President could ever be, acting on his own. At least a President has a people’s mandate which is why the President appoints Supreme Court judges in the USA for instance.
It is important to obliterate this whole idea of so called independent commissions from the body politic altogether. It started with the 17th Amendment. But the provisions of that Amendment were largely observed in the breach.
It took the full implementation of the provisions for independent commissions after the enactment of the 19th, post 2015, to realise the full potential for destabilisation that was inherent in the device of the Constitutional Council and the Independent Commissions.
Even though this writer predicted this potentially damaging outcome with the CC and the independent commissions as far back as the year 2000 or thereabouts, the constitutional pundits were sure of themselves as they hurriedly got the new provisions drafted.
They would certainly know now that hindsight is 20/20. Liberal pundits may yet swear by the 19th and hold that the circumstances that led to the Easter Sunday security breach cannot be fathered on the Amendment. They will be fooling themselves. The 19th Amendment had already led to a ludicrous situation in the country a few months before the Easter attacks, and it could fairly be stated that in light of the constitutional crisis of October 2018, the Easter Sunday breach was just waiting to happen.
The events of the previous October were a direct result of the completely amateurish and ridiculously sloppy nature of the draft 19th. But it’s not sloppiness alone. The Supreme Court ruled that certain clauses of the 19th cannot be made into law without recourse to a national referendum. Thereafter, a great deal of Clause tinkering was done to avoid a referendum, which resulted in major ambiguities in the constitutional document.
An amendment that has led directly to not one but two calamities for the country within a few months is not just a mistake, it is a total disaster.
The 19th should be taken out of our Constitution, chapter and verse, with utmost quick dispatch. Several more disasters are probably waiting to happen if this odious Amendment stays, and we have had one too many already.
Nothing close to the 19th or the 17th for that matter should be in our Constitution when the 19th is eventually despatched into the dustbin, hopefully after the April elections.
Having the elected executive decide on key appointments is certainly better than having a partisan NGO clique enjoying a say over who should hold key positions. And to what end do they use such powers? So that the nation would be serially bedeviled by crisis as it happened in late 2018, and most notably on Easter Sunday last year?