Seeking abolition of Executive Presidency: Why Sri Lankans are still chasing shadows

Seeking to end the Executive Presidency is one thing, though it is not the real culprit for the nation’s ills. But taking to the streets, to demand the exit of the incumbent elected leadership is another

If someone thought that all the public protests and the political opposition to the ruling Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka at present are to find a way out of the grave economic crisis, it is not to be — or, so it seems. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that they are all for the exit of the Rajapaksas from power and the withdrawal of the Executive Presidency as if it were the sole villain of the piece, but only when the Rajapaksas are in power.

There are issues, but the economic issue should have taken precedence from the people, polity and public administration. That is not happening and the unseen hand is shepherding the masses in ways that are not going to find solutions to anything, any which way. That includes the constitutional conferment of all powers in the hands of a single personality, namely, the Executive President, elected under the Constitution and through the instrumentality of direct elections and majority vote every five years.

So are parliamentarians, who too are elected every five years, again by the same people, but as per electoral districts and electorates, with a sharper focus on the area and region where their service, nay, power, could extend. MPs become ministers and their constituency too expands alongside that of the President, but not necessarily their power. It does not necessarily owe to the institution of Executive Presidency, but to the ground reality that the elected person, man or woman, has the endorsement of at least half the nation’s adult population, as stipulated in the laws for the presidential election.

Through much of the past four-plus decades, a meaningless and unjustified impression has gained ground that the Executive Presidency confers greater power on the incumbent than parliamentary democracy does. The answer is yes-and-no. Some of the exclusive powers that the Executive Presidency enjoys does not flow necessarily from that institution alone.

Under parliamentary democracy, such powers are conferred on the Cabinet, acting through and for the prime minister. In effect, the prime minister or prime ministerial candidate wins elections — and the powers are centred on the person and personality of that person, again, male or female. Or, that is what Third World democracy is all about, and that is what Sri Lankan democracy too is.

Farcical, servile

It is also absurd to conclude that the extraordinary powers that an incumbent President comes to enjoy and add-on at times at his or her own whims owe near-exclusively to the majority voter support that he had obtained. No, going beyond the mandate is the man or the woman. It owes to the servility of those around such leaders, who need those leaders and want to cash in on their popularity to win their parliamentary seats and gain occupancy of ministerial positions.

For their part, the people are servile in every which way and to every other authority, elected or otherwise. Their servility increased, especially among the Sinhala majority after the total annihilation of the left-militant JVP, which needed annihilation all the same, but not certainly the complete dousing of their flame, of mass self-respect and national pride, in the Indian Ocean.

Till date, new entrant and incumbent Prime Minister Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga, CBK (62 per cent) in 1994, and not incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa in the post-war 2010 presidential polls, had recorded the highest voter-support. CBK’s was a vote against war just as Mahinda’s 2005 wafer-thin majority was for pursuing war if LTTE would not relent on the peace front. The former could not carry out her pre-poll commitment for which and which alone she was given the mandate, but the latter did it.

At the end of it all, it is only about issues and environment, circumstances and worse. Personalities win and lose elections, and the people have the power to put them in their place. As they did with Mahinda Rajapaksa in Elections-2015, which he lost despite being in power for 10 long years and for which he amended the Constitution to contest for a third time. Yet, the very same voters brought back the Rajapaksas less than five years hence — not only because the Rajapaksas wanted power but more because the people wanted the Rajapaksas back in power.

That was after the internal feud within the previous government leadership, which the voter saw as a contributing factor for ground conditions that facilitated the 2019 Easter serial blasts. The blasts claimed 269 lives, including that of 49 foreign nationals, and shattered the nation’s tourism economy, a full year before Covid pandemic took over the whole world and its economy.

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa addresses the nation on Monday. ANI

Disenfranchised and worse

Very long ago, Sri Lanka has had Prime Minister-turned-President JR Jayawardena, who in 1977 even got political rival and predecessor in office, Sirimavo Bandaranaike disenfranchised and rendered electorally impotent. Despite his unassailable five-fifths vote, JRJ lacked the confidence to meet Sirimavo Bandaranaike and her SLFP on political and parliamentary platforms.

Why, JRJ even had the Constitution amended to hold a referendum and add an extra year to the life of Parliament. That was when Sirimavo’s SLFP had the lowest-ever eight parliamentarians and the ethnic minority’s Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) was the main Opposition with 17 MPs.

Who was politically powerful, JRJ who amended the Constitution to become the first Executive President or Sirimavo, who did not have MPs and whose cadres, if any, were demoralised to the hilt? If the SLFP was down in the dumps at the time, how did it revive itself? Circumstances. And this the SLFP and the Bandaranaikes did after a long and patient wait, when in 1994, Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga (CBK) first became prime minister and then president, as if in rival JRJ footsteps. Earlier, after her father, SWRD assassination in 1959, CBK’s housewife of a mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike stepped in to become prime minister straight, as if it were ‘family property and right’ — to be celebrated as the first woman Head of Government in post-War democracies.

Maybe, had JRJ’s successor in president Ranasinghe Premadasa not fallen victim to the LTTE’s sly tactics that he thought he had mastered but did not, and died at their hands, maybe he might have lived to fight another election and finished off the SLFP for good. That did not happen. Instead, you had a fresh face in CBK with the right family political credentials returning to the fold and re-energising the party all over again.

The eternal question would remain: Why did the patriarchal society accept CBK the woman against her brother, the late Anura Bandaranaike, in her place? One can list any number of reasons, for and against, even against CBK, but the die had been cast and she won. She was the right person at the right place at the right time. Anura was the right person, yes, but at the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Anura’s ill-luck would walk ahead of him as he became Mahinda’s prime ministerial running-mate only to be dumped, post-poll in 2005. It was not one of those ‘Rajapaksa arrogance’ that came to be branded. Instead, it owed to good sister Chandrika, who talked Anura into joining hands with her to campaign openly against Mahinda, the candidate of her own choice, both as outgoing President and ruling SLFP chief, in Elections-2005.

Winner-takes-all

The Sri Lankan voter has to blame himself for not appreciating the travails accompanying the kind of ‘winner-takes-all’ approach of the nation’s elections. The winner, all along, has been using, misusing and abusing the mandate, to serve his or her personal ends. The Rajapaksas were latter-day discoveries and theirs were latter-day inventions.

Once she came back to power in 1971, after losing in between, SLFP’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike changed the political culture through the First Republican Constitution, 1972 — or, at least sought to do so. She did not do so when she succeeded her slain husband, SWRD Bandaranaike, to office. Instead, after tasting power and poll defeat, through the new Constitution, she institutionalised the Left-leaning Republican ideology, de-linking the fiercely independent nation from all vestiges of colonial rule. Sirimavo had the office of the Governor-General, a nominal appointee of the Queen of England, abolished and replaced it with a figurehead president.

The maiden poll victory of SWRD in 1956, which gave him power, rode on twin wheels. One of course was the visible socialist agenda of his Leftist fellow travellers. The other was his ‘Sinhala Only’ language policy, which created space for the majority community to dominate the job market, which was mostly in the government sector, then and since.

Sirimavo, through her Republican Constitution, made Sinhala the main official language, and Buddhism, the State religion. She even introduced the ‘standardisation’ process for university admission. The Jaffna Tamils felt discriminated against, little acknowledging that the urban Colombo students, even of the Sinhala-Buddhist stock, stood to lose.

Sirimavo’s agenda was to take education and jobs outside of Colombo, as the urban elite would not have her and her party against the more urbane and sophisticated rival, namely, the United National Party (UNP), with its right-liberal public image and economic policy, and with which they have continued to identify all along. Today, the UNP is gone, but the urbanites, whose numbers and reach are spreading, prefer the breakaway SJB to the Rajapaksas’ SLPP, in turn a breakaway party from the Bandaranaikes’ SLFP.

The less said about JRJ’s Second Republican Constitution the better. He fancied himself as the Lee Kuan Yew of Sri Lanka — but all power and no responsibility. Yes, he got Sirimavo disenfranchised, et al. So did CBK wanted to use the famed ‘Chandrika Package’, supposedly aimed at addressing the Tamil ethnic aspirations to extend her term, through hidden provisions to amend the Constitution for the purpose.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, latter-day prime minister, who was then the all-important Leader of the UNP Opposition, threw the baby with the bath-water, when he used CBK’s personal agenda to deny Tamils their dues. Team Ranil committed the greatest democratic sacrilege of all times by burning the Constitution Amendment Bill inside Parliament Chamber. Today, he is still among the greatest of ‘liberal democrats’ in a nation that continues to be at sixes and sevens about its constitutional power structures.

With that one act, which covered news pages and analyses for weeks and months in an era without social media, Ranil ensured that he did not earn the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist wrath by backing the ‘Chandrika Package’ on the ethnic solution. The Rajapaksas were still light-years away, but the institutional damage to the Constitution had already been done.

Anarchist and worse

The protestors nationwide, demanding the exit of the Rajapaksas, starting with President Gota and not stopping with Prime Minister Mahinda, and wanting the Executive Presidency abolished, are chasing a shadow. Which their previous generation too attempted. UNP’s Ranil, SJB’s Sajith Premadasa, SLFP’s CBK and Maithripala Sirisena all promised the abolition of the Executive Presidency. Either they were Executive Presidents themselves, or contested for the presidency and lost. They did talk about the abolition of the Executive President when far away from it, but not when they were in it or at it.

Protesters take to streets in Sri Lanka, demand President Rajapaksa’s resignation: AFP

Sri Lanka is Asia’s oldest electoral democracy in the modern sense of the term. Even at the height of constitutional crises, real and imaginary, it had conducted business through the process of elections, whose credibility had not been criticised, and definitely challenged, beyond a point. Be it the power transition after SWRD’s killing, or the electoral transition at the height of the engulfing JVP insurgency and the LTTE terror war at JRJ’s retirement, or those that followed the Premadasa killing, they were all part of the nation’s well-heeled democratic processes, not mobocracy, as it now being sought.

More recently, when early signs showed that incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa was losing Elections-2015, the transition remained as smooth as ever. This was despite what the likes of aides-turned-critics in former minister, Dr Rajitha Seneviratne, openly claimed was an attempt for the Rajpaaksas to stay on in power with the backing of the nation’s military. It proved farcical, too, but no one either questioned or sued Rajitha for casting aspersions on the nation’s armed forces.

Today, when the economy is in the dumps and the Western world would hesitate to do business with Sri Lanka even otherwise, no one is talking about the armed forces. In their place, defence secretary, a veteran in Gen Kamal Gunaratne (retd) and army chief, Gen Shavendra Silva, have sworn by the Constitution and at the same time protecting the interests of the Sri Lankan State.

Seeking to end the Executive Presidency is one thing, though it is not the real culprit for the nation’s ills. But taking the streets to demand the exit of the incumbent elected leadership is another. First, there is no knowing if all the masses gathered alone constitute the electorate. If it is not, what is the view of the ‘silent’ section, whether in a minority or a majority?

Academic argument, yes, but if hundreds of thousands of people gathering in one venue for one day or a few days, or they have another hundred thousand or two adding to the ranks each passing day, could get an elected government ousted through the power of their voices and the determination to stay-put, another mass at another time can repeat the same, again and again — cause and circumstances, no bar. It’s just not democracy as understood and practised though these are also the voices of democracy, alright.

Is this what those in, with and behind ‘Occupy Galle Face Green’ want? If so, there is another name for it — ‘regime-change’, the like of which happened in 2015, through less sophisticated and more acceptable means of elections that the Constitution guarantees and which no ruler, including a succession of Executive Presidents, had sought to trample upon. Not as yet!

The writer is a policy analyst and commentator, based in Chennai. Views expressed are personal.

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