Post 2015 Presidential Election – some thoughts from a social scientist’s perspective
One of the wonderful things about being engaged in social science is that from time to time society has a way of surprising you.
When this happens the best is to rethink your assumptions, rather than trying to squeeze social reality into what you alreadybelieved in. The 2015 Presidential Election was one such occasion. First, the behaviour of a section of the Sinhalese voters – just five years ago the former president won an election with 57.9 per cent of the valid votes. It happened after the military defeat of the LTTE.
In fact this marked the end of more than three decades of armed challenges to the state, which began in the early seventies. It certainly marked a qualitative departure in Sri Lanka’s modern history. With this victory President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in triumphalist mode, went to tackle what he called the other war, ‘development’. We saw new buildings and highways coming up and propagandists for the president started touting percentage figures as a sign of development. This arithmetic discourse was supplemented by hegemonic Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, triumphalism with the participation of the armed forces. This was supposed to impress the Sinhala voter. But somehow a section of Sinhala voters did not think this adds up to much and voted against him. Unfortunately, despite long years of electoral practice, electoral behaviour is a heavily under-researched phenomenon in this country. The broad categories used in surveys do not seem to capture the complex process that goes into the final decision of placing a cross in front of a name and a symbol. There are quite a lot of questionable assumptions about political behaviour in these surveys. Anyhow the results of this election provide one more set of empirical data to explore this issue in a more nuanced fashion.
Exemplary Elections Commissioner
The second surprise for many during this election was the behaviour of the bureaucracy and the police that conducted the elections and provided security. The government officials who went through our polling cards, checked our identity, painted our fingers with indelible ink and spent long hours counting votes provided a service that Sri Lanka can be proud of.
They also had an exemplary leadership from the Election Commissioner, Mahinda Deshapriya. In fact looking back at our history of elections we can put forward a certain hypothesis for this behaviour. During the period of the first-past-the-post electoral system Sri Lanka developed an institutional framework that ensured relatively free and fair elections. At least one of the reasons that contributed to this was the bureaucracy becoming a relatively neutral factor once the parliament was dissolved. In this system there was only one centre of political power – the parliament. In such a context and because of the tradition of the Sri Lankan voter of changing parties in power, the bureaucracy became a politically neutral institution once parliament was dissolved. One could see signs of this phenomenon during the last days of the election campaign and it may have contributed to what we saw on 8th January. Finally, if the information on what happened during the final stages of transfer of power is correct, when it was clear that Mahinda Rajapaksa was defeated it was the police led by the IGP that stood firm in safeguarding our franchise. Therefore, both the bureaucracy and the police which we thought to be highly politicised acted in a different manner at this moment.
Having experienced this remarkable phenomenon of the defeat of a politically powerful president, it is time now to take stock of key issues that we need to reflect upon to make use of the opportunity created by this election. The purpose of this article is to raise some of the concerns that we need to tackle for long-term peace and stability in Sri Lanka. The concerns identified here can constitute ideas for a social vision that can contribute to peace and stability. It is precisely these problems that the Rajapaksa regime did not or could not tackle due to its ideological orientation and interests of those close to the regime. However much pro-Rajapaksa ideologues talked about a Mahinda Chintanaya it did not have a vision that could provide a basis for a peaceful Sri Lanka. To a certain extent an important reason for the electoral defeat was this paucity of ideas.
Complex issues
As will become clear from the rest of this note, the issues covered straddle several areas of concern. The complexity of questions that we face is such that we need to deal with all these areas. Therefore the first requirement is a non-reductionist mode of thinking. In one of the seminal articles with a catchy title, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, reflecting on a line by the Greek poet Archilochus which went as ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, identified two types of thinking prevalent in social analysis and in discussing answers to social problems. In the first category we have the approach of the hedgehog. This type of thinking is based on the search for one big answer or a single universal organising principle that explains everything in society. This involves an extreme form of reductionism. In contrast to the hedgehog, the fox is a more nuanced thinker. It does not believe in one big reductionist answer to social problems. Society is a complex entity for such an approach. Therefore there are many answers to many problems. This form of thinking generates scepticism when frameworks that explain everything are put forward. What follows are a few comments about several key issues that Sri Lanka needs to tackle in the aftermath of the presidential election of 2015, written in the spirit of a fox.
Victory of a plural society
First, of all this is an election victory of a plural society. However much the more nationalist sections of supporters of the National Democratic Front want to downplay it, if Tamils and Muslims had not supported the new president in large numbers it would have been difficult for Maithripala Sirisena to beat Mahinda Rajapaksa. Of course a significant section of the Sinhalese also supported him. It is precisely because of this it becomes the victory for the plural character of our society. It is time to celebrate this. It also shows one of the positive sides of a directly-elected president, when the entire country becomes one electorate. In a system like this, due to the peculiarity of the demographic composition of Sri Lanka, minorities can influence the election of the president. Therefore while the presidential system can certainly lay a foundation for the highly centralised personalised politics of political leaders, who begin to think they are descendants of Sinhala kings, discussion about reforms of the presidential system needs to remember the fact that under a presidential system, minorities can have a say in electing the executive.
Elections Commissioner , Mahinda Deshapriya.
When the war that has taken so much of a toll in this country ended with the destruction of the military capability of the LTTE, and the clash of arms was silenced, we had a golden opportunity to strengthen the plural character of our society that has been enriched by the presence of diverse identity groups. This opportunity to unite a plural society was lost due to parochialism and narrow nationalism. Hence the defeat of narrow nationalism in this election should provide us an opportunity to make another start to strengthen and celebrate the plural character of our society.Being an island in the Indian Ocean that attracted waves of migrants, this Pearl of the Indian Ocean has been always been rich in diverse cultures. On the other hand, Sinhalese who form the majority were always ready to make use of opportunities that the world provided. They went out whenever these chances arose and lived in societies dominated by other cultures. This history forms a solid base to make use of opportunities and also to adjust to the world of globalised capitalism. It is clear even that in developed capitalist countries those societies that are more open to diverse cultures have an advantage compared to those that are parochial. Hence the strengthening of the plural character of our society is necessary for success in many spheres.
State autonomy
The second concern is the restoration of the autonomy of the state. Sri Lanka is a case where various regimes have destroyed the state, or as some political scientists put it the state has become the same as the regime. Political economists such as Peter Evans, who have focused on the role of the state in development, have identified that the capacity and autonomy of the state from sectional interests as key factors in successful development. This is seen as a major factor in the establishment of a development State. This is a state that is not captured by sectional interests, able to get the best benefits from markets by managing them and implementing policies that would benefit society as a whole. In the case of Sri Lanka the destruction of the state by regimes is one of the major contradictions of democratic politics with regular elections. The fact is that it is the democratically elected representatives who have undermined the autonomy of the state and tried to utilise it for partisan purposes. The rot began in the early seventies with the first violent challenges to the state. The regime at that time tried to utilise the political representatives in the periphery to restore political control in the periphery – inn parallel a discourse developed giving a prominent place to elected representatives in development. At the central level political appointments became widespread, and during the Rajapaksa regime this reached epic proportions. In addition patronage from politicians became important for capital accumulation in the private sector. It is this relationship between a state whose autonomy has been undermined and the private sector that leads to large-scale corruption. During the Rajapaksa regime what we saw is this phenomenon in the context of a growing economy.
These developments have led to the establishment of a vast network of patronage politics, to the extent that the meaning of democratic politics has been undermined. For some politicians political power has simply become a means of getting access to state resources and state influence for their own personal agendas. On the other side there is also a significant section of society for whom access to centres of political power is the main source of their livelihood. In fact it is quite possible that one of the many competitions we saw during the presidential election was competition between those who utilise access to political power for their social mobility and those who depended on factors such as education, their own capital and skills. A significant portion of the vote of the latter group could have voted for Sirisena.
During the previous years the debate on state reform was dominated by the national question and provincial autonomy. While this has to remain on the agenda, the debate on state reform has to be broadened. Certainly constitutional reforms and new laws are a beginning.
Therefore getting rid of the 18th Amendment, bringing back the provisions of the 17th Amendment and a Right to Information Act will be a good starting point. An additional legal enactment that is essential is a law to limit and make transparent contributions to election campaigns. The leader of one of the foreign election observer teams recommended this. Those concerned with free and fair elections need to focus on this, because contributions to election campaigns are a main mechanism for the links between private capital and politicians. This is a foundation of ‘crony capitalism’.
While legal enactments are a beginning for building autonomous state institutions, they alone do not ensure its success. These legal structures have to operate in the context of a particular social structure, networks and expectations in society of what the state should do. Definitely there have to be contributions from many actors such as politicians, the bureaucracy and judiciary. Equally important is the role of citizens. Perhaps one piece of interesting research, a researcher interested in state autonomy, can take up is to try and explain the behaviour of various elections commissioners during elections. How do you explain the diversity in the behaviour of election commissioners during elections? This type of work is needed to enrich our understanding of state reform, which is now dominated by a legal discourse.
Economic policy with social vision
The third and final task is to go beyond the discourse of economic growth that came to dominate the discussion on development in the post-war period. The arena of economic policy is dominated by many who believe that if we have economic growth the other problems in society will automatically be solved. On several instances this was put forward even as an answer to the national question. This is an area full of people with one big answer to problems of society or the ‘hedgehog’ type of thinking in Berlin’s terminology. Many spend their entire life chasing percentage figures. What is surprising is that while criticism has developed within the left of those who reduced the complex philosophy of Marx to economics, the neo-liberal utopia seems to spawn a new breed of economists who have only one answer to all problems in society. In fact those who only know how to manage an economy but are devoid of any social vision dominate the economic policy-making.
This is dangerous for a society that has seen so much violence and destruction.
In the post-war period we need an economic policy which has social dimensions as an integral part. This has to be developed in our own historical context. In the past there were several ideas that characterised our social policy. Protecting the peasantry primarily through investment in smallholder agriculture, a notion of distributive justice, the idea of universal rights to certain services and ensuring basic needs and rights of the working class were some of these. With the advent of neo-liberalism one single idea – poverty alleviation – began to dominate the discussion. A much richer discussion that took into account social structures and many other concerns of our society were replaced by a discourse that focused on ensuring a minimum calorie level. It provides a very limited vision and is unable to tackle the social contradictions of an expanding market economy in a plural society. This is not to argue that the old ideas mentioned above are all still valid in the same way as before. But this is a plea to open up the debate on the social dimensions of a growing market economy so that we could respond to emerging social contradictions. Some of the key issues are inequality, regimes of accumulation within which the working class of the formal and informal sectors have to earn their living, problems of smallholder peasantry and rural working class, and new aspiration within the plantation population.
Globalised world
Finally, these concerns of the post-war period have to be tackled in a globalised world. I am one of those who believe that the Sri Lankan state evolved in the context of two waves of globalisation – one during the colonial period and other more recent. In other words, it has always been a case of trying to understand the political economy of Sri Lanka in a global context. No amount of historical concepts of sovereignty can ignore this. This means we have to tackle these problems in a global context, now with multiple centres of capital accumulation and power of ideas disseminated by communication technologies. We cannot isolate ourselves from these currents. The task then is to carefully analyse the politics of the external currents that will influence us. There will be some that will benefit Sri Lanka in its search for a peaceful society. There will be others that will undermine it.
(The writer is a well-known social scientist in Sri Lanka and abroad. He can be reached at sunilbastian@gmail.com)