Editorial

16th January 2000

Confused conscience

This contention is subject to correction of course, but the rationale for the Conscience Bill which is being contemplated by the government probably has its origins way back in the early 1960s, when Gamani Jayasuriya as a young UNP backbench MP from Homagama supported the Schools-takeover Bill which the SLFP government introduced despite the UNP’s objections.

The ‘conscience vote’ was invoked by conscientious objectors to private education within the UNP, and it was allowed by the UNP whip and the party leadership of that time. No disciplinary action was taken against Mr. Jayasuriya, who nevertheless continued his conscientious politics to the nether end of his career. As a senior cabinet minister, he resigned his portfolio and membership in parliament because it went against his conscience to remain in a government that had “hatched the Indo-Lanka accord which provided for a temporary merger of the North and East provinces.’’

J. R. Jayewardene, who introduced the so called Crossover Bill did so to enable C. Rajadurai from the Tamil United Liberation Front to cross the floor from the opposition to government. The Bill had the Jayewardene trademark in that it allowed only one way traffic, enabling crossovers from opposition to government but not vice versa. (Mr. Jayewardene’s original 1978 Constitution barred crossovers altogether, but the subsequent amendment referred to here made conscience a one way street.)

When MPs of the Moraji Desai government crossed over to opposition benches, signalling the end of the Janatha administration, Mr. Jayewardene quipped from his relatively more secure vista across the Palk Straits that “if Morarji had taken my advice, he could have saved his government.’’ Today, a government which sometimes seems to be modelling itself on the Jayewardene era, at least as far as electoral ploys are concerned , seems to be contemplating another so-called Conscience Bill.

Sri Lankans who are now inured to the political expediency and opportunism of our brand of parliamentarians, do not go into shock any more when they see MPs voting for and against issues merely on the basis of which side of the divide they are sitting on — opposition or government benches.

Some of the same MPs who called the 1982 Referendum of the Jayewardene regime a “rape of democracy’’ and similar epithets were recently canvassing the idea of such a referendum with quiet nonchalance, while some of those who floated the concept of the referendum in 1982 were in the forefront of the campaign against it. The general parliamentary behaviour of most people’s representatives therefore indicates that they operate without any conscience whatsoever, making this business of the Conscience Bill look a little too good to be true, at least on the face of it.

Men and women who are flexible in matters of conscience by some behavioural quirk, strangely seem to be prone to be fluid in matters of loyalties as well.

The Bill, therefore, must seek to strike a balance between an MP’s right against being bullied by the party whip, and the voter’s right to ensure that an MP he or she elected from one party will not jump ship for a mess of pottage. The choice is between the dictatorship of the party whip and the freedom of the harlot. The crucial test, therefore will, in each case of a crossover, be the credibility of each MP and his or her standing in the electorate. Considering the quality and calibre of MPs today, the less that is said about this aspect the best. (We already have the classic example of the CWC entering parliament on the UNP ticket and voting with the Government.)

A “Conscience Bill’’ connotes that members can vote against the party whip on issues on grounds of conscience, but does not necessarily infer that members will be allowed to cross the floor. The words crossover and conscience though sounding somewhat the same, have vastly different meanings, but without having to go into the seamier side of semantics, all that can be said is that the two words right now seem to have been interchangeably confused by at least some of our legislators.

Not that we in our editorial offices of The Sunday Times have any pretensions to being the nation’s conscience, but suffice to observe that our legislators nowadays don’t qualify for any award for principled statesmanship either.

The Political Column

Editorial/ Opinion Contents