Debasing our political culture

By Neville de Silva

The Bandaranaike political legacy is hard to match anywhere in the world. SWRD Bandaranaike and his wife Sirima were the first husband and wife duo to be elected prime ministers in any country. Sirima Bandaranaike was the first woman prime minister in the world. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was the first elected leader of a country that had her parents as prime ministers. Her mother and she were the first mother and daughter to be president and prime minister at the same time.

No country in the democratic world has such a record.

Let us not forget that Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, has enjoyed universal franchise since 1931. Japan was the only country in Asia to have the right to vote before Ceylon and that only the previous year.

For 70 years we have proudly flaunted our achievement before the world. Initially it was indeed an achievement to be proud of, for the adults had the right to vote at the same time, unlike in many other countries where the franchise was only gradually extended.

If my memory is correct the women of Switzerland were granted universal suffrage only in 1975, whereas our own had by then voted for almost 45 years and had already produced the world's first woman prime minister.

When Ceylon was granted independence in 1948, it was considered a political model for other developing countries to follow. Several countries in Asia and many in Africa were still under the colonial yoke and decolonisation was still a long way off.

The country had an efficient and impartial civil service, a small armed services more for ceremonial purposes than defending Ceylon's sovereignty, a neutral police and most of all, a highly regarded and unbiased judiciary.

These were the pillars on which the country's democratic structure was to rest for such strict impartiality was intrinsic to the proper functioning of a democratic polity.

In fact Ceylon, as the island was known until the 1972 republican constitution returned it to the ancient name by which it was known, was the envy of colonial territories still aspiring for independence in Asia and Africa.

Independent Malaysia and Singapore looked up to Colombo as the epitome of the development model, as the exemplar for newly independent states. Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew who was to lead the small nation state with an iron fist but set it on a course of national integration and economic achievement, would admire this small island and draw on its strengths in modelling his nation.

Many years later, when Ceylon started its downward slide to political degradation, and economic ruin, its once impartial institutions increasingly politicised and sinking in the morass of corruption, Lee Kuan Yew would look back wistfully at the history of a country he greatly admired.

"Your country," he would say, "went this way because of too much politics. If we did what you did, Singapore would have been a ruin". These might not be his exact words but they definitely convey his sentiments which I had heard from him more than once.

If present and future generations of Sri Lankan of every ethnic hue curse most politicians that have sat in our legislature, it is not necessarily because they were perceived as corrupt, incompetent and power hungry. It is because they did not have the courage, the backbone to stop their leaders from following the inevitable road to national ruin.

Unlike most of them who entered parliament in the early years of independence or even pre-independence with the intention of serving his/her immediate constituency, if not the country, some of those who entered later did so with the intention of fattening themselves on the resources of the country.

The past 25 years or so has not only seen the disgusting devaluation of political office to the extent that people began to associate such office with highway robbery, but even that valued token of an individual's political power- the vote- has been debased.

Whereas in many countries that were under the jackboots of dictatorship and their people had to sacrifice their lives to win the right to vote, our politicians treated it with such disdain and disrespect that people began to treat those elected by that vote with contempt.

As the one weapon that they had with which to throw out governments every four or five years, people valued and respected their vote. In the early history of independence, our voter actually did throw out every incumbent government having waited patiently and silently for that sacred opportunity.

But increasingly power hungry politicians, desperate to cling to office to fatten themselves and their kith and kin because no sane person would ever give them a job, have reduced that sacred vote to a mockery.

At first it began by impersonating genuine voters or casting the vote for the dead and departed. Then it turned to highway robbery when polling cards were stolen and officials intimidated into accepting false votes. Next came the mass stuffing of ballot boxes, sometimes making use of servicemen or police to actually supervise such stuffing, or waylaying official vehicles carrying ballot boxes and rigging them.

The fact is that all major parties have been guilty of such corrupt and illegal practices.

But no government has made corruption, fraud, thuggery, politicisation of the armed services, police and to an extent the judiciary such an art.

Sri Lanka's karma cannot be so bad that worse is to follow.