The queue of hopeful candidates waiting to get nominations from Sri Lanka’s political parties for the upcoming local government elections brings to mind irresistible and immediate parallels with the proverbial rogues’ gallery. Perhaps if police identification lists of known criminals in this country are compared against these pictures and these names, there may be more than a few unhappy coincidences.
Easy entry to easy money and seductive power
Granted among them, there may be a few rare individuals who have entered the hustings with the genuine intention of serving the local area community. But there is little doubt that many look upon this opportunity as a stepping stone to provincial council and parliamentary elections with easy entry to easy money and seductive power. After decades of subverting the system by unscrupulous political minds, it is the unfortunate case that our electoral process is now unrelentingly geared towards that very precise objective.
Elections have become, in fact, the very antithesis of what they are supposed to be; the free and secret expression of the democratic right to vote by each and every citizen. For this, the blame need not be laid merely at the door of the political leaders of the current administration but all their predecessors, to whom the electoral process was nothing more than a cynical manipulation of votes.
Disillusionment with the electoral process
That said, we must however acknowledge the indisputable responsibility of this government for taking the degeneration of the country’s electoral process to unplumbed depths. In January 2009, we saw this country’s Commissioner of Elections virtually breaking down in tears before the electorate and vowing that he would resign from office given his inability to perform his job properly even though he retracted from this position a few days later.
Mid that year, parliamentary elections were held presided over by this same elections official with a record low voter turnout. Some said that this low voter turnout was because of the relative lack of interest in the parliamentary polls as contrasted with January’s intensely contested Presidential elections which pitted a former Army Commander (now in jail) against his erstwhile Commander-in-Chief. Others were of the opinion that this was, at least in part, due to widespread public disillusionment with the pathetic performance of the individual supervising the electoral process.
Development sans justice
Now we hear talk of an Elections Commission being appointed under the highly problematic 18th Amendment to the Constitution without the safeguard of independent vetting of the appointment of its members by a Constitutional Council (CC). The CC was the vital core of the much misunderstood - and now successfully jettisoned - 17th Amendment. Despite what others would like to say now and despite all the unscrupulous misrepresentations maliciously impugning the credibility of those who sat on the CC in its first and only term, these were all honourable gentlemen even though the body may have benefited from having less lawyers and retired judges and also reflected a more equable gender balance.
Substantively however, the performance of the CC during that all too short period indicated as to where Sri Lanka may have headed if this process had been taken forward with at least a degree of commitment by the political leadership. The country’s National Human Rights Commission may have distinguished itself in South Asia instead of being reduced to a farcical and laughable shadow of what it was supposed to be. The innovatively imagined National Police Commission may have presented a fine example for similar such bodies in the region.
As much as, (with all its defects in representative democracy), India is proving to be a regional leader in matters such as the right to information, Sri Lanka may have also claimed its just due in spearheading strong pro-democracy and Rule of Law initiatives in a post-war environment. Yet this was not to be. Our country’s leader and their cheerleaders in the populace persist in a shortsighted vision of development sans justice for the country’s majority and minorities like.
Concentration of executive power in one office
In retrospect, it is apparent therefore that the attacks on the 17th Amendment from 2004 onwards was not by chance even though professionals and civil society were woefully slow to realise this. None of the appointments that the CC recommended to the constitutional commissions during 2002-2005 were seriously impugned for lack of suitability or lack of integrity. On the contrary, seeing how well these commissions performed during that time, politicians in the government, (as well as those in the opposition aspiring for political power), realised that the 17th Amendment posed a grave threat to their unilateral will.
Sustained and successful attacks were then made on this constitutional amendment, with one group of hysterical detractors even going to the ridiculous extent of alleging that the CC will end up being a pawn in the hands of sinister Western forces and subversive non-governmental organisations if allowed to continue. This hysteria was calculated towards a definite political objective, which was the return to the consolidation of all power in the Executive Presidency. This is therefore what we have now. The loss of serious legitimacy in the electoral process follows in logical consequence thereof.
Weary sense of déjà vu
So what do we have currently? Members to the Elections Commission and all the other so-called constitutional commissions will be appointed at the sole discretion of President Mahinda Rajapaksa with feeble input from a toothless Parliamentary Council. We may raise our hands to heaven and articulate fervent pleas that good people will be appointed to these bodies but past experience is ample testimony to the fact that such pleas may not be worth the paper on which they are written.
So despite an Elections Commission being appointed or not within the coming months, there seems to be little doubt that the credibility of Sri Lanka’s electoral process is in tatters and is destined to be so for an unforeseeable length of time. True, there are grumblings at local council level, budgets have been defeated and some hope that these are the coming signs of a greater dissatisfaction with the way that this country is being governed.
However to right the wrongs of the past, (at least, the very recent past), much more needs to be manifested from the people than mere grumblings. In the meantime we look forward to having our rogues’ gallery being converted into yet another motley crowd of peoples’ representatives with a weary sense of déjà vu.
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