Sunday Times 2
2023: An Annus Horribilis with computer Jilmart
View(s):Queen Elizabeth II called the year 1992 her ‘Annus Horribilis’ — Horrible Year. It was the year the marriages of three of her four children went on the rocks. To add to her woes, Windsor Castle was ravaged by a fire with the initial damages estimated at $ 90 million.
Since Covid-19 broke out in 2019, every year has been an Annus-Horribilis for most countries of the world, with millions of people in rich and poor countries continuing to die. Their economies have been ruined resulting in political upheavals and threatening democratic institutions that hold states together.
Despite the traditional wishes for a ‘Happy and Merry New Year’ that would be made soon, the hard reality is that another Annus Horribilis is before us once again.
The world is no longer ‘One World’ for the United Nations and one species, the Homo Sapiens, as was thought. It is also one world for the coronavirus, including all viruses, and bacteria with the urge of humans for intense world travel.
For Sri Lanka, 2022 would have been the worst Annus Horribilis since perhaps the Kandyan Rebellion of 1817-1818. It was crushed by the destruction of entire stocks of paddy, and edible crops. Fruit trees were felled and cattle slaughtered in the Uva — the bastion of the rebellion — to subjugate the people by starving them to death. Paul E Peiris, the first Asian to receive a doctorate from Cambridge University, in his book ‘Sinhale and the Patriots’ refers to a letter written by a British Official, Henry Wright, described as the First Assistant to the Accredited Agent in the Uva. It was a ‘melancholy story of two families who assembled round a small fire in a room unwilling or unable to rise from it and perished in the night of cold and hunger’.
Around 207 years later, Lankans living both in the cities and villages are threatened with starvation as reports of UN agencies have indicated. They attempted no rebellion. Only their leaders squandered and blundered.
An Annus Mirabilis (A Wonderful Year) is certainly desirable but has not even been predicted by the leaders supposed to be governing our destiny or even by political astrologers.
A significant number of opposition political parties are demanding that a countrywide election be held. Opposition and SJB Leader Sajith Premadasa is demanding that elections to local government bodies be held early next year as scheduled.
Premadasa has said the election would be a litmus test on the state of politics in Lanka but President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government which is propped up by the Pohottuwa party of the Rajapaksas is not too keen on holding the elections. Although the government leaders have not spoken out, the second rankers are claiming that it would not be in the national interest to hold an election at this juncture and that the cost would be billions of rupees.
However, the consensus of all parties is that in the long term, it would be a countrywide election that would resolve the current political imbroglio.
Whether an election would be an all-round cure — a panacea or ‘Kokatah Thailaya’ — for the severe political ills plaguing the country has not been considered given that the form and attitude towards elections have undergone changes the world over in the past few decades.
This country adopted the British model of voting even before Independence, well described by Winston Churchill as: ‘The little man, walking into a little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper’. The Sri Lankan model had occasionally deviated from this model such as in the form of thugs preventing voters from casting their ballots, ballot boxes being stuffed illegally with ballot papers, and ballot boxes going missing while being transported to counting centres. But the overall process of voting has remained and results accepted by the parties.
The vast increase in the number of voters had necessitated mechanisation and now electronic canvassing and voting which have brought about drastic changes much to the detriment of democracy.
The best-known example of this is the defeat of Al Gore in 2000 presidential election by a razor-thin majority — one cause for his defeat being attributed to a miscount of votes by an electromechanical failure of the system. Gore is known as the ‘Best president America never had’.
Sri Lanka’s electoral system was devoid of any mechanical or electronic involvement till the presidential election between Mahinda Rajapaksa and General Sarath Fonseka when a system of collating votes from different counting systems of the Colombo University campus was used.
Sarath Fonseka’s supporters believed that he had polled enough votes to defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa and some coined an essentially Sri Lankan term for his defeat: ‘Computer Jilmart’.
When much faith is being expressed in elections being the solution to the current crises that the country is undergoing, shouldn’t it be logical to ensure the method of counting the votes cast?
Vladimir Lenin is attributed with the quotation that at an election: ‘It’s not the voting that matters but the counting’.
Lenin of course is no democrat having come into power after the October Revolution when Leon Trotsky seized power in a coup.
Lanka’s Marxist leaders of yore such as N.M. Perera and Pieter Keuneman have been exemplary in following the British democratic model. Paradoxically they were at the receiving end when they went to vote at the Referendum called by J.R. Jayewardene to extend the life of parliament. Officials told them their votes had ‘already been cast’.
On the other hand, there are more recent Marxist parties which have demonstrated that the bullet and not the ballot is their way.
The Aragalaya forces have demonstrated that people walking on their feet can throw out a corrupt government without ballots or bullets.
Shouldn’t all those who have placed their faith in elections ensure the procedure and laws on which future elections are to be conducted?
Or will elections be followed with cries: It was a Computer Jilmart?
(The writer is a former editor of The Sunday Island, The Island, and consultant editor of the Sunday Leader. He can be contacted at gamma.weerakoon@gmail.com)