Editorial

The UNP General Secretary caused some excitement for a few hours earlier in the week with a proposal that went viral. His proposal to postpone elections by two years through a Parliamentary vote followed by a Referendum would normally have been dismissed as a somewhat deranged suggestion, except for the position he holds. Straightaway, one would be excused for suspecting it was ‘the voice of Jacob and the hand of Esau’.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, the leader of the UNP, downplayed his party General Secretary’s public comment saying that he had already informed the Cabinet that the Presidential election would be held as constitutionally due (the Sunday Times gave the date as October 5 or 12) and that there was no further comment required on the subject.

The proposal itself was farfetched in the extreme. The UNP with a single seat in a Parliament of 225 that is completely splintered among the majority parties would not have cleared the first hurdle of a two-thirds Parliamentary assent, even if it was for the sake of self-preservation of their seats.

While the very suggestion of a postponement of elections now sounds preposterous, the underlying point the UNP honcho made, had some element of economic sense though politically completely out of order i.e. that economic stability is priority No. 1 still. The reason is that at least under the stewardship of the incumbent President the country knows which way it is heading.  He has pulled the country from not just the brink, but from absolute bankruptcy as it was two years ago in 2022 when it had a reserve of just US dollars 500 million, not enough for a shipload of fuel. Now that reserve stands at US dollar 5 billion. He has paid the price for the inevitably unpopular decisions taken along the way.

If indeed, the UNP General Secretary was only flying a weather balloon, it was certainly in very inclement political weather. All the Opposition parties are clamouring for an election. Local Government elections have already been postponed and so too have Provincial Council elections (which is a good thing).

To hint at the postponement of a Presidential election in this scenario is high-voltage stuff. Internationally it was bad. Locally, the President was quick to be likened to a Hitler when he would surely prefer to be compared to Churchill (who won the war, but lost an election), whose legacy was that of saving his country from capitulation.

The original precedent in postponing a big election was set when the then United Left Front (ULF) Government comprising the SLFP and the Left parties, the LSSP and the Communist Parties (Moscow and Peking) put off the due date by two years citing the enactment of the new Republican Constitution in 1972. The Parliamentary election due in 1975 was put to 1977. The LSSP that connived in that constitutional jugglery was booted out of that coalition the same year and by 1977, all those parties faced a humiliating grubbing at the hustings. The then Opposition Leader J.R. Jayewardene who called that extension not illegal, but “illegitimate”, went on to perform exactly the same exercise in 1982 with a Referendum, going one better by extending the life of Parliament by six years.

It had its fallouts and consequences but it was a different era and circumstances. President J.R. Jayewardene had complete control of Parliament. It was argued then that the extension of Parliament through a Referendum was all about the “continuity” of the liberalised economy. Today, as then, it is not taken as a good example.

 Foreign ‘observers’ in election process

 

While the senior office-bearer of the President’s party was dropping proposals for the postponement of elections, a team from the European Union (EU) was in the country discussing preliminary issues relating to the conduct of elections—not in Europe, where there are plenty of them happening, but in Sri Lanka.

The US ambassador who has an incurable habit of throwing protocol to the winds, and is allowed to get away with it, made news this week by going direct to the Election Commission, without so much as a by your leave from the Foreign Ministry, to grill the commissioners about local elections.

In 1982, a US embassy officer was declared persona non grata for talking undiplomatically about that year’s Referendum, and in the early 1990s, the same happened to the British High Commissioner who was found inside a polling booth during a local council election.

Sri Lanka has had a Universal Adult Franchise since 1931—almost a century ago, before many European nations. Its elections have been both largely free and fair and governments have changed peacefully over and over again by the ballot. Of late, though, with the country’s heavy dependency on foreign aid and post-insurgency human rights issues, the scales have turned in favour of the West as part of an increasing ‘hands-on’ approach into the internal affairs of the country. There is a perceived democracy and human rights deficiency in Sri Lanka.

No country, nor the EU dared go to India, however, to monitor its recently concluded elections. Political parties in India invited parties from around the world, including from Sri Lanka to ‘witness’ the elections. There are no observations or monitoring and no recommendations to be made. But Sri Lanka is fair game.

The first time a foreign observer team came to Sri Lanka was for the 1988 Presidential election. They were from the South Asian neighbourhood (SAARC). It was later that the Europeans came on board.

When there was indeed a serious aberration and an Elections Commissioner was held hostage at Temple Trees for hours during the conduct of a poll not so long ago, the foreign observers were blissfully ignorant and made no comment, but they will comment about women’s representation and election expenses, which local monitors refer to anyway. They comment on what are wider policies on how institutions must function.

A former Elections Commissioner (before foreign observers were to come) in his post-1977 election report proposed doing away with the indelible ink on a voter’s finger as being an affront. How much more of an ignominy would it be to have a foreign team rubber-stamp its approval that an election is clean.

Foreign missions ‘witnessing’ an election is different from monitoring it where it then becomes intrusive and ‘conditionalities’ for future ‘good behaviour’ by Sri Lanka.