Columns

Borrowing one of the most enduring questions from  the Bard, cynical Sri Lankans may well murmur, ‘methinks the President does protest too much?’ when giving ear to President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s painstaking excuses as to why he has no intention of delaying the country’s Presidential elections scheduled for later this year.

Why so many protests?

Indeed, his announcement a few days ago to the Chief Prelate of the Ramanna Maha Nikaya that he had ‘officially’ informed the Elections Commission of Sri Lanka to hold the Presidential Elections ‘on the scheduled date,’ verges on the patently ridiculous. The holding of the elections ‘on schedule’ is a constitutional duty of the Elections Commission that no President, Prime Minister or politician can interfere with, determine or regulate. Why does the President ‘remind’ the Elections Commission, inform the prelates or publicly trumpet that fact?

The Commission must exercise its constitutional duties independently as the Supreme Court has reminded, time and time again. There is little need to examine those well-established precedents. Suffice to say that the principle is set in constitutional stone as it were. Consequently the announcement that he had ‘informed’ the Elections Commission to go ahead with the elections, is farcical.

It is almost as ludicrous as the President informing the public that neither he nor his lawyers had been ‘consulted’ by a worthy with the name of Chamindra Dayan Lenawa who has sprung into the limelight by asking the Supreme Court to ‘declare that the President’s term is six years’  and ‘issue an interim order stopping the Election Commission from conducting the Presidential Election in 2024′ until then. Given that the matter is now before the Court, our intention is not to discuss the constitutional validity of this extraordinary plea.

That point about not
being ‘consulted’

That determination will, no doubt, give rise to rich legal analysis in the public sphere. However, the question here is the no less extraordinary phraseology that the President’s twitter handler as well as the Presidential Secretariat in its news release employed in responding to that court filing by baldly stating that neither the President nor his lawyers had been ‘consulted’ by Lenawa. Pray, why should the President need to disassociate himself from being ‘consulted’ when there is evidently no need for any Sri Lankan citizen to ‘consult’ the apex executive in the first place when filing a rights violation plea in the Court, whether in relation to the President’s term or any other matter as the case may be?

In other words and to repeat, does the President protest so much as he feels  the need to justify himself in the context of factors otherwise firmly pointing to a contrary intent? First and foremost among those factors are assertions of trusted political lieutenants including the General Secretary of the United National Party (UNP) made repeatedly to the effect that the Presidential elections ought not to be held and suggesting that the President’s term should be extended for a further period.

An even more peculiar proposal was broadcast this week by the General Secretary claiming at a meeting in the North-Central Province that a Bill will be presented to ‘cure’ a constitutional discrepancy in the term periods of a President’s tenure. More specifically, he stated that, ‘the President had submitted a proposal to the Cabinet last Monday to address the discrepancy arising from the President’s tenure being stated as 5 years in one context and 6 years in another, in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.’ This will be presented to the Parliament shortly, we are told.

From farce to
constitutional comedy

So we are now at the surreal point where politicians are proposing the curing of supposed ‘constitutional discrepancies’ through simple Acts of Parliament?To what painful fate has Sri Lanka’s decades-old legislative and constitutional history been consigned to? From the Online Safety Act being ‘passed’ sans conformity to the Determination of the Court and presented as a disgraceful ‘fait accompli’ by the Government, we may have to brace ourselves to face even more catastrophic constitutional violations.

For the unpalatable if not unconstitutional remedy that the UNP’s General Secretary proposes in regard to ‘fixing’ a purported constitutional contradiction may well turn to reality given the breakdown of legislative due process safeguards in Sri Lanka. The constant intimidation of the Court by the President and his Ministers are clearly part of that same strategy.

Meanwhile if the President is so quick to resort to public affirmations of his will to hold the Presidential elections as scheduled, it is a veritable puzzle as to why he does not rein his General Secretary and other loyalists in, preventing them from uttering such manifest idiocies?  On the contrary, he remains studiedly silent. That silence amounts to tacit consent of Rule of Law violations pronounced with such aplomb by his party lieutenants.

Excuses that insult
‘commonsense’

This double tongued approach of ‘confuse, contradict, capture’ seems to be the precise stamp of his administration. We are asked to believe that black is white despite the evidence of our own eyes in the unnerving pattern of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and applaud when nonsense becomes an ugly reality. That pattern has become a constant feature whether in regard to Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring processes that the Government paints as rosier than they are or to anti-corruption exercises.

As observed last week in these column spaces, the efforts of ‘all the King’s horses and all the King’s men’ of a spanking new Bribery and anti-Corruption Commission are doomed to fail when Presidential patronage and protection is given to gross corruptors. And we may repeat, that protection is extended not to the Rajapaksa-kin but also to his own loyalists. Here too, the President’s silence says much.

Needless to say, this does not promise a ‘system change’ when, as his supporters contend, he is given a clear mandate to govern as opposed to being under the thumb of the Pohottuwa rabble. And what of the much hyped ‘Yukthiya’ operation to tackle the proliferation of drugs which the Inspector General of Police (IGP) has boasted as having resulted in a 23% reduction in crime? If so, the IGP, who had been declared by the Supreme Court as a violator of constitutional rights, must present solid statistics to buttress this ambitious boast.

In the meantime, he may look at examining the unending line of fundamental violations which the Court continues to hold against officers of his Department. In one such recent case, the wife of a suspect had been arrested along with her mother and her toddler in lieu of her husband for whom the police was searching in regard to a motor vehicle accident, (R.H. Iresha Lakmali v Major General Kamal Gunarathne, Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and others, SC (FR) 505/19, SCM 31.05.2024).

The Bench pointed out that, ‘the Respondents would have this Court believe that a woman, with her young daughter, on her own volition came forward to travel hundreds of kilometres in the dead of night, cooped up in a police vehicle with a group of police officers…so that she may help the officers find her own husband.’ Rejecting the defence that she had ‘voluntarily’ got into the police vehicle as an ‘insult to commonsense’, it was warned (per Thurairaja J) that, ‘this Court is not so detached from reality to gobble up whatever feeble excuses placed before it.’

We can only repeat that cutting judicial line about excuses that ‘insult commonsense’ to this Government as a whole.