Editorial

The northern polity is keen to take advantage of every election, this time the presidential election, to ‘strike when the iron is hot’ and make demands from the competing parties in the South.

One of their demands is to hold elections to the nine defunct provincial councils after the presidential polls.

As candidates eye the northern vote that can tilt the balance of power in the South and especially in a three-cornered presidential contest, they are parrying the demand.

Alongside this demand is a push for police powers to be devolved, which they argue is part and parcel of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (13A). The President has agreed to discuss it, but at a later date—after the presidential election. The Leader of the Opposition has also agreed to the ‘full implementation’ of 13A.

The issue of police powers has been a hot debate ever since 13A was forced down Sri Lanka in 1987 by India’s intervention in the aftermath of the July 1983 race riots in the South, not the North. The argument, therefore, that the people in the North require police powers to be safe has little substance.

For countries like Britain that are promoting devolution of power in Sri Lanka, including police powers for the periphery, the boot is on the other foot now. Riots have spread all around England and Northern Ireland, and it is the Central Government in London that is cracking the whip, urging local police stations to get on the streets and arrest the lawbreakers; inducting special prosecutors, and asking courts to sit overtime to quell these race riots. When such nationwide exigencies occur, the full force of a central government is required, it seems.

The bigger issue of provincial councils is the question of who really wants them. It is very clear that it is the political parties and their politicians who want these as their mini power centres—not the ordinary people in the North, South, East or West. While it is the North that is at the forefront of the political demand for them, one must question what earthly benefit has accrued to the people of that province from this tier of government. They have churned out resolutions in support of the UN Human Rights Council crusade against Sri Lanka but cannot defend their own fishermen against poaching Indians. They shout in Colombo demanding greater autonomy yet zip up to Delhi’s interests even when they are at the expense of their constituents’ interests.

What is best is not elections to these provincial councils but holding a referendum along with the next parliamentary or local council election to see if ordinary citizens want a provincial council in their region or not.

External interference in Hasina’s fall?

 

The Iron Lady of Bangladesh, who ruled her country for 15 years, eventually seems to have feet of clay as she fled her home as the ‘anarchists’, as she called them, came for her. It was understandable, though. Her father, the Father of the Nation, newly carved out of East Pakistan in 1971 by a caesarian section, was brutally murdered by his own soldiers in his own home along with most of his family. The coup leader and assassin lives today in Canada, a state sponsor of terrorism.

The overthrow of Sheikh Hasina by a popular uprising has been compared worldwide to the ‘Aragalaya‘ of 2022 in Sri Lanka, which in Sri Lanka’s case was less severe in that it managed to avoid the loss of lives and the intervention of the military to avoid a state of anarchy. It, however, witnessed the Head of Government fleeing the country as the masses came for him. Unlike the Sri Lankan leader, though, the Bangladesh Premier did not have to take a circuitous route to exile. India, which had refused the Sri Lankan leader ‘entre’ sent its National Security head honcho to Delhi’s Hindon airbase to welcome her. India invested heavily in balancing ties with Bangladesh through increased trade corridors to fend off increasing Chinese infrastructure projects in that country.

Sheikh Hasina astutely balanced India and China’s rival geopolitical interests over her country—a matter that Sri Lanka is more than familiar with. She even succeeded in getting the West to invest in her country by demonising the Jihadists, arguing the economic upliftment of her people was the best antidote to Islamist extremism. But as she was being deposed, she is reported to have remarked that she was paying the price for not yielding to a request to carve out a Christian country, like East Timor, from her own and parts of Myanmar.

As astounding as it may sound, given what goes on in the deep state of the West that even the formal governments may not know of, whether this is a figment of her imagination or true remains to be seen. Bangladesh, like Sri Lanka, is a very strategic location in the growing tension between the West and China.

While there were numerous conspiracy theories about the ‘Aragalaya’ too, foreign interference in countries is now an accepted norm in world affairs. Russian internet bots supposedly played a part in the current British riots. America is on the watch-out for Russian meddling in its upcoming presidential elections. The Sri Lankan presidential election is not without the hidden hand of foreign powers interested in its outcome.

Bangladesh since its birth has tried amidst severe obstacles to be a secular, liberal, democratic nation. The Bengalis have a close historical affinity with the majority community and the religious minority in Sri Lanka. The late Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar (whose 19th death anniversary is tomorrow) once referred to the likeness in physical features of the two peoples and the need for South Asians to tap the potential of each other’s complementaries “to rise and shine as a region”. Unfortunately, SAARC, the regional grouping initiated by Bangladesh, has fallen flat due to the lack of support from India.