By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

2024 is election year practically everywhere. In South Asia, it is two down and two to go. Bangladesh and Pakistan are done with their elections. Next up is India with the mother of all elections which will be held over two months in April and May. Farther east, Indonesia had its own massive elections last week. Sri Lanka is waiting for its election dates. Unlike other Asian countries, including Pakistan where the army calls all the shots, Sri Lanka is the only country where election timing is virtually at the discretion of its CEO, aka the Executive President. Ranil Wickremesinghe is not only the Executive President; he is also becoming an alternative interpreter of the Constitution. That is the burden of the intervention by the Friday Forum in the Colombo Telegraph.

As the learned members of the Forum remind us, and the President himself, Mr. Wickremesinghe is a double-oath holder. One as a Lawyer for nearly fifty years and the other President for less than two years. Both of them to uphold the Constitution. He seems to be failing both. That is by apparently arrogating to himself the role of interpreting the Constitution, a role that is the exclusive preserve of the Supreme Court under the Constitution. And when he is challenged, he dares the Opposition to launch impeachment against him. How dare he?

He dares so because he has the numbers in parliament to escape impeachment. He dares also because he doesn’t think that there is anyone in politics or in state institutions including the judiciary, who knows better than him; and those who know better than him, and there are plenty, are politically inconsequential. The Friday Forum also highlights an equally disturbing development on the legislature front.

That seems to be a growing practice with governments to push through parliament legislations that are not duly affirmed for conformance with the changes to the original Bills stipulated by the Supreme Court to ensure their constitutionality. The governing majority in parliament would seem to have surpassed itself in passing the Online Safety Bill, and having it certified, without anyone checking whatever happened to the as many as 31 amendments that were determined as required by the Supreme Court. The opposition calls to debate the Bill and check compliance were reportedly ignored by the Speaker.

The Friday Forum reiterates the never ending call “for an affirmation by all parties and their leaders that they will abolish the executive presidency, and go back to a system of an elected Prime Minister responsible to parliament and the people.” To implement the affirmation, the Forum is calling “for a referendum on this matter, that is combined with the first election held in 2024.” That is a politically astute suggestion to silence those who get their editorial knickers in a twist and interpret any call for abolishing the presidency as a maneuver to enable Ranil Wickremesinghe continue as president without facing an election.

One would hope that Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe will not monkey with election timing anymore, and will not try to redeploy the old election dirty tricks of the UNP that go back all the way to Dedigama, long before independence, in the 1936 election to the second State Council election. The UNP was not a Party at that time, but its eventual fathers were in control of the levers of state power even under colonial rule.

AKD’s India Visit

The only formal political party in Sri Lanka in 1936 was the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. By 1939, the Party was proscribed, and its leaders were jailed. They broke jail and went to India, not to escape incarceration, but to continue their revolutionary activity and join the struggle in India for freedom from colonial rule. The Indian expedition of the Old Left could have been a more appropriate backdrop for commentary on the political implications of Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s visit to India, than that cheap gossip in a Sunday Paper about Lenin allegedly asking Trotsky to go even in a petticoat to procure peace at Brest Litovsk during World War I.

Many of the commentaries on the visit were also put shots aimed at the pre-history of the NPP, or the old history of the JVP, and all of them predicated on the musings of Rohana Wijeweera about Indian Expansionism. Lional Bopage, one of the repositories of the positive aspects of the JVP experience, has provided a useful overview of the evolution of the JVP’s position on India, but it is unlikely that the JVP’s and NPP’s media detractors would read Bopage or do their own research to provide an objective assessment of AKD’s visit to India.

One striking omission in almost all of the negative commentaries is that their negativity is singularly aimed at AKD and the JVP/NPP, and nothing much negative, if at all, has been said about the Modi government’s imperial invitation to a rising political star in India’s utmost isle. Yet I came across one amusingly innocent piece that politely accused India for its meddlesome manners especially in the matter of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. There is nothing new in this, but what I found to be new is the nugget that Rohana Wijeweera apparently never stopped warning about India’s designs for Sri Lanka and that he based his premonitions on a detailed study of the Indian National Flag that includes

The Ashoka Chakra or Dharma Chakra, and the Indian National Emblem that includes an adaptation of the four lions of Ashoka’s Lion Capital.

I don’t know whether Rohana Wijeweera actually said anything or believed that the use of the Chakra and the Lion in India’s national symbols is something that Sri Lankans should remain wary of. But this is the kind of nationalistic adolescence that Anura Kumara Dissanayake would hopefully help not only the JVP but also most Sri Lankans to grow out of, through the vehicle of the NPP. Thankfully, no one in the NPP is in the blabbering habit of Wimal Weerawansa, who once exhibited his high school general knowledge when he insisted in parliament that the Indian National Anthem, Tagore’s immortal rendition in Bengali, is only sung in Hindi! Those days are behind the Sri Lankan electorate, and there is much to look ahead.

Just on the question of the Chakra on the Indian Flag, there have been a few interpretations of it. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, the vocational Philosopher, India’s first Vice President and later President, has interpreted the Chakra as being representative of dharma and law. Prime Minister Nehru was more practical – the Chakra is symmetrical on the flag and easily reproduceable than Mahatma  Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel that had been on the flag of the Congress during the independence struggle.

Sri Lankan Historian S. Arasaratnam, one of the more objective scholars of nationalism among Sri Lankan academics, has interpreted the Chakra as a neutral symbol that is symptomatic of the efforts of India’s founding fathers (in the Constituent Assembly) to lift the emerging nation above the fray of its Hindu-Muslim religious differences. Then comes along Modi after 75 years and plunges the country into a new temple triumphalism.

Those who ask the JVP to explain its rapprochement with India in light of its virulent opposition to the Indo Lanka accord 37 years ago, have not been consistent in asking others who too had been opposed to India in more ways than one and even long before the signing of the Indo Lanka accord.

NM Perera pithily characterized the foreign policy of DS Senanayake and the first UNP government as “Anglo mania and India phobia.” That mindset has been quite the norm in many political circles. It continued thirty years later with President Jayewardene at least until 1983. Even the SLFP has not been averse it to it despite later claims of a special relationship with the Nehru family in India.

As nuggets go, James Manor in his biography of SWRD Bandaranaike, The Expedient Utopian, recounts an anecdote from the 1930s, when Lord Mountbatten was stationed in Kandy and Nehru was visiting the island. Mountbatten suggested to one of SWRD Bandaranaike’s sisters that they should invite the visiting Indian leader for tea at Horagolla. Pat came the rebuff, “we do not sup with coolies.” That was more ignorance than snobbery, but the nugget would go down well in Modi circles in today’s India.

As well, as political analysis goes, one of the academic theses on the Indo Lanka Accord has been that the accord severed the linkages between the Sri Lankan state establishment and the social base of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. The argument continued that what was ruptured in 1987 was restored only after 2005 when Mahinda Rajapaksa became President, thanks to the not so hidden hand support of the LTTE. Yet it has been a truism among Sinhala ultranationalists that Mahinda Rajapaksa is the only authentic Sinhala nationalist leader because everyone else was compromised by English.

Now that the Rajapaksas are gone, and the Supreme Court has ruled why, there might be revisitations of the old thesis. One hypothesis could be that the tragedy of the Rajapaksas is that they were used as dummies by others, who were otherwise political nobodies, for ventriloquistic claims on everything from nationalism to the economy, and from central banking to organic fertilizer.

As I wrote recently, the peacefully involuntary departure of the Rajapaksas has created the biggest vacuum to be filled in this election year. Anura Kumara Dissanayake has emerged as the most likely contender to fill that void, but in altogether different, and hopefully positive, ways. His trip to Delhi enhances that assessment, and even expectations, except for those who hold against Mr. Dissanayake the sins of his predecessors but will not subject any other political leader to such an exacting postmortem.