{"id":88487,"date":"2013-05-26T00:00:47","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T18:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=88487"},"modified":"2013-05-30T00:20:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T18:50:33","slug":"sociology-for-idiots-13-a-and-the-npc-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sociology-for-idiots-13-a-and-the-npc-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Sociology For idiots, 13 A And The NPC Election"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rajan Philips<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rajan Philips<\/p><\/div>\n

First, the government puts itself in a political quandary over elections to the Northern Provincial Council<\/a><\/span> (NPC).\u00a0 To have them, or not to have them, becomes the teasing question.\u00a0 The President goes on record repeatedly promising to have the election in September.\u00a0 The government goes out of its way to make sure that Sri Lanka<\/a><\/span> would host the Commonwealth Summit in November.\u00a0 All of this makes sense.\u00a0 A free and fair election could showcase the government\u2019s claim at the Commonwealth summit that postwar reconciliation is on course in the island\u2019s former battlegrounds.\u00a0 The government could even brag that it has re-enfranchised the Tamil people whom the LTTE<\/a><\/span> had disenfranchised previously (especially in 2005). That is one way of looking at it.<\/p>\n

Then there is the crooked way of doing things.\u00a0 A chorus of voices\u00a0 emerge asking the government to postpone the election until after the CHOGM<\/a><\/span>, or not to have an election at all.\u00a0 First, they argue, as the election in September will have to be \u2018an election with witnesses\u2019 it will be exploited by enemies at home and abroad (the LTTE rump, NGO parasites, opposition pigmies etc.) to pillory the Sri Lankan government in the Jaffna \u00a0peninsula in front of foreign election monitors and international media.\u00a0 Second, they admonish, 13A<\/a><\/span> and the PC system are India\u2019s impositions on Sri Lanka and permanent security threats to it, so they should be abolished as soon as possible rather than consolidated by having elections and creating a new Northern Provincial Council.<\/p>\n

But the government seems to have made up its mind to go ahead with the NPC election in September under the Constitution as it stands including its Thirteenth Amendment.\u00a0 That much has been stated categorically at last week\u2019s Cabinet press briefing by Anura Priyadhashana Yapa, Petroleum Industries Minister and the celebrated Chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee that impeached Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 The Minister did not quite close the door on abolishing 13A for a new system of devolution saying that such a change would have to be first discussed publicly to hear the views of a cross section of people.\u00a0 Mr. Yapa\u2019s main antagonist at the parliamentary committee, UNP\u2019s Lakshman Kiriella<\/a><\/span> quickly claimed victory for his party.\u00a0 According to Mr. Kiriella by agreeing to conduct the NCP election under 13A the government was accepting the \u201cUNP\u2019s position that devolution was the way forward\u201d.\u00a0 Except that the UNPers may know the way forward but their leader knows only to step backward at every juncture.<\/p>\n

The genealogy of 13A<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are two sides to the disenchantment with 13A and the Provincial Councils.\u00a0 If 13A and the PC system are considered too much and too dangerous in the extreme South, they are considered too little and too ineffectual in the extreme North.\u00a0 Not long ago a visiting Indian parliamentary delegation was told in Jaffna that India should give up its \u201cobsession with the 13th<\/sup> Amendment\u201d, and move towards a \u2018transitional administration\u2019.\u00a0 TNA\u2019s President Suresh Premachandran<\/a><\/span> told the same delegation that what is needed now is \u201can interim administration, overseen by India or the United Nations, until there is a final political settlement for the Tamils.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dayan Jayatilleka took Premachandran to task for giving Gotabhaya Rajapaksa<\/a><\/span> the biggest ammunition against 13A by opening his big mouth about interim administration and UN oversight.\u00a0 To his credit and ambidextrously Jayatilleke has also put the pertinent question to GH Peiris as to which Tamil party of significance will accept anything less than the province as the unit of devolution. \u00a0One can argue from dawn to dusk for and against 13A and the Provincial Council system, and Dayan Jayatilleka<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and GH Peiris<\/a><\/span> are worthy opponents and provide great reading.\u00a0 In the end, who is correct? – is a practical question.\u00a0 As well, political changes are brought about by originality and leadership, and not by scholarship and literature.<\/p>\n

Pace Prof. Peiris, SWRD Bandaranaike<\/a><\/span> demonstrated extraordinary originality and vision among Sri Lankans of his generation and every generation in articulating the \u2018federal idea\u2019 for this island as far back as 1926.\u00a0 He was bold and original and he did not need to see the depth of snow in the Canadian federation, or the level of oppression in the Soviet Union, details that might be of relevance in academic backrooms.\u00a0 Young Bandaranaike\u2019s early articulation was not an isolated flash in the pan; the idea has been continually evolving as a counter-thesis of power-sharing to the dominant trend of power-concentration in Sri Lanka\u2019s state and politics.\u00a0 And to close Jayatilleke\u2019s point, any Tamil politician of today will wager on the insight of Bandaranaike as to the form of government in Sri Lanka and not on even a highly accomplished Peradeniya academic.<\/p>\n

At the other end, SJV Chelvanayakam<\/a><\/span>, hardly eloquent or florid, was possessed of a razor-sharp legal mind.\u00a0 He may not have read anything more than KC Wheare on federalism, and he did not need to travel the world like our generation of parliamentarians to attend workshops on power sharing, but Chelvanyakam had an original grasp of what power sharing meant for what he called Sri Lanka\u2019s two \u2018deficit provinces\u2019.\u00a0 By some historic coincidence, it fell to the two St. Thomas\u2019s College classmates to formulate a political pact on power sharing.\u00a0 That was the celebrated B-C Pact.<\/p>\n

That it took 31 years for the B-C Pact to emerge after the federal idea was first mooted by SWRD in 1926, and another 31 years for the adoption of 13A says not so much about the idea itself as about Sri Lanka\u2019s political class and its self-absorbed muddling and machinations.\u00a0 SWRD\u2019s immediate successors panegyrized the so called Bandaranaike principles but excommunicated the B-C Pact.\u00a0 By the way, when SWRD reluctantly relented to pressure orchestrated by JR Jayewardene<\/a><\/span> and the UNP (with GG Ponnambalam<\/a><\/span> synchronizing in Jaffna, attacking the \u2018Christian\u2019 Pact) and tore up the pact, JRJ wrote in his diary (to paraphrase the footnote on JRJ\u2019s diary entry, in James Manor\u2019s biography of Bandaranaike) that the Prime Minister should have stood his ground and stood by the Pact regardless of protests!\u00a0 The Pact was torn up but the idea did not die.<\/p>\n

The Federal Party pleaded for recognizing Tamil also as an official language in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and for including the provisions of the B-C Pact in the 1972 Constitution, but those pleas were arrogantly rejected.\u00a0 Much was expected by way of rectification in the 1978 Constitution but expectations were frustrated.\u00a0 It took another ten years before JRJ finally caught up with his diary entry in 1958 and ushered 13A in 1988.\u00a0 There is no denying India\u2019s interference in 1988, but there should be no denying either of the political dialectic within Sri Lanka and the synthesis that manifested itself as the Thirteenth Amendment.\u00a0 Needless to say, if the provisions of the B-C Pact had been included in the 1972 Constitution<\/a><\/span>, or even one half of 13A had been included in the 1978 Constitution, there would have been no pretext or occasion for India to muddle in anyway in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 There is more.<\/p>\n

Regional marginalization <\/strong><\/p>\n

Prof. Peiris is on the mark in saying that it was \u201cpost-independence marginalisation of the North and parts of the East from the economic mainstreams of Sri Lanka \u2026 that facilitated large-scale mobilisation for the secessionist war waged by the LTTE\u201d, and that \u201ca concerted attempt to bring about a major structural transformation of the northern and eastern regional economy\u201d is now necessary.\u00a0 In a warning that should apply not only to the \u2018northern and eastern regional economy\u2019\u00a0 but also to the economy of the southern region, Peiris rightly says that such economic transformation cannot be brought about by \u201ca scatter of ill-conceived international airports, cricket stadia and film villages.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the aversion to 13A, the geographer in Peiris could not help conceptualizing the \u2018northern and eastern regional economy\u2019, a concept not very different from what a Bandaranaike or a Chelvanyakam would have articulated.\u00a0 It would be farfetched to suggest that the post-independence marginalization of the Northern and Eastern Provinces was an inevitable outcome of the Soulbury Constitution, or that a more inclusive economic development of the country would not have been possible under the Soulbury Constitution<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 In fact, the Soulbury Constitution started looking much better only after it was replaced in 1972, and again in 1978.\u00a0 It was not the constitution or market forces that led to the marginalization of the North and East but the dynamic of electoral politics fuelled by ethnic expediency. \u00a0The experience of regional or provincial marginalization invariably provided the matrix for political identification.<\/p>\n

There was a parallel development in the Tamil political sphere.\u00a0 Fearing discrimination, or marginalization, the Tamil political leaders focused on representation as their political line of defence and demand.\u00a0 From the modes of ommunal representation and balanced representation, the representation argument took on a federal form predicated on provincial units.\u00a0 The transition from one mode to the\u00a0 other was also driven by the electoral rivalries among the Tamil political parties<\/p>\n

History and claims to traditional homelands were rhetorical embellishments which would have withered away if the experience of marginalization had been reversed and the question of representation had been resolved.\u00a0 Neither happened; representation became even more lopsided by land colonization in the east, and disenfranchisement in the central plantations; worse, another toxic ingredient was added to the communal cauldron by the influx of the military into Northern and Eastern Provinces, starting from the 1960s.\u00a0 A country\u2019s armed forces are invariably stationed in different parts of the country.\u00a0 But the government was fomenting trouble by sending into areas where people primarily spoke Tamil, an army of soldiers who only spoke Sinhalese.\u00a0 That was then. Now it is not only the language disconnect, but also dispossession of people\u2019s land for stationing the military and its enterprises, that has become the new existential threat.<\/p>\n

Going back to the future <\/strong><\/p>\n

Twenty five years have gone by after 13A was adopted and we are still arguing its genealogical legitimacy and whether or not it poses a threat to national unity.\u00a0 If national unity means being inclusive of the Tamils and the Muslims, and if they both indicate that 13A is a reasonable starting point for their inclusion, how could anybody reject that except by telling the Tamils and the Muslims that inclusion means not getting what they would reasonably like, but being satisfied with what they are given.<\/p>\n

The government has no choice but to hold the election in September, if for no other reason than the Commonwealth summit it will be hosting in November.\u00a0 But apart from deciding to go ahead with the election the government does not appear to be having any plan as to what to do either during the election or, more importantly,\u00a0 after the election.\u00a0 Sure it would like to win the election in the North as it has in every other province, but it would be better off not trying too hard to win.\u00a0 Trying Daya Master or any other turncoat, or some \u2018independent group\u2019 of nondescripts will simply not cut it for credibility before the Tamil voters.<\/p>\n

Instead, the government would be better off by following\u00a0 the prudent advice that CWC leader S Thondaman gave President Jayewardene in 1981, and keeping out of the election altogether.\u00a0 JRJ did not heed the advice and the decision to contest the DDC elections in 1981 ended in a tragic fiasco.\u00a0 The Jaffna Public Library<\/a><\/span> was burnt among other atrocities and everyone knew then and knows now who did it.\u00a0 But thirty two years later a retired police officer is writing<\/a><\/span> imagined memoirs blaming it on the LTTE and the caste differences among the Tamils.\u00a0 This is sociology for idiots.\u00a0 Politically, in the four years after the war the country has travelled thirty years back to the future.\u00a0 Hopefully, the government will not make it worse by mishandling the NPC election and its results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":67761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\nSociology For idiots, 13 A And The NPC Election - Colombo Telegraph<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sociology-for-idiots-13-a-and-the-npc-election\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sociology For idiots, 13 A And The NPC Election - 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