By

N Sathiya Moorthy

Responding to UNP Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe’s comment on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s maiden meeting with India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, External Affairs Minister G.L. Peiris has told Parliament: “We made it crystal clear that devolution of police powers is not acceptable.

We want to find a solution that will stand the test of time.”

According to media reports, Prof. Peiris, who participated in the bilateral talks that followed PM Modi’s inauguration, also said that the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC), set up last year which lacks credibility with the UNP, TNA and JVP boycotting it not necessarily in that order, was the best way to address the devolution issue. Though not pronounced in clearer terms, it was a suggestion to India to get the TNA to participate in the PSC.

Coupled with subsequent media briefing by Cabinet Spokesman, Minister Keheliya Rambukwella that the Government was willing to implement 13-A without police powers, there is some revived hopes now for a political solution to the ethnic issue.

It needs two hands to clap, as much as to fight. The Sri Lankan State and the Tamils have done enough of both in the past. The post-war five years should have been time for introspection, but it’s never too late.

Mutual recrimination over missed opportunities in the implementation of 13A will do no good, least of all to the Provinces and the Tamils.

Instead, early and immediate implementation at this stage could still convince the TNA to join the PSC, where again it can agitate for police powers. Over the past years, they have been suffering rejection by the Centre and promptings from Tamil nationalists; they are walking a tight-rope in their commitment to a political solution within a united Sri Lanka.

Whether or not the TNA joins the PSC, given the inherent strengths and demands of democracy, the Government too should argue its case on police powers before the PSC and Parliament. Unilateral decisions, however justified for reasons of national security, pre-suppose the PSC outcome, and also restrict the process, ab initio. It’s already weighted in favour of the Government, challenging the credibility of the process already.

The current decision on police powers is anyway time-bound. It should be so. It cannot be a solution that can stand the test of time. It should not be either.

There should be flexibility for future governments and parliaments to decide otherwise, if circumstances so facilitated and commanded. Any failure on this score would imply a failure of the nation’s current security strategy and apparatus, a task left unfinished by the incumbent.

It is likely that President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s maiden meeting with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi a day after the latter’s inauguration has kick-started the current discourse on power-devolution and police powers. PM Modi and India apart, Sri Lankans would also like to see that their Government keeps its word on 13-A, power-devolution and political solution.

These commitments were made almost voluntarily, to India and the international community, to get assistance for Sri Lanka from India and international community to eliminate the LTTE terror apparatus and concept.

The Government needs to remember that credibility too is a hallmark of democratic politics and international relations. Nations and also governments are evaluated on the basis of the distance between their word and deed. Constant revision of political and administrative positions implies a deliberate shifting of the goal-post all the time.

Genuine as those changed circumstances may be at times, such indecision also speaks of a poor understanding of the ground conditions by the rulers and/or the ruling class. War and violence of the past was a product of such wishful thinking.

The international community will be left with no choice but to evaluate emerging ground realities independent of Sri Lankan official claims, if they are convinced that the incumbent is incapable of reading the situation rightly, or is eternally indecisive, or effectively bluffing them or a combination of all of them.

Possibly, such shifts owe to continuous discourse within the administration. The rationale is at times unconvincing, too. It was once argued that police powers could encourage Provinces to order the arrest of national leaders within their jurisdiction.

There were takers for this kind of arguments, too.
Under the circumstances, a larger and a serious national discourse through the PSC process, aimed at a national consensus alone would help. That way, the incumbent’s concerns that 13-A was torpedoed as much from within the Government of the day as by the LTTE and the rest of the Tamils outside, has validity.

The post-war PSC provides a solution, the Government should submit itself to the supremacy of Parliament, and see itself only as the implementing authority. Only if they are convinced about it, could the Government expect the TNA, UNP and the JVP, among others, to join the PSC. Without their participation, this PSC in particular cannot be expected to produce a solution that can ‘stand the test of time’.

Even otherwise, the Government’s approach is time-bound, not aimed at the future, near or distant. As Minister Rambukwella said in another context, India has amended the Constitution any number of times. So has Sri Lanka, maybe on fewer occasions. India has worked on a single Constitution whereas Sri Lanka has had three during the same period.

Either way, there will always be scope and possible need for Sri Lanka to amend the statute in the future too. One of them could involve the need and justification for conferring police powers to the Provinces. Should stabilisation of the current situation occur in favour of 13-A linked power-devolution, not just the Tamils, but Sinhala Provinces and their Provincial Councils may be the ones demanding more powers. ‘Police powers’ may be one among them. ‘Police powers’ is already in the Constitution.

The incumbent Government may have justification that in post-war, the nation is not yet ready for implementing at least this clause. Yet, it cannot rule for the future. The JRJ regime did just that with 13-A, but its own successor UNP Government would not implement it.
The Centre can now consider going to the PSC for staggering police-powers implementation.

The PSC in turn can fix periodicity for review, and decide on stage-by-stage implementation. A three or five-year review may be in order, initially, but it would be for the PSC to decide. Fast-tracking or slowing down the process should be left to Parliament to decide, based on a mandatory report from the Centre.

There is some hope on this score. Even while sticking to its post-war position on police powers, the Centre has intermittently been talking about devolving powers on traffic and other lesser forms of policing to the Provinces. Minister Rambukwella too has said as much.

If the TNA and the NPC would play along, it would get for the Tamils what they have not been able to get, singing a solo and at times suspicious-sounding song all along. Should anyone, including India or the international community, intervene, there is no way the TNA or the NPC can guarantee good conduct by peripheral elements in the Tamil nationalist groups within.

The TNA is committed to a political solution within a united Sri Lanka. With police powers, the TNA-administered NPC would be powerless against ‘separatist’ elements in their midst, nearer home and afar, if the latter is so determined. Without police powers, the Sinhala population – and also the Sri Lankan State and Government would have no reason to suspect them of collusion. It will be true of India and the international backers of the TNA and the Tamils.

Simultaneously, Minister Rambukwella has lent credence to the divided Opposition’s anticipation of advanced polls to the presidency. He did not rule out presidential polls in January 2015, one and half years ahead of schedule, as the Opposition has been busy predicting for close to a year now. He said that President Rajapaksa (like others before him and possibly after him) would decide on it, based on astrological advice.

The ruling UPFA’s reduced showing in the Provincial polls in the urban West and rural South have triggered increased political activity, which also hint at a possible re-alignment of electoral forces, deriving particularly from governance-driven, anti-incumbency factors. Leaders of the UNP Opposition attended centre-right JHU’s programme, and the centre-Left National Freedom Front (NFF) is talking to the JHU – both partners in the Government.

Executive Presidency and not the ethnic issue, once again seems to be the escapist strategy for anti-incumbent unity. People-centric governance issues like price increases and economy, corruption and casino-morals as talking-points during poll-time can challenge the credibility of the challenger, both before the polls and afterward.

Whether Executive Presidency or Economy or both become the nation’s election agenda, then ethnic issue will have no place there. With an amalgam of parties now in the government, and possibly in the Opposition, too, there is no way, either of the Sinhala-Buddhist’ majors, namely the ruling SLFP and the Opposition UNP, would want to open the Pandora’s Box all over again.

In parliamentary polls, the Tamils can have their say and elect their own members from the TNA – which is increasingly giving the picture of a divided-house. Not in a nation-wide presidential election. The mysterious LTTE-enforced boycott of the 2005 polls exposed the Tamils for what they were worth or not worth.

Owing to delimitation of electorates and post-war Census the first in three decades, the number of Tamil MPs would decrease at the next elections. Even otherwise, experience has shown as early as 1977, the Tamil party, TULF, could claim farcical credit for being the official Opposition in Parliament with double-digit figures in a 225-member House. They have not been able to claim credit as the king-maker then or afterwards.

The TNA’s failed attempt in 2010 presidential polls showed how their strategists were cut off from ground realities in the Sinhala South. They voted for the loser Sarath Fonseka when as incumbent President Rajapaksa was wooing them with offers of a post-poll political solution. The Sinhala voters thought otherwise about the presidential polls and about the TNA’s choice, too.

There is nothing to show over the past five years that the Tamil leadership has studied the nation’s Sinhala voters better than what was/is told to them by their Sinhala-Buddhist political interlocutors.

Nor have they found a way to keep ethnic issue an inclusive poll and post-poll agenda, though its Sri Lanka’s acknowledged national problem still.

That way, all Tamils’ efforts over the past decades have been tactics-driven, not strategy-centred. Where they have had a strategy, the LTTE got it all wrong, in the end losing tactics to strategy and strategy to tactic. In the name of Tamils and in the name of Tamils, it should be said the TNA cannot repeat it.

Nor can the Tamils afford it, either. They should be looking at situations and solutions that too can stand the test of time!