By
C.A.Chandraprema
In the context of the present raucous cry for the abolition of the executive presidency emanating from certain NGOs, political parties and prominent individuals, the question we have to ask ourselves is whether these people have given adequate thought to what we will be doing by abolishing the executive presidency and reverting back to a parliamentary form of government.
In order to form an informed opinion on this matter we have to look back at the 31 years of parliamentary government in this country before the presidential system was introduced.
The first parliament in this country had a total of 101 members – 95 elected and six appointed members. At the first parliamentary elections held in 1947, the UNP led by D.S.Senanayake won just 42 seats. Even with the six additional MPs appointed by the incoming government the UNP still did not have a clear majority in parliament and they had to cobble together a coalition with the help of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress led by G.G.Ponnambalam and some independent MPs in order to have a working majority in parliament. Thus what we had from day one under the parliamentary system were unstable governments. In 1952, Dudley Senanayake called for a general election in the wake of his father’s death. Thanks to the sympathy vote over the untimely death of DS, the UNP managed to get 54 seats which together with the six appointed MPs gave the UNP a comfortable majority.
In 1956, though S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike’s victory is often portrayed as a massive victory, it was a good win only in comparison to the eight seats that the UNP won. The SLFP got 51 seats and with the six appointed MPs they had a reasonable working majority in parliament. But it must be remembered that the SLFP led the MEP formation with various other parties like Mr. Philip Gunawardene’s VLSSP and others. By today’s standards, Banda’s great revolution would be considered a very average victory. But under the parliamentary system getting even a working majority was such a rarity that Banda’s victory was portrayed as a great achievement. By the time the next election was held in March 1960, the number of members of parliament had gone up to 151+6 =157. The UNP got the most number of seats at the March 1960 election but with just 50 MPs this was not sufficient to form a government in the 157 member parliament. The ITAK led by S.J.V.Chelvanayagam offered the 15 seats his party had won to Dudley on certain conditions but Dudley rejected the offer obviously because even the 15 seats of the ITAK would not have helped him to obtain a working majority in parliament.
The SLFP fought the March 1960 election under the leadership of C.P.de Silva but by the time fresh elections were called in July 1960, Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike had taken over the leadership of the SLFP. The appearance of Mrs Bandaranaike on the platform was seen as giving the SLFP a sympathy vote over the assassination of SWRD, and they managed to win 75 seats in parliament which together with the six appointed MPs gave her government a bare working majority in the 157 member parliament. But it must not be forgotten that the SLFP had a no contest agreement with the left parties in July, something they did not have in March, and this made a world of a difference. In 1965, this government fell due to the crossover of a few SLFP parliamentarians which eliminated the slim majority that the government had in parliament. At the elections held in 1965, the UNP won 66 seats which was not sufficient to form a government even with the six appointed MPs. So they availed themselves of the offer made by the ITAK which had 14 MPs to support the UNP in exchange for certain concessions and a government with a majority was formed.
At the 1970 general elections the SLFP won 90 seats and formed a government with a two thirds majority in parliament with the help of the LSSP and CP which had another 25 MPs among them. At the 1977 general election which was the only election held under the 1972 constitution, the UNP won 140 of the 168 seats in the National State Assembly and formed a government. Thus we see that what we had during the era of parliamentary government were unstable governments and wild swings in parliamentary representation due to the first past the post system of election. Under the first past the post electoral system, no party got even 50% of the popular vote until 1977. There were instances when the party that lost the election actually got more votes than the party that was deemed to have won the election!
Why Dudley caved in
This happened at the July 1960 election when the SLFP formed a stable government with 81 seats in the 157 member parliament. Yet at this election the SLFP got only 33.5% of the vote while the UNP which ‘lost’ got 37.5%! But the UNP contested more seats than the SLFP because of the no contest agreement between the blue and red parties. The same thing happened once again in 1970. The SLFP won 90 seats with 36.6% of the vote while the UNP was routed having won only 17 seats though it got 37.9% of the vote. (But again, the SLFP led a United Front in combination with old left at that election which gives a different picture). Today, we have got used to the proportional representation system and situations like July 1960 and 1970 would be inconceivable. In this day and time, the public will never tolerate a victorious party that has got less votes than the vanquished. If we look at the unstable governments, and the distortion of the public will that occurred under the parliamentary system of governance from 1947 to 1977, we begin to see the justification that J.R.Jayewardene had for introducing proportional representation and the presidential form of government.
He was aware that the proportional representation system also could result in unstable governments because the gap between the victor and the vanquished would be very narrow. The executive presidential system was seen as a counterbalance for the lack of a large majority in parliament for the governing party. This country has had much more stable governments after the executive presidency was introduced than before it. All the governments before 1977 were weak governments that could be shaken with a general strike or a civil disobedience campaign. We had a strong government after 1970 and they did manage to overcome the first JVP insurgency of 1971, but that was largely due to the circumstance that the JVP launched their insurgency just nine months after the new government was elected to power. Had the JVP bided their time and struck four or five years after the election of the UF government, the outcome may well have been different with rats abandoning a sinking ship amidst the panic caused by the armed revolt.
In 1957, the mere threat of a civil disobedience campaign by the ITAK was enough to make S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike sign the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact which agreed to create Regional Councils and to cede powers relating to agriculture, cooperatives, land and land development, health, education, industries, fisheries housing, social services, electricity , water and roads to the new unit of government. Looking at the list of powers we see that only foreign policy, defence and law and order would remain with the central government! Because Bandaranaike took this ill-conceived step in 1957, we still have not been able to get away from this mindset of dividing the country into smaller units of government.
Would Bandaranaike have caved into a threat of a civil disobedience campaign if he had been the executive president of the country? Despite Bandaranaike’s reputation of being spineless, perhaps not! What happened in 1957 would have been that Bandaranaike’s personal attributes would have been exacerbated by the inherent weakness of a parliamentary system of government which would fall at the slightest turbulence. In March 1960, Dudley had the good sense not to accept the terms set by the ITAK to form a government.
Though Dudley was able to do this in 1960, the political imperative is that a political party has to form governments otherwise the leadership comes under siege from disgruntled party members. So when the next election came around in 1965, Dudley was prepared to compromise. In 1965, the UNP won 66 seats in the 157 seat parliament. So he needed the 14 seats of the ITAK to obtain a majority. In order to get that support, he had to agree to set up District Councils with all the powers devolved in the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact of 1957 and in addition he agreed to a land distribution policy in the North and East that would result in an exclusive Tamil enclave in that part of the country.
In the first round, land would be allocated to the landless people living in the relevant district. In the second round, land would be allocated to Tamil speaking persons from the Northern and Eastern provinces. In the third round the land would be thrown open to applicants from other parts of the country but once again preference would be given to Tamil speaking applicants!
The fact that a leader of a multi-ethnic nation agreed to such a land distribution policy shows the extent to which leaders would go to form governments. The choice was to either agree to such conditions or not form a government. Thus the parliamentary system of government was responsible in a way for the ethnic conflict by giving disproportionate bargaining power to ethnicity based political parties that could use their clout to wring concessions from the politicians at the centre.
A parliamentary government may be stable during its first two years in office but a few years to its term of office it becomes increasingly vulnerable to splits. Even the 1970 government which was the first to have a two thirds majority in parliament had split by 1975. One can only imagine what would have happened if the JVP had waited till the UF government was declining in popularity and splits had emerged in its ranks before launching their first insurgency.
Saved by the executive presidency
It is very unlikely that Sri Lanka would have survived the turbulence of the 1980s in one piece without an executive presidency. The first big test was the general strike of 1980. By 1980, the UNP government was still only three years into their tenure and too new and too united to be toppled with a general strike even if the parliamentary form of government had remained in place. But if not for the executive presidency, the July 1980 strike would have had a much greater destabilizing effect on that government.
The reason why the UNP was able to defeat the general strike of 1980 so easily was because of the executive presidency. The reason why the government was able to survive the Indian intervention between 1984-1990 is definitely due to the executive presidency. Had political power in Sri Lanka hinged on a parliamentary majority in the 1980s, the Indians most certainly would have taken steps to weaken the government by buying up MPs.
Furthermore, the UNP government would not have survived the second JVP insurrection of the late 80s if not for the executive presidency. In their second attempt the JVP did what they failed to do in 1971. They waited till the UNP government was nearing the end of its second term in office and until splits had emerged in the ruling party over the question of who was going to succeed JRJ. Furthermore, when they struck, they targeted individual members of the ruling party instead of going for the police stations and the other institutions of the state. The UNP would never have survived such an onslaught if this country had had a parliamentary system of government at the time. If it was possible to topple a government by killing and intimidating members of parliament, the UNP government would have fallen in 1987-89.
Coming to more recent times, it was with the parliament of 2004 that the war against the LTTE was fought to a finish. What Mahinda Rajapaksa inherited from Chandrika Kumaratunga in 2005 was a minority government. The governing coalition had 105 members of parliament and a majority was formed with the nine JHU parliamentarians, the five SLMC parliamentarians and one MP each from the EPDP and the Up-Country People’s Front.
By 2007 the JVP moved apart, and the government lost 39 parliamentarians. If this had been a parliamentary form of government, the government would not have lasted beyond 2007. But because of the executive presidency, the UPFA government not only managed to survive with their numbers bolstered by defections from the UNP but achieve a feat which was considered impossible even by governments that had a much steadier majority in parliament – defeating the LTTE.
Thus from the July 1980 general strike through Indian intervention, the second JVP insurrection, and the final victory over the LTTE, the stability and indeed the very survival of this country was due to the executive presidency. It is true that the Indians were able to foist the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord and the provincial councils system on us even with the executive presidency but that was due to the direct threat of an invasion by India. Internally, there was no force capable of bending the government to its will forcibly.
When one looks at that macro-picture there is no doubt whatsoever about the benefits of the executive presidential system as a guarantor of internal stability. The downside however is that in the hands of the wrong person, the executive presidency itself could be the cause instability and political turbulence in the country. We saw this happening during the governments of R.Premadasa and particularly during the time of Chandrika Kumaratunga. But in the same breath we have to say that because of the executive presidency, both these leaders were able to resist pressures to do things that may have destabilized the country even more.
For example, President Premadasa managed to get the Indian troops out of Sri Lanka by 1990. If he was leading a parliamentary government, he would never have been able to do that because the Indians would have taken steps to buy over MPs and overthrow Premadasa. He was also able to resist pressure to implement the police and land powers given to the provincial councils. Chandrika Kumaratunga also never devolved police and land powers to the provincial councils.
While both Premadasa and Chandrika thus managed to safeguard stability by resisting pressure to do things that would have had a detrimental effect on the country, at a different level both of them were a cause of political instability mainly through their relentless persecution of political opponents. It is in fact this behaviour that gave rise to cries for the abolition of the executive presidency during the tenures of these two presidents.
There is not an iota of doubt that had both Premadasa and Chandrika been prime ministers sitting in parliament both of them would not have persecuted their political opponents in quite the same manner. In both these cases we see that the isolation and aloofness of the position of president would have motivated these leaders to be more repressive than they would have been if they had been leading the country from within parliament.
If Premadasa had been dependent on a parliamentary majority to govern, he would have thought twice before antagonizing Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathmudali. Likewise CBK would have been much less inclined to persecute members of the opposition in quite the same manner if she was sitting and interacting with them on a daily basis in parliament.
This is of course not to say that a parliamentary form of government cannot be nasty. The 1970-77 government of Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike was perhaps even nastier than that of Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government of 1994-2001. The 1970s government had all the thuggery and intimidation and persecution of the CBK government and in addition it had the effect or ruining opponents economically by expropriating their businesses and lands and some prominent cases, even their houses.
However it is more difficult to sustain such viciousness under a parliamentary form of government than it is under a presidential system. If a president lacking balance and restraint is in office, that fact alone will be the single biggest source of instability in the country.
Stability too should be a priority
If the executive presidency is going to be abolished, then some scheme will have to be devised which guarantees the political party that gets the most number of seats a working majority in parliament. At present, the only proposal for electoral reform is the proposal put forward by the Parliamentary Select Committee headed by Dinesh Gunawardene. But only the constituent parties of the UPFA including the JHU and EPDP have agreed to this proposal.
The UNP, JVP TNA and SLMC have not agreed to it. Be that as it may, what this scheme proposes is to have 140 MPs elected on the first past the post system from demarcated constituencies and a further 70 MPs from the districts on the proportional representation system whereby the best losers in the constituencies would be given a chance to get into parliament on the proportional representation quota. Another 15 seats would be on the national list. Five of these national list seats would be given to the party that gets the most number of seats and the rest allocated on the basis of the number of votes obtained by the parties.
One of the positive features of this proposed scheme is that the smaller political parties will be eliminated and the fragmentation of representation will be contained to some extent. But even under this system, in the North and East ethnicity and religion based political parties will still be able to win a certain number of seats and there is always the danger of political instability. If all the 15 national list seats are given to the party that wins the most number of seats as bonus seats to ensure a working majority in parliament, then there is the chance of being able to form stable governments, but even then there is no guarantee that it will produce the desired result.
Whichever way one looks at it, it is only the executive presidential system that guarantees political stability. But as we said earlier, in the wrong hands, this system does tend to give rise to political reigns of terror in a more sustained manner than would be possible in a parliamentary system of governance. But given the particular circumstances of this country, by abolishing the executive presidency we may end up introducing a greater degree of instability to the country than any caused by the viciousness of an unbalanced incumbent.
While it is true that a good section of the UNP suffered under the ill-conceived persecution of President Premadasa and the UNP had to suffer further persecution under Chandrika Kumaratunga, still at least the country remained intact and these leaders could not be frog marched into making decisions they did not want to make. The reason for the persecution and viciousness was due to the personal failings of those two leaders.
But if we look at the present situation neither the incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa nor his principal adversary Ranil Wickremesinghe are repressive individuals. Mahinda most certainly has done no harm to any opposition party during his tenure. If we take Ranil Wickremesinghe, it was he who introduced this period of political peace to the country by not paying Chandrika back in her own coin when he won power in December 2001. So he too is not a repressive leader.
If the incumbent and his challenger have both proved themselves to be non-repressive, then why do we have to worry about the continuation of the executive presidential system? If we look further into the future, it is unlikely that Sajith Premadasa or any possible successor in the UPFA would be repressive leaders either. The present abolitionist hysteria propagated by some NGOs and political parties like the JVP is due mainly to the fear that Mahinda may win a third time. That however is no reason to effect a change in the system of government and burden this country with chronically unstable governments for the rest of our lives.
Courtesy:Sunday Island