By

C.A.Chandraprema

The main issue of the week past was supposed to be the commencement of the constitutional reform process with the passage of the Prime Minister’s resolution on parliament sitting as a committee of the whole house to draft a new constitution for Sri Lanka. The debate on the PM’s resolution was held, but no vote was taken and the whole constitutional reform process seems to be in a state of limbo.

The fact that such a thing could happen after the prime Minister accepted all the amendments put forward by the SLFP Maithri-group speaks volumes about the situation in the so called national unity government.

As exclusively reported in this column at that time, the SLFP Maithri group wanted the word ‘new’ from expunged from the phrase ‘new constitution’ so that what would be drafted would not be a new constitution but only amendments to the existing one.

Furthermore, the SLFP Maithri-group wanted the entire preface to the resolution deleted barring the first sentence. The paragraphs in the preface that were deleted referred to the repeated pledges that President Sirisena had given that he was going to abolish the executive presidency.

It was obvious that the SLFP Maithri group wanted the preface deleted so that there would be no reference in the resolution about abolishing the executive presidency. The word ‘new’ was deleted from the phrase ‘new constitution’ for the same purpose. If a totally new constitution was to be promulgated there would be much less justification for retaining the executive presidency.

However by making amendments to the existing constitution, there would be room left to sidestep the abolition of the executive presidency. Even after the PM timidly agreed to all the amendments brought by the SLFP Maithri group, the constitutional reform process is still in a state of limbo.

Obviously the constitutional reform process is not being blocked by either the UNP or the Joint Opposition but only by the SLFP Maithri faction. This may be due to the fear that if any constitutional reform process is launched, there would be a public outcry for the abolition of the executive presidency. Indeed it is comic to see the fear that the SLFP Maithri group has of the public.

The local government election which has been postponed for nearly a year is not being further postponed due to any reluctance on the part of the UNP (or the Joint Opposition for that matter) to face an election but entirely due to the fear of the SLFP Maithri group about their prospects at an election. By postponing the LG election, the government is missing out on the opportunity to have an election at a time when things are in their favour. The best time to hold the LG election would have been immediately after the parliamentary election last year.

With each passing month, the situation becomes more unfavourable for the government and the SLFP Maithri group is dragging the UNP down with it, without allowing the UNP to consolidate itself. The UNP has a political cadaver tied to its back and the only way they can extricate themselves from this situation would be through constitutional reform and the abolition of the executive presidency.

To be fair to RW, he did make an attempt to get out of this trap by bringing that resolution to set up a Constitutional Assembly to draft a new constitution but that attempt seems to have failed and the cadaver is still tied to his back. The question that arises is whether the UNP is focused enough on what it is doing. Last week, when the main topic was supposed to be constitutional reform, what we heard from the Prime Minister was mostly about the proposed Economic and Technological Cooperation Agreement with India.

Indian pressure on PM?

In the course of the PM’s statement there was even a reference this columnist and the contents of this column last week. The gist of what the PM said was that this columnist was trying to mislead the public by publishing the contents of fictitious documents and that I had been given employment in this newspaper by president Mahinda Rajapaksa and that I was expressing my gratitude by toeing the Rajapaksa line. The PM knows very well that what he said was not true. My association with this newspaper goes back a long time. I have never written in English to any newspaper other than The Island. It was I who won for The Island the journalism award given in memory of the PM’s father Esmond Wickremesinghe back in 1990. So it was certainly not former President Rajapaksa who got me into The Island.

In any event, we are at a loss to understand why the prime minister is pursuing the ETCA with India so aggressively. If he pursued constitutional reform with half as much zeal, he would have been able to consolidate the UNP’s power whereas by aggressively pursuing ETCA he is actually destabilising his political base. He is threatening the media every week and antagonising professional groups by the day and frightening off even those who may otherwise have been inclined to support ETCA. What are we to make of the PM’s behaviour in this regard? There could be several explanations. One obvious explanation is that the Indians were putting enormous pressure on him to get this pact through so that Sri Lanka is bound hand and foot to India. This is after all a government created for the most part by RAW. And this behaviour may be the result of that pressure.

On the other hand, it could also be the PM’s way of scuttling ECTA himself. Trying to tell the Indians at a governmental level that this ETCA thing will never work is too much hard work. Besides, the Indians will insist on their pound of flesh for helping to bring this government into power. Trying to get the Indians to give up CEPA like schemes will be like trying to persuade them to get over their fixation with the 13th Amendment. Even during the previous regime we have seen on many occasions visiting Indian ministers announcing to the Sri Lankan public that the Sri Lankan government had agreed to implement this or that while his Sri Lankan counterpart stands by silently nether denying or confirming what the Indian minister was saying. The Indians always had plans for Sri Lanka most of which were not in consonance with the plans that the Sri Lankan government of the day had.

So perhaps the PM has hit upon a way of getting the Indians off his back for good – by frightening the whole of Sri Lanka into uniting against ETCA so that he is saved the trouble of explaining matters to the Indians. As of now, he who has done the most to drum up opposition to ETCA is not the GMOA or the JVP and certainly not the Joint Opposition but the PM. It was the PM’s revered uncle J.R.Jayewardene who explained D.S.Senanyake’s decision to retain the British military bases in Sri Lanka after independence by saying that the British had voluntarily left both India and Ceylon and that they no longer posed a threat a Ceylon, but the newly independent India did and it was as a guarantee against India that DS retained the British bases in Ceylon. The value of D.S.Senanayake’s vision would have been brought home forcefully to JRJ himself in the late 1980s. The period in which Indian pressure on SL has been highest after the 1980s, is the present period.

So we may be right in surmising that the PM is promoting ETCA in a manner that will ensure it will fail because there is no other way to get the Indians off his back. The more he blackguards professionals and journalists, it is up to us to realise that the PM probably wants us to oppose ETCA even more resolutely. We reported that earlier this month when the UN Human Rights Commissioner visited Sri Lanka he had obviously given strict instructions not to say anything that will set Colombo on fire. After his end of visit speech all of us present were left with the impression that he had not said anything significant. Contrast that approach with that taken by the PM on the ETCA issue. If things go on like this, very soon the Indians themselves will be begging the PM to stop promoting their cause.

Ceylon Chamber’s words of caution

The statement put out last week by Sri Lanka’s premier trade chamber the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce about this ETCA controversy was reported by most media as the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce having ‘welcomed ETCA’. But a more careful perusal of that statement reveals it more as a cautionary note to the government. No trade chamber will tell a government not to enter into an economic partnership with another country. So the CCC says quite correctly that it ‘has consistently supported the expansion of Sri Lanka’s trade interests through signing mutually beneficial and well-designed trade agreements’. As such they welcomed the PM’s statement in Parliament explaining the Government’s stance on the proposed Economic and Technology Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) with India. Having thus welcomed the idea of an economic partnership with India, the CCC then sounds a series of warnings as follows.

1. The Chamber urged the authorities involved in the ETCA process to have transparent, systematic, and broad-based consultations with the private sector. (When the Ceylon Chamber refers to the private sector it actually means mostly itself!) What this means is that like the GMOA, the CCC is also not satisfied with the level of transparency in the whole process. The Chamber observed with concern that the opposition proliferating in the media to the proposed ETCA, can in part be attributed to the lack of information sharing and a systematic consultative process.

2. Any bilateral agreement must be supportive of Sri Lanka’s holistic economic interests and must recognise size asymmetries of the two countries.

3. A phased approach must be taken on liberalising the movement of natural persons in professional services.

4. There are valid concerns of an uneven playing field faced by Sri Lankan business in India. In order to build confidence, the Indian government should move quickly to solve non-tariff barriers to trade with India.

5. Opposition to the ETCA citing ‘national interest concerns’ must be carefully examined alongside the potential gains to consumers and firms in Sri Lanka. The latter too is ultimately a matter of national interest.

6. The Chamber endorses the Prime Minister’s comments that Sri Lanka needs to focus on expanding the markets for our exports and tap into the growing middle class in emerging economies in Asia and Europe. Greater openness to trade in services cannot be ignored, owing to its strong link to goods trade and investment. Services liberalization needs to be pursued, within a mutually-beneficial framework and following stakeholder discussions.

7. While it is governments that sign trade agreements, they ultimately impact positively and negatively on consumers and businesses. The trust and confidence of the private sector in new trade agreements the government may forge in the future necessarily depends on how the ongoing ETCA process is handled.

Thus what we see from the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce statement is not a wholesale endorsement of ETCA but a call for more information and transparency. They are in fact saying the very things that the GMOA is about ETCA. Indeed this statement clearly shows that even the CCC does not really know what ETCA involves. Last week, in an interview with this writer, the GMOA president Dr Anuruddha Padeniya said that when they met President Maithripala Sirisena he had told them that he too had not seen the draft of ETCA. The president has not seen the draft, the cabinet has not seen it, nor has parliament or the professional associations and trade chambers. Little wonder that a chorus of voices has arisen against this agreement that nobody is given information abaout.

Lalkantha’s clarion call

Addressing a press conference last week, JVP trade union chief K.D.Lalkantha flayed the Prime Minister for the boorish manner in which he was promoting the ETCA with India. He said that the trade union movement has misgivings about the content of the ETCA with India as well as the politics behind it and also the PM’s attitude. He drew the attention of the public to the fact that the PM was on the one hand telling parliament that the ETCA with India had not yet been finalised and that critics were finding fault with a non-existent agreement while on the other hand declaring publicly that he would sign the agreement with India no matter where the opposition to it came from. “If there is no agreement yet, then what is it that the PM said he would be signing?” queried Lalkantha adding that the people would be happy to see a copy of whatever the PM had resolved so resolutely to sign with India.

The JVP trade union chief said that the groundwork was being prepared to suppress journalists and professionals who speak out against ETCA by labelling them as people who had held a brief for the Rajapaksas. He said that anybody has a right to hold a brief to the Rajapaksas if they so wished and that affiliation or otherwise with the Rajapaksas had no relevance for the debate over ETCA. He warned that by trying to sign this agreement against all opposition, the PM would inevitably call upon himself a general strike that will cripple the entire country. He reminded the government that it was not just the GMOA that was involved in this struggle but the engineering services and virtually every other category of professionals and that the engineers can by themselves bring the entire country to a grinding halt.

Lalkantha said that the trade unions will not allow this agreement with India to be implemented even if it is passed by parliament. He called upon all political parties outside the government to accept this as a political challenge thrown at them by the government and to rise up against ETCA. He further warned the SLFP members who had sided with Maithripala Sirisena to take a stand against ETCA if they have any hopes of obtaining votes from SLFPers at future elections and that if they do not take a stand against ETCA, they will have no option but to join the UNP or contest under the Swan symbol. Though Lalkantha did not explicitly called for a broad front uniting all political forces, trade unions and professional bodies and business groups against ETCA, that was exactly what he was hinting at. As the days go by, the call for such a broad front will become more explicit from all those involved in what is now fast becoming a national campaign against ETCA.

The Bhutan model for Sri Lanka?

Narendra Modi’s first visit after he assumed power was to the neighbouring country of Bhutan which is actually an extension of India. The way the Indians established domination over Bhutan was through an innocuously named ‘India-Bhutan Friendship Treaty’ signed in 1949. Not more than two pages long, with only ten broadly stated Articles, this document was simplicity itself. Free trade between the two countries was established through Article 5 which went as follows: “There shall, as heretofore, be free trade and commerce between the territories of the Government of India and of the Government of Bhutan; and the Government of India agrees to grant the Government of Bhutan every facility for the carriage, by land and water, of its produce throughout the territory of the Government of India, including the right to use such forest roads as may be specified by mutual agreement from time to time.”

The free movement of natural persons between the two nations was established by Article 7 which went as follows: “The Government of India and the Government of Bhutan agree that Bhutanese subjects residing in Indian territories shall have equal justice with Indian subjects, and that Indian subjects residing in Bhutan shall have equal Justice with the subjects of the Government of Bhutan.” This two page friendship treaty even provided for the extradition of criminals who may seek refuge in one another’s territories. This friendship treaty was renewed and reaffirmed again in 2007 even though the earlier treaty was supposed to be for perpetuity. The main difference between the 1949 and 2007 treaties was that in 1949, Bhutan was to be ‘guided’ in its external relations by India and that under the 2007 treaty, Bhutan was to have control over its own external affairs. Thus Bhutan has won a certain degree of freedom through the 2007 treaty.

However the earlier provisions relating to free trade and the free movement of natural persons still remain in identical form in the 2007 treaty as well in Articles 3 and 5. The most important thing that we Sri Lankans have to take note of is that the India-Bhutan Friendship Treaties which turned Bhutan into a satellite state of India were not detailed documents dealing with the minutiae of the understanding between the two countries. They only provided a ‘framework’ within which Bhutan became an extension of India itself. Herein lies the danger in this Economic and Technological Cooperation FRAMEWORK Agreement (ETCFA) that the government is trying to sign with India. This is an agreement that broadly agrees to establish free trade in goods, services and investment leaving the details for later.

Once the framework agreement is signed, you really don’t need any details. The rest can be done administratively through cabinet papers like the one relating to the setting up of an Indian ambulance service in Sri Lanka. Because of the bad experience the Indians had with CEPA where no agreement could be reached on the details, they seem to have fixated on getting a framework signed instead and to do what they want by administrative means. If a two page treaty with very little detail was enough to turn Bhutan into a satellite state of India, a similar framework agreement with no details would suffice to do the same to Sri Lanka. This ETCA framework agreement to agree on the details later should never be signed as that will be the cover under which the Indianisation of Sri Lanka will take place.

Courtesy:Sunday Island