by C.A.Chandraprema

The scenes in Parliament on Wednesday last week made Parliamentary history. Never before have we seen anything like the horse trading that went on at the last moment to get the amendments to the PC Elections Bill passed. When the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and the All Ceylon Makkal Congress wanted the proportion of provincial councilors elected on the proportional representation system increased to 50% from the 40% that had been decided on earlier, the government agreed in order to get the two thirds majority needed to pass the amendments to the PC elections law that enables the government to postpone PC elections. For the government, these amendments to the PC elections law were literally a matter of life or death. If the elections to the Sabaragamuwa, North Central and Eastern Provincial Councils could not be postponed, the government was staring defeat in the face.

At the presidential and parliamentary elections held in 2015, even though they were contesting against everyone else, the Mahinda Rajapaksa led UPFA won both the Sabaragamuwa and North Central Provinces. So the result of an election in these provinces was a foregone conclusion. This upped the ante for the government and made them agree to anything to avoid what they had deemed to be certain defeat – an eventuality that would have had fatal consequences on their already tenuous hold on power. Hence the last minute horse trading that went on the floor of parliament to increase the percentage of the provincial councilors elected on the proportional representation system with no consideration given to what effect this will have on the stability of the provincial councils as institutions. This is a government that is engaged in a headlong quest for political survival and such considerations no longer matter.

Local government elections have been due for over two and a half years but have not been held and there is no sign that they will be held anytime soon. When it seemed likely that the government would not be able to prevent the provincial council elections from being held, hasty attempts were made to prepare for LG elections because they would cause less damage to the government than the PC elections. As a part of these preparations, the government changed the system of elections to the LG institutions on August 25 this year. That in fact was the first time they made use of committee stage amendments to introduce changes to the law through the back door. A Bill to make certain minor technical corrections to the local government elections law had been gazetted earlier and the government in blind panic at the prospect of the provincial council elections being held, took this bill up for debate in Parliament and at the committee stage introduced over 50 new clauses completely changing the system of election to the local government institutions.

Headlong quest to dodge elections

The idea was to head off the PC elections by holding the local government elections first, if having an election becomes inevitable. Having got away with introducing sweeping changes to a Bill at the committee stage, they adopted the same strategy to rush in changes to the PC elections law as well. Given the fact that many people in the government think they are not just looking at defeat in the face but death itself, they are obviously not concerned about how these desperate machinations look to a public that is already looking askance at the antics of this government. This mindless fear in fact could be the main cause of their undoing. The yahapalana coalition working together did manage to defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa in January 2015. In August that year, they were able to win the Parliamentary elections after the President upset the UPFA election campaign by stating publicly and in writing that Mahinda Rajapaksa would not be made Prime Minister even if he won the election and then following up by sacking the general secretaries of the SLFP and UPFA on the eve of the poll.

After emerging panting and palpitating from that election with a slim majority in Parliament, the yahapalana coalition developed an election phobia and are now in a state of mind where they will do anything to avoid an electoral showdown with the Joint Opposition led by Mahinda Rajapaksa. While it is certainly true that after the experience of the last Parliamentary election, the Joint Opposition will field their own list at any subsequent election and there will be no room for President Sirisena to repeat the antics of August 2015, still the fact was that the UNP and its allies had won 106 seats and over 40 MPs who had been elected to Parliament under Mahinda Rajapaksa’s leadership had defected to the government and a government with a two thirds majority had been formed. Under such circumstances, they could easily have held the local government elections.

Even if the Joint Opposition had fielded a separate list at that local government election and they had won a lot of local government institutions, still the yahapalana government could also have given good account of themselves – at least they would have been better placed then than they are now. But what has prevented the yahapalana government from having any election after August 2015 is because of the fear of not doing well or being defeated. Even if they were to be defeated, the margin of defeat would have been much slimmer if the LG elections had been held immediately after the Parliamentary election. The longer they delay, both the certainty and the margin of defeat increases. The government has been saying that they will be holding the postponed LG elections in January and the postponed PC elections in March 2018. But one can bet one’s last rupee that they will not hold any elections between now and the next Presidential or parliamentary election.

The logic of blind panic

When one postpones elections for the fear of defeat, one operates on a different logic. You first put off the election because the situation is not propitious. With the passage of time, the situation invariably becomes even less propitious and the election gets pushed further away. The yahapalana coalition is now caught up in this vicious cycle and there is no escape. There are enough complications in the amendments to the LG elections law and the PC elections law that were made recently to ensure that no elections are held in foreseeable future and that is what is inevitably going to happen. The logic of dodging elections in this manner is that if the government loses an election it will lose its legitimacy and its ability to govern even though they have been elected for a fixed term in office. They think that by somehow dodging a mid-term test they would be able to retain their legitimacy and ability to govern at least until the term they were elected for runs out.

However, the point that the government has to consider is whether this headlong quest to dodge elections which the voting public is only too well aware of, is doing anything to enhance their legitimacy in the eyes of the people. It’s true that the dodging of elections even in the desperate and blatant way the yahapalana coalition has been doing it, does not result in a loss of legitimacy as dramatic as that caused by an election defeat; but still, it does result in an irreversible loss of face which will prove enormously costly in the medium to long term. Still, not having elections helps. The example one can give is that when the elections to cooperative societies were being held last year, they were all going against the government. Usually cooperative societies are won by the government in power and the cooperative societies and the small businesses run by them are an important source of patronage for local politicians.

But in the recent past, when elections to cooperative societies were held they were all going against the government by huge margins. Given the fact that the cooperative societies have something like eight million members which forms a good part of the voting population, the message that the government got was that they were looking at resounding defeat come an election which is why they are doing things that nobody has ever done before in their headlong quest to avoid a test. If they went to the lengths we saw last Wednesday in parliament to avoid holding elections to three provincial councils, one can be certain that despite anything this government may say, they are under no circumstances going to hold the local government elections which have to be held countrywide which would therefore show the loss of the government’s legitimacy countrywide instead of in just two or three provinces.

So we are now faced with a situation where no elections will be held in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, not a single local government institution is functioning countrywide. From midnight on Tuesday, the provincial councils will also be dissolved one by one. Ultimately the only institutions of government left operational will be the presidency and the parliament. This situation will not be disliked by those who felt that there was too much devolution of power. Once all the provincial councils stand dissolved, Sri Lanka will be more centralized than it was even during British Colonial times when there was the British government which administered the whole country through the Government Agents. Today even venerable old local government bodies like the Colombo Municipal Council are being administered by a Commissioner.

Courtesy:Sunday Island