By N Sathiya Moorthy
President Maithiripala Sirisena should be ruing the day he failed to read the fine-print of 19-A before clearing it.
Today, when he reportedly wants to sack Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, we are told that the Constitution does not provide for the same. And hopefully it does not do so in future, too, and for very valid reasons.
The one distinguishing character of a democracy as against a dictatorship is the power of the top constitutional authority to act at will and whim, and still have the mandate of the Constitution, where the courts and even the people who elected or selected the other man do not have the power to challenge such decisions. In Sri Lanka, under the Second Republican Constitution, the top post was called ‘Executive Presidency’, but in effect was quasi-dictatorial was the character of the highest office of the land – and under the cover of democracy.
Sri Lanka boasts of being the oldest elected democracy in the western mould in the whole of Asia, dating it back to Donoughmore era in the early thirties, yet, it inaugurated the Executive Presidency with its eyes wide open, and still priding in the forgotten past. Worse still, every political and constitutional authority other than the Executive President blamed the ills of the existing system to the office of the Executive President, and explained away his or her own servility in return for loaves of office and profits.
It was all because the Constitution empowered the Executive President to dismiss the elected Parliament any time after the first year of the latter completing its term. No reason needed to be given, no justification needed to be offered to the Supreme Court, the watch-dog of the Constitution and democracy – not even to the people, who had voted in all those MPs, like the President himself. All because the people elected the President in a direct election while the Prime Minister was elected indirectly by Members of Parliament, who in turn were however elected by the people.
Democracy-defenders
Worse than this contradiction was/is the PR system, which ensured two things. One, given the Sri Lankan/Sinhala political reality, no single party could form a government on its own, nor could any leader get himself identified as an acceptable prime minister nominee of a majority group, whose choice the President of the day could not veto. In the case of President Sirisena, even during the run-up to the 2015 parliamentary polls, he went around declaring that he would not nominate predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa for Prime Minister even when the latter was the chief campaigner of their SLFP partner in the ‘national unity’ government. That was even if the SLFP-UPFA combine won most number of seats and the MPs elected Rajapaksa as their choice for Prime Minister.
Rajapaksa in his time, so did Executive Presidents before him, had played the same game. Even while selecting Ranil Wickremesinghe was made Prime Minister on the evening, President Sirisena did so, no questions asked. But if his camp thinks that the Executive President can do as he wished, it actually was not to be. After becoming President, Sirisena could at best have dissolved Parliament that very evening under the powers vested in him in the pre-19-A era, but he did something entirely different, and none of the self-styled ‘democracy-defenders’ in the country and outside even winked their eyes in disbelief.
In neighbouring India, the world’s largest democracy, the Supreme Court through a 1971 verdict (U N R Rao vs Indira Gandhi) ruled against the President in the Westminster dispensation, sack the Prime Minister and continue without the ‘aid and advice’ of the Council of Ministers. Since then, more than once has the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of the bicameral Parliament, been dissolved at the advice of the Cabinet headed by the Prime Minister, whose team would continue as lame-duck in practice but with all constitutionally-vested powers otherwise, though only on paper – until after the next elections.
In Sri Lanka, 19-A was a half-way mark, however belated, as it ensured that the President could sack the Government and Parliament at whim only six months before elections are due. This concession possibly owed to the reality that anyway elections are due and let not the ‘unity government’ upset the political apple-cart and egos more than immediately required. That is a saving clause that Ranil might have written into 19-A but Maithiri overlooked, knowingly or otherwise.
Political buffoonery
It is possible both Maithiri and Ranil did not foresee the possibilities that they now find themselves in right now. They thought with Elections-2015, the Rajapaksas were gone for good, and they had the whole field to themselves to bicker around like school kids. Such short-sightedness, which did not provide for Mahinda’s ruggedness, among others, meant that they were targeting each other almost from day one, leaving the other one to his own ways – and means. Rajapaksa derived his strength from the Sinhala masses, unlike the duo, especially Maithiri, whose strength flowed from international support even before Elections-2015 and the surprise-element that might have shocked the Rajapaksas too.
But when the chips were/are down, Rajapaksas, especially Mahinda is back where he was, at the centre-stage of national politics. The message of LG polls is clear: You can defeat or lose to Mahinda, but you cannot ignore him. It is again a dictatorial trait that the voters should have resisted in doing, but then, they cannot be blamed either. The choice was between hourly buffoonery and political stability. They wanted less of the former more than more of the latter.
For now Mahinda is playing his cards close to his chest. He also seems to understand and acknowledge that the President Sirisena does not have powers to sack Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, and put him in that place, instead – if at all there is any truth in such reports. He may also be aware of the possibilities of the Supreme Court striking down such a construct, unlike in 2015 when the election was for the presidency, not for local governments – which in turn does not have a direct bearing on the political administration of the Sri Lankan State.
Mahinda also seems to have concluded that he could not make do with the present state of political flux, where he could form a government with the defectors who had left him in 2015 and more from the UNP and the rest, who might settle for plum posts or promises of another electoral victory, with his charisma intact. But the price of such instability, the like of which he too had experienced immediately after becoming President in 2005, until the fortune of the war favoured his leadership, would be costlier than in 2015. Hence possibly, his demand for fresh elections to Parliament, especially when the going is still good for him, but here again, no one has any powers to dissolve the elected Parliament just now, under 19-A.
(The writer is Director of the Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. Email: sathiyam54@gmail.com)