Wednesday 26th March, 2025

The Opposition has taken umbrage at President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s talkathon, as it were, in Parliament last Friday, when the final vote on Budget 2025 was held. Some SJB MPs have claimed that the Chair had their microphones switched off so that the President could hold forth uninterrupted, and he used the budget as an excuse for haranguing the House. The government MPs have sought to counter this argument. They insist that President Dissanayake, as the Minister of Finance, only exercised his constitutional right to address the House on the final day of the budget, and there was nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

There have been numerous instances where the legislature became a captive audience for the Executive Presidents—and even loquacious Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders. Sri Lankan politicians have a propensity to talk nineteen to the dozen just to hear their own voice. However, there is more to the recurrent argy-bargy over presidential grandstanding in Parliament than the Opposition’s aversion thereto; the tendency of the Executive Presidents to subject the legislature to their loquacity can also be seen as symptomatic of the erosion of the separation of powers.

What has fuelled the ongoing campaign for the abolition of the executive presidency is that the Presidents tend to act like harum-scarum private bus drivers when they have control over Parliament. They tend to bulldoze their way through. The situation becomes even worse when the Presidents’ parties happen to have supermajorities in Parliament.

The Executive Presidents are compelled to act with some restraint when parties other than their own gain control over the legislature, as evidenced by the experiences of President D. B. Wijetunga from August to November 1994, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga from 2001 to 2004, and President Maithripala Sirisena from October 2018 to November 2019. Presidents J. R. Jayewardene, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, by virtue of being the leaders of the ruling parties with supermajorities, reduced the Legislature to a mere appendage of the Executive. President Ranasinghe Premadasa also did likewise although his party did not have a two-thirds majority in Parliament. This unwholesome practice has continued over the years without a hiatus.

The constitutional requirement that the Executive Presidents attend Parliament once every three months, along with their power to address the legislature and hold Cabinet portfolios, has enabled them to dominate—if not undermine—the legislature. Some Presidents have leveraged their power to address Parliament to project their authority and overshadow legislators. One may recall that the last Parliament had the then President Ranil Wickremesinghe walking in, making speeches, and even asking some Opposition MPs to shut up.

The JVP, a bitter critic of the executive presidency, has pledged to abolish it. Its leaders made their support for Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2004 presidential race conditional to his pledge to scrap the executive presidency. He, true to form, reneged on his promise. The JVP was also instrumental in having the 17th Amendment and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution introduced to curtail the powers of the Executive President. The 21st Amendment, which did away with some of the presidential powers, restored by the 20th Amendment, was also introduced partly due to JVP’s pressure exerted through Aragalaya (2022). Unfortunately, the Constitutional Council, which was created to fetter the excessive executive powers of the President, has become a rubber stamp for the Executive.

Today, the JVP has a two-thirds majority in Parliament and boasts of having expanded its support base across the country. Curiously, not much is heard about its pledge to abolish the executive presidency.

During an interview with the government-controlled ITN, on 04 Dec., 2024, in answer to a question about the JVP’s promise to scrap the executive presidency, JVP Central Committee member, legal advisor and Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala, said that the JVP/NPP leaders would not be able to conduct another presidential election campaign ‘with their clothes on’ as they had pledged to abolish the executive presidency on a priority basis.

Whether the JVP/NPP leaders will care to carry out their promise to abolish the executive presidency expeditiously or make another Machiavellian about-turn and conduct their party’s next presidential election campaign—with or without their clothes on—remains to be seen. What they should do urgently is to ensure that the President not only respects the doctrine of the separation of powers but also is seen to do so by refraining from subjecting Parliament to boastful bluster and snide remarks. They laid into the previous Presidents for haranguing Parliament, didn’t they?

Tuesday 25th March, 2025

The JVP/NPP government is still upbeat about the passage of its maiden budget with an unprecedented majority of 159 votes. That was no mean achievement, but everybody knew that the ayes would have it. Euphoria invariably gives way to the sobering reality in politics. A serious problem is already looming on the horizon.

The harvesting of Maha season paddy is drawing to a close. It was forecast that the country would be able to produce about 2.9 million MT of paddy during the 2024/2025 Maha season, but the harvest has dropped to about 2.4 million MT, according to Minister of Trade Wasantha Samarasinghe, who told Parliament the other day that the government would not hesitate to import rice, if necessary.

The sharp drop in the Maha paddy harvest is mainly due to floods in rice-growing areas. The government pledged that the Paddy Marketing Board would purchase about 300,000 MT of paddy to build a buffer stock to make market interventions, if necessary, but it could buy only 60 MT of paddy, according to media reports. Paddy farmers’ associations and agricultural experts are warning that rice prices are likely to increase further during the upcoming festive season, and the country will experience a rice shortage towards August 2025. When the government failed to make large-scale millers release adequate rice stocks to the market, last year, it opted for imports, but its leaders thundered in Parliament that they would never import rice again after the 2024/2025 Maha paddy harvest!

Rice, which is also a cultural staple in this part of the world, plays a significant role in Sri Lankan politics, as is public knowledge. The possibility of a rice shortage must therefore be a disconcerting proposition for the JVP/NPP government, with about six weeks to go before the local government elections. All signs are that the much-delayed Provincial Council elections, too, will have to be held either towards the end of this year or in early 2026. The government will have to ensure that rice is freely available at affordable prices.

Having come into being in the mid-1960s, the JVP rose to national prominence circa 1970 by taking on Dudley Senanayake’s government, which it condemned as a US puppet. Claiming that the CIA was planning to keep that administration in power regardless of the outcome of the general election to be held in 1970, the JVP closed ranks with the SLFP-led United Front led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike and urged the public to give that alliance a supermajority to defeat what it called a CIA conspiracy. The UF won a two-thirds majority. One of the main reasons for the fall of that UNP government was a reduction in the rice subsidy. (The following year, the JVP took up arms against the UF government!)

Five and a half decades on, the JVP is in power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament. It is now eating out of Uncle Sam’s hand! Dudley Senanayake is long dead, but the JVP has another Dudley to contend with, and rice has become an election issue again.

Several farmers’ associations which threw their weight behind the JVP/NPP, helping make last year’s regime change possible, are now on the warpath. They are of the view that the government, in spite of its rhetoric, will continue to be at the mercy of the rice millers’ cartel led by Dudley Sirisena, who, they say, is running a kind of parallel government together with other powerful millers capable of making political leaders bend to their will.

Unlike in 1970, when the JVP went all out to defeat Dudley of Mirigama to help install a government led by the SLFP, today, it has had to tame Dudley of Polonnaruwa for its own sake; it has its work cut out, for the rice Mafia has prevailed over successive governments and humbled even those who take pride in having defeated the LTTE.

Deshabandu Tennekoon, the suspended Inspector General of Police, surrendered to the Matara Magistrate last Wednesday after leading the force he once headed on a merry chase for some 20 days, resulting in a lot of egg on the face of the police. He did so after unsuccessfully moving Court of Appeal earlier in the week seeking a writ order to prevent his arrest. This was obviously a last ditch attempt which failed. No doubt fearing that he could not hide for ever, Tennekoon turned up at the court house early on Wednesday morning, reportedly in a Benz car although there is no confirmation of that, staying in the court room until his case was taken up later in the day.

Although we believe the police could have arrested him when he turned up in court, as is known to have been done in the past, that did not happen. Tennekoon would have no doubt been prepared for such an eventuality. The prosecutor went on record that the fugitive should have been in a holding cell rather than seated in the open court room. At the end of the day he was remanded till April 3 and taken away to the Angunukolapelessa jail under special escort by the prison authorities who have been directed to ensure his safety in custody. This is an obvious precaution given the suspect’s notoriety and it was not long ago that a suspect was shot dead as he stood on a courtroom dock. Also, many grudges are known to have been settled in jail in the past.

Deshabandu Tennekoon is not the only high profile fugitive who has recently evaded the long arm of the law. Readers will no doubt remember that the woman accomplice, disguised as a lawyer, who smuggled in the firearm used in the recent court room killing in a hollowed out copy of the Criminal Procedure Code, is not yet in custody although an attractive reward for finding her has been offered. Notably no such inducement was offered by law enforcers for the arrest of their fugitive chief. But a lot else has been done in searching his home where some 795 bottles of foreign liquor and 214 bottles of wine had been found. These salacious details were presented to parliament last week by Public Security Minister Ananda Wijeypala who is the political authority responsible for the police. Since we are now into a New Year and Christmas was only recently past, Tennekoon probably received these as gifts which are customary in this season particularly to those holding high office and others who can do favours. The minister, no doubt, derived much satisfaction in revealing these details to parliament just as much as his cabinet colleagues have relished exposing misdoings of predecessor governments during the ongoing committee stage on the 2025 budget debate.

It is not unusual for police to take family members of wanted suspects as hostages until the quarry is either arrested or surrenders. This was not done in Tennekoon’s case although his family had been questioned about his whereabouts. Also there have been other past instances of high profile wanted suspects evading arrest for much longer periods than the suspended IGP. One such was Rear Admiral Royce de Mel, a former commander of the then Royal Ceylon Navy, who was wanted in connection with the abortive 1962 coup d’etat. De Mel successfully evaded arrest for several weeks before he was surrendered to the specially created trial-at-bar that tried the accused by his counsel, GG Ponnambalam Q.C. Many years after de Mel’s death, details of where he hid in a remote plantation bungalow were published in the media.

While Tennekoon was in hiding, there were threats of confiscation of his property and punishment to those who helped him were made although it was not clear whether such measures were enforceable or not. The public will now have to await the unraveling of the usually prolonged legal process before being able to see where this matter will eventually end. But it is patently clear that Deshabndu Tennekoon’s was a rank bad appointment to the position of IGP. He had been found guilty of torture by the supreme court in December, 2023 in what was described as a “historic judgment” where it was held that he was “personally responsible” for acts of torture against a suspect in custody. Before this judgment there were other allegations of his being complicit in attacking peaceful protests and making death threats to journalists and much more.

Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe resisted appointing Tennekoon as IGP extending the tenure of his predecessor, CD Wickremeratne for three month periods several times before he caved into demands by a Tennekoon patron before finally making the appointment. But this also necessitated some sleight of hand at the Constitutional Council (CC) which had to approve the appointment. Then Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardene counted the votes of two absent members of the CC as noes (rather than absent) against Tennekoon declared a tie and then registered his own casting vote to record approval.

This demonstrated that even the checks and balances safety mechanism of the CC has been aborted for a clearly bad appointment to be made. It is to be hoped that such unfortunate situations will not be allowed to arise in the future.