Chaotic House and moral compass

Tuesday 25th February, 2025

The JVP-led NPP government, to give credit where credit is due, has already set two examples worthy of emulation. It had Speaker Asoka Ranwala step down when he failed to prove his claim that he had a doctorate. It has also had the courage to take exception to some degrading remarks Deputy Minister Nalin Hewage made about SJB MP Rohini Wijerathna last week.

Chief Government Whip Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa promptly requested the Chair to expunge the offensive words from the Hansard when the SJB raised objections. NPP MP Kaushalya Ariayaratne condemned, in a Facebook post, what Hewage had said. Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya has also gone on record as stating that such remarks should not have been made. Way to go!

Hewage should have known better than to make such remarks, and there is no way he can justify them. Now that the government has expressed disapproval of his disparaging remarks, the matter should be considered closed. But the Opposition has a propensity to blow issues out of proportion to gain political mileage. Let its holier-than-thou members who lack control over their restless tongues and tend to lash out at female MPs at the drop of a hat be urged to follow the example set by the NPP. They ought to remember that nastier things have been said about female MPs in Parliament, which has also witnessed numerous brawls and even a savage attempt to assault and gherao the Speaker. The culprits got off scot-free. Thankfully, most of those rowdies are not in the current Parliament.

The UNP and the SLFP as well as their offshoots, the SJB and the SLPP, respectively, are without any moral right to condemn others for mistreating women. The UNP’s 17-year rule (1977-1994) began with a presidential pardon for a notorious rapist serving a jail. UNP politicians and their supporters also stripped female SLFP activists naked in public during the post-election violence spree in 1977. The SLFP, which produced the world’s first female Prime Minister, humiliated a group of female UNP activists in a similar manner in the run-up to the North-Western Provincial Council election in 1999.

Most of the Opposition MPs who have taken up the cudgels for Rohini’s rights—and rightly so—were in the previous Parliament, but they never so much as made a whimper of protest when MP Diana Gamage was vilified in the House. After crossing over to the government from the SJB, Diana had to suffer many indignities at the hands of some male SJB MPs who would spew out streams of suggestive remarks whenever she rose to speak in the House. She sought to get even with them, but hers was a futile effort like a badger’s fight against a pack of mastiffs.

We urge the party leaders to take up the issue of harassment of female MPs and rein in unruly elements in their parliamentary groups. This is the best way to clean up Parliament.

Meanwhile, the female members of the Provincial Councils and local government institutions were in a far worse predicament than the women MPs. Reams were written about the harassment of female local councillors, some of whom were even shouted down at council meetings. The situation became so bad that the victims sank their political differences and formed a front to fight for their rights.

Successive governments have striven to increase women’s representation in political institutions and made laws to achieve that end, but without much success. A quota has been introduced for women in the LG institutions. There is a pressing need for decisive action to safeguard their rights. This is something the NPP government should give serious thought to, with the next LG polls only a few weeks away. It ought to extend its Clean Sri Lankan initiative to keep the local councils to be elected in April free from harassment, sexual or otherwise. Other political parties which are making a public display of their commitment to protecting women’s rights, too, should assign high priority to the task of ensuring that LG institutions will have zero tolerance of the harassment and intimidation of female councillors.