Democracy and hypocrisy

Thursday 3rd September, 2020

The SLPP government is under fire for having nominated a murder convict—Premalal Jayasekera—to contest last month’s general election. Those who re-elected him from the Ratnapura District and their eastern counterparts who elected TMVP leader S. Chandrakanthan, who has been charged with murder, from Batticaloa have drawn a lot of flak. Critics of the SLPP maintain that the government and those who enabled the aforesaid duo to become lawmakers have, jointly, dealt a body blow to democracy. One could not agree with them more; the government should have known better than to field an accused in a murder case as a candidate, and the people should not have voted for the lawbreakers in the fray.

But not all those who are screaming blue murder about the election of Pillayan and Jayasekera are genuinely concerned about the country’s democratic wellbeing; among them are some individuals who obviously act out of expediency rather than principle. They never so much as gave a whimper of protest when President Chandrika Kumaratunga offered the entire Northern Province to Velupillai Prabhakaran for a period of 10 years without elections despite all his crimes, in a bid to make peace with him. Had Kumaratunga succeeded in her endeavour, the man who gunned down Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiappah and perpetrated numerous heinous crimes thereafter would have controlled the North. Prabhakaran was responsible for eliminating many Tamil political leaders, assassinating President R. Premadasa and former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, recruiting child soldiers, suppressing political dissent violently, massacring civilians and bombing civilian targets. But some of the present-day champions of democracy did not condemn the TNA, which audaciously recognised Prabhakaran as the sole representative of the Tamil people and acted as the mouthpiece of the LTTE.

Some of those who are inveighing against Pillayan and Jayasekera and trying to protect democracy kept on urging Sri Lankan governments to talk peace with Prabhakaran, whom the LTTE declared both President and Prime Minister in the areas under its control, although he did not have representation even in a local government institution.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world, a battle is on to save democracy. Opposition activists in Belarus have vehemently rejected the outcome of last month’s presidential election. The European Union (EU) has refused to recognise Alexander Lukashenko as the President of Belarus; it claims that the presidential election was far from free and fair. The EU is right in having done so, given the suppression of the democratic rights of the Opposition activists in that country. But the European nations did not question the legitimacy of the J. R. Jayewardene government, here, which secured a second term by replacing a general election with a heavily rigged referendum, in 1982. The EU made a mockery of its commitment to protecting democracy by pressuring Sri Lanka to reach a power sharing agreement with Prabhakaran, who was sentenced to 200 years of imprisonment by the Colombo High Court, in 2002, for ordering the Central Bank bomb attack, which killed 76 people.

Former Norwegian special envoy, Erik Solheim, who strove to save the LTTE without success, has revealed that Prabhakaran himself ordered the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. But that did not deter him or his country from helping the LTTE gain legitimacy. Norway meted out the maximum possible punishment to the homicidal maniac, Andrew Berwick, who massacred over 70 civilians, mostly youth, in cold blood, in 2011. He was incarcerated for 21 years. Ironically, Norway did so, having brought immense pressure to bear on Sri Lanka to negotiate with a mass murderer; Berwick is only a baby in the world of crime in comparison to Prabhakaran.

The abominable practice of nominating persons charged with criminal offences or convicted criminals to contest elections must stop. It amounts to an endorsement of their criminal records to vote for them. The SLPP deserves the barbs it receives. The same goes for the SLPP and TMVP backers in Ratnapura and Batticaloa. Let it be added in the same breath that hypocrites and devious agents of extra-parliamentary forces, weeping buckets for democracy, are no better.