Draining Diyawanna swamp

Thursday 21st November, 2024

The JVP added Sinhala slang, jilmaat, meaning trickery, to Sri Lanka’s political lexicon, after the 2010 presidential election; it claimed that the then President Mahinda Rajapaksa had secured a second term by means of a computer jilmaat, but it could not prove that allegation. However, there have been numerous instances of legislative and constitutional jilmaat in this country, and they are responsible for the rapid rise of anti-politics. Veteran leftist and former Cabinet Minister D. E. W. Gunasekera has, in a brief interview with The Island, pointed out how a questionable constitutional amendment has been gnawing away at public trust in the electoral process since 1989.

A report in this newspaper yesterday quoted DEW as having said that the 14th Amendment, which inserted Article 99A into the Constitution, in 1988, providing for the appointment of defeated candidates as National List (NL) MPs, was different from the original Bill approved by a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC). He has said the then Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa, who headed the PSC at issue, himself revealed that fact during a parliamentary debate, but no remedial action was taken.

The deplorable practice of appointing defeated candidates to Parliament is violative of the people’s franchise, and a Bill containing such provision would not have survived judicial scrutiny, and therefore it is possible that the J. R. Jayewardene government resorted to some constitutional jilmaat to secure the passage of the 14th Amendment with the questionable section.

No government has cared to amend Article 99A in spite of their much-avowed commitment to democratic best practices. All political parties have shamelessly used this constitutional provision to smuggle in defeated candidates into Parliament. As long as Article 99A remains unchanged, it will not be possible for the people to get rid of any MP by defeating him/ her in a general election if he/she is in the good books of his/her party leader and his/her party polls enough votes to secure NL slots. Even the JVP-led NPP, which pontificates ad nauseam about democracy, morals and ethics, has appointed defeated candidates as NL MPs. Two of its 159 members in the new Parliament are candidates rejected by the people in last week’s election. The New Democratic Front is embroiled in a dispute over its two NL slots which a large number of its defeated candidates are said to be eyeing.

It is also possible for political party leaders to engineer NL vacancies to appoint anyone of their choice as an MP owing to Section 64 (5) of the Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Act passed in 1988. All political parties have made use of this despicable legal provision to make NL appointments. Such reprehensible laws have come to stay because once they are ratified by Parliament, they become faits accomplis owing to the absence of legal provision for the post-enactment judicial review of legislation, the need for which cannot be overstated in a country like Sri Lanka, where governments do not respect even the entrenched clauses in the Constitution. It may be recalled that in January 2024, the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government, which bulldozed its way through, arbitrarily declared that its draconian Online Safety Bill had been passed amidst a noisy protest in the House. In 2017, the Provincial Council Elections (Amendment) Bill was passed in a questionable manner, with some sections incorporated into it at the committee stage to postpone the PC polls on the pretext of increasing female representation. It was a typical Christmas Tree Bill, which was substantially different from the Bill gazetted, tabled in Parliament and examined by the Supreme Court. Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, all political parties represented in Parliament at the time voted for that bad Bill, enabling its passage with a two-thirds majority!

The onerous task of draining the Diyawanna swamp, which the NPP has undertaken to perform, should not be limited to ridding the legislature of undesirables; Parliament must also be made to right the wrongs it has committed under previous governments if public trust therein is to be restored. Let the NPP government be urged to use its supermajority to amend Article 99A and Section 64 (5) of the Parliament Election Act as a national priority to prevent the appointment of defeated candidates and those who are neither unsuccessful candidates nor NL nominees as MPs. Similarly, urgent action should be taken to enable the post-enactment judicial review of legislation. That is the least the self-righteous JVP/NPP leaders can do to atone for the sin of having appointed defeated candidates as NL MPs. No clean-up of Parliament will be complete unless the new government takes action to safeguard the people’s franchise, which is the bedrock of democracy.