National mourning for Q. E II? Ranil’s rupture with the republic

By DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

The unelected President of Sri Lanka has declared that the Sri Lankan, flag on all public buildings, will be lowered to half-mast as a mark of respect for Queen Elizabeth II of Britain who died at the age of 96. The President intends to declare a day, or days, of National Mourning, which will be notified later.

“President Ranil Wickremesinghe, on the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, has given directives to lower the national flag in all public buildings half-staff, the President’s Media Division (PMD) says.

The period of national mourning is expected to be announced subsequently, the PMD said further in a tweet.”

This is a travesty. It is a particularly grotesque travesty as Sri Lanka sees the 75th anniversary of its Independence on the horizon. It is quite appropriate for the President to send his condolences and, if possible, to attend the funeral. But to lower the national flag on state buildings? And to declare a day, or days, of National Mourning? He just has to be kidding.

In the first place, Queen Elizabeth is not our queen. In the second place, Sri Lanka is a Republic, which is the exact antipode of a monarchy. Since the Sri Lankan state is a republic, there is no call whatsoever for state buildings to lower the Sri Lankan national flag to half-mast in honour of the British Queen, or any monarch anywhere.

The Queen was and King Charles will be the sovereign of the United Kingdom. Monarchy anywhere and everywhere at any time in history, acknowledged the monarch as the sovereign. When the monarchy receded in history but was retained ceremonially, the monarch was not so much acknowledged but conceded to be the country’s sovereign. Whichever the case, the monarch was coterminous, even synonymous, with ‘the sovereign’.

In stark contradistinction, in a republic the people are sovereign. A republic is defined by the fact that sovereignty arises from and ultimately resides in the people: ‘res publica’. This is explicitly clear in every republican Constitution from that of the USA (“We the People”) to Sri Lanka.

Why should Sri Lanka, as a state, lower its National Flag and observe days of National Mourning on the occasion of the death of a foreign monarch? Why should it do so especially when the monarch in question is the sovereign of the country from which Sri Lanka wrested its Independence, the 75th anniversary of which it is about to celebrate?

Whatever sentiments we may have for the departed Queen Elizabeth, mourning is a private and at best a social matter. Except for the usual condolences, it is decidedly not a matter for the Sri Lankan State and nation.

Mine is not a private sentiment of a left-leaning political scientist. The question of the relationship or lack thereof, between Sri Lanka and the British monarchy was made explicitly clear at great length in 1972 during the promulgation of the first Republican Constitution of Sri Lanka.

To pull back a bit, in his Five Lectures, the JVP’s founder-leader Rohana Wijeweera pointed to the fact that Ceylon was still ruled by the Queen of the former colonial power, Britain, a fact which for him, was proof of the incomplete character of our Independence. Wijeweera in turn had been influenced by and built on the criticism leveled by the traditional left in 1948, that what we had obtained was an inauthentic Independence and had merely graduated from a colony to a neo-colony.

In the aftermath of the April 1971 Insurrection, it was noticed that the insurrectionists had to be tried for the offense of armed rebellion against ‘the Queen’, which was the law on the statute books. In his submissions during the Criminal Justice Commission trial, Wijeweera pointed that out. The grotesque anomaly was immediately noted by society at large and that realization accelerated the decision to convert to a republican form of state.

The very form in which Sri Lanka converted to a republic signaled the end of its political relationship with the British monarchy. The Constitutional process chose not to proceed by way of the previous Constitution, despite its many merits, as that was a product of colonialism, ruled by a monarchy to boot.

The 1972 Constitution chose to consciously rupture with the previous, pre-independence Constitution. It was a dual rupture: from a colonial product to a product of an independent country, and from the Constitutional acceptance of the British monarch as the head of State, the sovereign, of our state, to that of the sovereignty of the whole people of this island. Hence, an ‘autochthonous’ and Republican Constitution, through a rupture.

The rupture was to underscore the lack of continuity with even the nominal role of the British Crown. The umbilical cord was surgically severed. What President Wickremesinghe has chosen to do, by declaring the Sri Lankan National Flag to be flown at half-mast on State buildings and to observe a day or days of National Mourning, is to reverse the process, symbolically and psychologically.

Already, we have departed from the content and spirit of republicanism by virtue of the fact that we have an utterly unelected leader. He was unelected by the people to the presidency and unlike his predecessor DB Wijetunga, who assumed the presidency in mid-stream, serving out the rest of the assassinated President Premadasa’s term, he was unelected to Parliament in the first place. Now, we are going one step further, backwards not forward, in making the death of the British monarch with whom we consciously, constitutionally severed the Sri Lankan state, an occasion for state and national mourning.

While I find this shocking, none of this really surprises me. The so-called Silent Revolutions of 1956 and 1970 were propelled by a national notion that Independence did not feel complete; that the process of de-colonization was unfinished; that there still remained an unacceptably large overhang of British colonialism. No one exemplified the neocolonial profile more than did Sir John Kotelawala, chosen by a ruling elite (not popularly elected) shaken by the Hartal of August 1953– the First Aragalaya— and the resignation of the PM. The year after the Hartal, in 1954, he hosted Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ceylon. In 1955 he took the pro-Western line (actually that of John Foster Dulles) at the Bandung conference which was the zenith of anti-colonial Afro-Asianism, earning the local appellation ‘Bandung Booruwa’, the Donkey of Bandung.

In all this, Sir John’s advisor was Esmond Wickremesinghe, the father of President Ranil Wickremesinghe. As Prime Minister in 2001, Wickremesinghe had sought to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese colonial conquest, which was the cherry on the cake of his economic neoliberalism and appeasement of the fascist Tigers. The electorate evicted him and kept him out of office for 15 years. Now he’s back. As President. Truly, the apple does not fall far from the tree. The cycle is repeating itself and will end with a version of that earlier outcome.