Vote for democracy

Wednesday 5th August, 2020

Sri Lanka goes to the polls, today, to elect a new Parliament. It is for the first time in the country’s electoral history that an election is held amidst a national health emergency. All polling and counting centres will be free from coronavirus, the Election Commission (EC) Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya has said. Director General of Health Services (DGHS) Dr. Anil Jasinghe has also given a similar assurance. The EC has, with the help of the health authorities, taken necessary precautions, and polling and counting centres are being disinfected. These measures are to be appreciated; voters and public officials on election duty do not have to fear health risks.

The EC, in its wisdom, chose to hold the election on Wednesday, and, as a result, the virus-hit economy has suffered another blow owing to the disruption of work in both public and private sector throughout the week. Since the EC Chairman and the DGHS are confident that voters and election officials are safe, the question is why the process of counting votes cannot commence immediately after all ballot boxes reach the counting centres, as has been the practice all these years?

The EC Chairman has said the fear being expressed in some quarters that ballot boxes may be switched is baseless. During the last four decades or so no such malpractices have taken places except during the District Development Council Elections (1981), the referendum (1982) and the North Western Provincial Council election (1999), he is reported to have said, warning that if any polling centre is affected by malpractices, all the votes polled therein will be rejected. However, it is only natural that the fear of polls rigging continues to haunt the public, given the sheer number of malpractice-ridden elections they have witnessed including the ones Deshapriya has mentioned.

Both presidential and parliamentary elections, in the late 1980s, were marred by violence and large-scale rigging, as is public knowledge. The JVP unleashed savage terrorism in a bid to sabotage the polls, with its sparrow units knifing and shooting voters; the then UNP government exploited the situation to stuff the ballot boxes and secure another term. The JVP, either wittingly or unwittingly, facilitated the election of President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1988. In so doing, JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera and his partners in crime made a fatal mistake; they were annihilated on President Premadasa’s watch, the following year. Prabhakaran and his fellow terrorists would make a similar blunder 17 years later; they ordered a boycott of the 2005 presidential election, and that move led to the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa as the President, and he had them eliminated. So, one can argue that both Wijeweera and Prabhakaran together with their confederates paid for the sin of disrupting elections with their own lives.

The results of the 1982 referendum and the elections marred by widespread violence and rigging should have been annulled and fresh polls held. The European Union polls observers have said, in their report on the 2004 general election, that what they witnessed during that electoral contest, in the North and the East, where the LTTE backed the TNA, was the antithesis of democracy. The election authorities did not have the courage to stand up to repressive regimes and the LTTE; they made a tremendous contribution to the perpetuation of electoral malpractices by recognising the outcome of the 1999 North Western Provincial Council election, where the then President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s backers chased away UNP polling agents and stuffed the ballot boxes in full view of the police.

Let the people be urged to go to polling centres as early as possible and exercise their franchise. Their active participation in the electoral process is a prerequisite for ensuring the wellbeing of democracy.