Wednesday 18th June, 2025

The Opposition MPs, save a few, walked out of Parliament yesterday, claiming that the Speaker violated their constitutional right to have themselves heard in the House. The protesting MPs alleged that the Chair allowed the Chief Government Whip to speak freely while denying the Chief Opposition Whip and the Opposition Leader an opportunity to express their views on matters of national importance.

Leader of the House and Minister Bimal Rathnayake lashed out at some Opposition MPs for their misconduct, which, he said, was second only to that of the UPFA MPs who went berserk in Parliament in 2018, hurling chilli powder at their rivals. The Opposition has its share of troublemakers who do not act with decorum, but two wrongs do not make a right; silencing dissent is as deplorable as misbehaviour in the House.

Much has been written about the abuse of power and blatant violations of parliamentary privileges of the Opposition members under previous governments. In 2018, some of the Opposition notables who are currently pontificating about the virtues of democracy smashed up furniture in Parliament and even tried to assault the Speaker. The culprits should have been arrested and prosecuted for unleashing violence and destroying public property, a non-bailable offence. The media and civil society organisations campaigned hard to have those violent elements brought to justice, but in vain. There have been numerous other such instances where previous governments violated the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the Opposition MPs, who were even assaulted in full view of the media and schoolchildren in the public gallery. It is only natural that public anger welled up for decades and found expression in the 2022 uprising or Aragalaya, which paved the way for the JVP-led NPP’s meteoric rise to power last year.

People voted overwhelmingly for the NPP because they were desperate for a system transformation. But the NPP government is acting as though it considered its supermajority a divine right to do as it pleases in Parliament and elsewhere, and, above all, make its political opponents bend to its will.

Political power has on the wielders thereof the same effect as mind-controlling parasites on their hosts, if allowed to go to their heads. It is like a borrowed garment. It is the politicians blind to this reality who rule the country with the arrogance of an emperor, indulge in malpractices and suppress democratic dissent. They should learn from what has befallen former leaders and the likes of Mervyn Silva, who considered himself a warrior king reincarnate and flouted the law with wild abandon and total immunity while in power, knowing that he was shielded by his political masters. Now, he finds himself in the exalted company of other lawbreakers behind bars. There are lessons that politicians can learn from the predicament of former Ministers Keheliya Rambukwella, Mahindananda Aluthgamage, Nalin Fernando and S. M. Ranjith, and the bureaucrats behind bars for having cut corrupt deals together with politicians. A future government will surely order thorough probes into alleged transgressions under the incumbent administration, such as the questionable green-channelling of 323 red-flagged containers. The state officials who are allegedly queering the pitch for the Opposition parties in contests to elect the heads of the hung local councils will also have to face the consequences of their actions.

The NPP’s argument that the Opposition plays the victim in Parliament to gain public sympathy, and disrupts sittings to gain media attention is not untenable. The government is right in asking the Opposition Leader and the Chief Opposition Whip to keep their unruly MPs on a tight leash. Similarly, it ought to respect the constitutional rights and parliamentary privileges of the Opposition MPs and be different from the previous governments that were intoxicated. If it wants to gain public trust and arrest the erosion of its vote bank, it should be the change it promised to usher in.

Tuesday 17th June, 2025

The battle for control of the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) is over. It was a foregone conclusion that the SJB and its allies would not be able to slam the brakes on the NPP juggernaut in Colombo. NPP councillor, Vraie Cally Balthazaar, was elected Colombo Mayor yesterday. She received 61 votes while Riza Zarook of the SJB polled 54 votes. Her election was preceded by a row over how the election should be conducted—by a show of hands or a secret ballot. The NPP asked for a secret ballot, but the Opposition pushed for an open vote; the former prevailed amidst protests from the Opposition. Western Province Local Government Commissioner Sarangika Jayasundara, who presided over the election, decided on a secret ballot. The protesters gave in.

The most democratic way to set about electing the Colombo Mayor—or any other local council head for that matter—would have been to allow the councillors to decide, by a show of hands or a voice vote, whether the election should be conducted by secret vote or otherwise. An open vote allows the public to see whom the councillors accused of having taken bribes vote for.

Interestingly, before the 06 May local government polls, the NPP leaders including President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya vehemently condemned all candidates other than those representing the NPP as rogues who did not deserve to represent the public. Therefore, there is no way the NPP can deny that it enlisted the support of some of those ‘rogues’ to seize control of the CMC as well as other hung local councils though secret votes helped prevent the identities of the non-NPP councillors who voted with it being revealed.

Unfortunate as the showdown in the CMC was, it had a positive side. It made the government and the Opposition lay bare their true faces. Both the NPP and the SJB shamelessly made about-turns on their pre-election declarations that they would not join forces with others to secure control of local councils. But they resorted to horse-trading to gain control of as many as 178 hung councils. They accused each other of bribing councillors holding the balance of power. What their flip-flops signify is that they have no qualms about letting their much-flaunted moral scruples, principles and commitment to democratic best practices fall by the wayside when they safeguard their interests.

The SJB ought to realise that deal-making is no substitute for hard work in regaining popular support and recovering lost ground to win future elections. It has to conduct a vigorous grassroots level campaign; its strategy lacks initiation and engagement at the community-based tier of the polity, where the NPP is still strong, especially in the urban sector though its popularity is on the wane, as evident from the outcome of last month’s mini polls. The SJB has a long way to go before it gains wider recognition as an outfit capable of governing the country. First of all, it should resolve its internal disputes.

It is not prudent for the Opposition to seek shortcuts to power. Anomalies could occur in electoral politics, benefiting some parties and politicians in the political wilderness, due to widespread public resentment at the governments in power and aggressive social media campaigns which are far from organic and backed by algorithmic manipulation and intense click-farm activity. The regime changes in 2015, 2019 and 2024 may serve as examples. Gaining power is one thing but living up to the people’s expectations is quite another.

Ideally, the SJB and others should have allowed the NPP to run the hung councils where it secured pluralities, instead of making use of some legal provisions to manufacture majorities. The NPP is also not without blame for this situation; it has proved that magnanimity is not a trait it possesses.

Manufactured majorities may help political parties achieve their short-term objectives, but they do not help win popular elections. In 2018, the UNP-led UNF retained a parliamentary majority and scuttled President Maithripala Sirisena’s efforts to oust it and dissolve Parliament, but the UNP suffered a humiliating defeat in the 2020 general election, where it was left with only a single National List slot. The SLPP managed to secure the election of Ranil Wickremesinghe as President in 2022 and retain a majority, but it was reduced to three seats in the 2024 general election.

The mixed representation system, under which the LG polls are held, has some serious flaws, which need to be rectified. However, the political parties and their leaders should also be blamed for the unholy mess the LG system finds itself. They lack maturity and commitment to democratic best practices. The need for a conciliatory political culture cannot be overstated.

The question is whether the government and the Opposition can be expected to bring about national reconciliation when they cannot so much as adopt a conciliatory approach to running the hung local government institutions in the best interests of the public.

Monday 16th June, 2025

Archbishop of Colombo Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith can be proud of many achievements; yet one key mission remains unfulfilled—his endeavour to secure justice for the victims of the Easter Sunday carnage. During a service at St. Anthony’s Shrine, Kochchikade, on Thursday, he expressed disappointment with the incumbent government’s failure to fulfil its pledge to have justice served to the victims of the 2019 terror attacks. He lamented that a slew of recommendations made by the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI), which probed the Easter Sunday terror attacks, had gone unimplemented. He criticised the Attorney General’s Department for not implementing the PCoI recommendation that legal action be instituted against a former President and some police and intelligence officers for their negligence.

The Archbishop’s disappointment is understandable. Ably assisted by others, he led a successful campaign to prevent a bloody backlash following the Easter Sunday terror attacks, which claimed over 270 lives and left hundreds of others injured. Appealing for restraint, he made a solemn pledge to ensure that justice would be served expeditiously. Six years have elapsed and we have had three governments and four Presidents since the carnage that shook the world. The SLPP came to power, promising justice to the victims of the terror attacks. So did the NPP. Those promises stood both parties in good stead electorally in 2019 and in 2024 respectively. The NPP is lucky that Cardinal Ranjith did not slam it in the run-up to the 06 May local government elections.

Sri Lankan politicians are very ‘promising’. They are apparently adept at only one thing— making promises. They have turned elections into promise-making contests. One may recall how the SLFP-led United Front promised ‘rice from the moon’, of all places, and garnered favour with the rice-loving electorate to win the 1970 general election. In 1977, the UNP promised a righteous society, but after being ensconced in power, it had a notorious killer and rapist given a presidential pardon and released from jail and resorted to barbaric violence to retain its hold on power.

Isms that Sri Lankan politicians profess may be different, ideologically and politically, but there is one particular ism that serves as a common denominator of all of them—their adherence to Machiavellianism. Their guiding principle appears to be that ‘the promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present’. So, it is not surprising that the SLPP reneged on its promise to Cardinal Ranjith, and the NPP has done likewise.

It has been alleged that the SLPP government delayed investigations into the Easter Sunday attacks as it wanted to cover up some military intelligence officers’ links to the terrorists who carried them out. Those who were seeking justice for the terror victims pinned their hopes on the NPP. But the Public Security Ministry and the CID are now under the influence of two former police officers who were at the helm of the CID at the time of the Easter Sunday attacks and faced allegations of failure to act on warnings of impending terror strikes in 2019; these officers were catapulted to their current high-level positions because they are prominent members of the NPP’s Retired Police Collective. So, the integrity of the CID probe into the Easter Sunday carnage is already compromised, as we have argued in a previous comment.

It is doubtful whether even the main Opposition party, the SJB, will go all out to have the Easter Sunday carnage thoroughly probed in case of being able to form a government, for its seniors were in the Yahapalana government, which the PCoI has held accountable for the tragedy. “The dysfunctional Government was a major contributory factor for the events that took place on 21st April 2019. The Government including President Sirisena and Prime Minister is accountable for the tragedy” (PCoI Report, pp. 470-471). The JVP backed that UNP-led administration to the hilt by helping it retain a working majority in Parliament.

Thus, having justice served to the Easter Sunday carnage victims, with the help of politicians and political parties, will remain an extremely uphill task. It looks as if the seekers of justice were left with no alternative but to rally the public to accomplish their mission.