by Rajan Philips

If President AKD’s inaugural Policy Statement at the opening of parliament 10 days ago was mellifluous in its delivery, it was also meticulous in detail, and sweeping in its themes and vistas. He literally spoke with words and numbers effortlessly flowing, but without notes or the help of the teleprompter even though he had the text in front of him. It was not soaring oratory but captivating eloquence. More like NM in English; and Bernard Soysa, given the pirivena roots of his education, in both Sinhala and English. Yet as an old Peradeniya friend of mine told me last week, what NM couldn’t do AKD has done. And in more ways than one.

The subtitles in the English text of the Policy Statement are quite revelatory. The middle of the speech, taking nearly half its length, is all about the economy. Naturally so and the economic themes and content are indicative of both the government’s approach to stabilizing and growing the economy, and the President’s studiousness in mastering the file. There is no other practical alternative to abiding by the agreements with the IMF entered into by the previous government, while looking for better agreements in what is left of debt restructuring and, more importantly, for restructuring the economy on a sustainable growth path.

Those who are chiding the government for going along with the IMF would also have been the first people to lambaste it for radical irresponsibility if it had chosen to repudiate the agreement. There are still uncertainties and challenges ahead, but as I wrote last week, there could not have been a better political start for the post Ranil-Rajapaksa era than what is being initiated by President AKD and his NPP government.

The start is even more impressive when one looks at the President’s thematic assertions on giving no room for racism and on building national unity; accepting a multi-party system, restoring the dignity of parliament and building a democratic state; and reforming the public service, affirming the rule of law, and delivering justice to victims of crime no matter who the perpetrators of crimes are. Somewhat of a mundane theme amidst all the lofty ones is about cleaning Sri Lanka. Mundane, but a very crucial and long overdue cleaning initiative.

There are those who are ready to smirk at what they see as the JVP’s fatefulness in having to uphold and abide by a political system that it once strove to overthrow. But such self-amusements are rather superficial, for the real irony is that the JVP is now having to save and stabilize not only the economy but also the political system both of which were undone by the same forces that once unleashed state violence to protect them from the JVP. Equally, there is no need for the JVP to show its democratic credentials to anyone in the west when western democracies are electing the real antichrists of democracy such as Donald J. Trump.

What is strikingly unique about these themes and their contents are their sincerity and seriousness that should be apparent to anyone who would view President AKD’s Policy Statement in a historical perspective and in comparison to presidential declarations and statements that we have had to suffer through in the last 20 years.

No Room for Racism

Of all the themes that President AKD touched on in his Policy Statement, the most path breaking thrust is in the commitment to end racism in Sri Lanka. It needs to be said that Sri Lankans – Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians, do not belong to different races in the biological sense. That race is a social construct and not a biological reality is now universally accepted except for flat-earth counterparts in social studies.

In Sri Lanka, the tradition of identifying Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims, not to mention the castes among the former two, as different races was conclusively put to rest, at least among social scientists and progressive activists, by the path breaking 1979 seminar on “Ethnicity and Social Change in Sri Lanka” organized by the Social Scientists Association. Kudos for that belongs exclusively to Kumari Jayawardena and Charles Abeysekera.

Yet the term race is commonly used to describe the two (Sinhala and Tamil) linguistic groups and the two religious (Moors and Malays) groups. Especially in the Sinhala and Tamil languages in which the same term(s) is used overlappingly to identify caste, ethnicity and race. Race and racism are also political terms that are universally used to describe and denounce discrimination based on differences of colour, place of origin, language and religion.

The President makes it clear that his assertion that there is no room for racism is really an accusation that there has been too much room for ‘racism’ for too long in Sri Lanka – in the shaping of the country’s political framework and its power structures “along regional, ethnic, or religious lines.” And he goes on “such political divisions inevitably resulted in growing alienation among communities.”

This is quite a perceptive understanding because in many political societies pre-existing social and cultural differences aggravated political conflicts between communities. In Sri Lanka, it has been the other way around. Ethnic differences over every aspect of politics led to a breakdown of relationships between communities. Political differences spanned the entire spectrum of the state and its responsibilities – on citizenship, language rights, representation, and access to land, employment and education.

And the President’s dialectic that racism provokes counter-racism, and “racism in one part feeds and strengthens nationalism in another,” brings to mind a rather combative version of the same sentiment by TULF leader A. Amirthalingam in his maiden speech in parliament, as a 29 year old Federal Party (ITAK) MP in 1956, that it is “communalism of the majority that begets communalism of the minority.”

President AKD is striking a remarkably conciliatory note, and without pointing fingers at this or that community he is drawing on the electoral sweep in which “all communities across all provinces have trusted us and granted us this power.” He is also firm in assuring that his government will not allow “a resurgence of divisive racist politics” or any “form of religious extremism to take root again in Sri Lanka.” And again that no one “will be allowed to use nationalist or religious rhetoric as a means to gain political power in this country.”

Flights of Oratory

Sri Lankan politics has seen flights of oratory extolling national unity and equality for the first 20 years after independence. SWRD Bandaranaike waxed eloquent at the State Council that contributed to JR Jayewardene’s original bill on the national languages being changed to include both Sinhala and Tamil as official languages. Even though he would repudiate the original arrangement as Prime Minister in 1956, SWRD was never unclear about what was needed for Sri Lanka’s unity.

He went poetic envisaging an island that would someday be a “painted ship on a painted ocean.” Colvin R de Silva was polemical and blunter in presaging that with two languages there would be one country, but with one only there could be two of them. NM was inflexible in his stance on the parity of languages, even though it may have cost the Left an election or two, but it held the country together as both Amirthalingam and AJ Wilson would later acknowledge in their obituaries of NM.

There was more of them in the late 1960s. GG Ponnambalam, the father of fifty-fifty, was sincere and genuine when he perorated in parliament that “through fair weather and foul, in sunshine and in rain, I have held aloft the ideal of a united Lanka.” In fact, “from Point Pedro to Point Dondra,” was Ponnambalam’s rhetorical rejoinder to what he called the peninsularity in the idea of Tamil federalism. To sum it up, at the 50th anniversary of Sri Lanka’s independence, President Chandrika Kumaratunga acknowledge on behalf of everyone that “we have failed in the essential task of nation building.”

Now there is a chance for the remaking of a broken nation. President Dissanayake seems convinced of the great opportunity he, his government and the new parliament have, and he seems determined to make good use of it. The rhetorical flourishes of the past were all sincere expressions of individual political leaders. But none of them drew on electoral support from every part of the country and could be backed by the power of the state to the extent that President AKD and the NPP now seem to have.

Put another way, what AKD and his gallant team are manifesting is an organic possibility and not a synthetic experiment. In the past, resolving the inter-ethnic or the national question was attempted primarily through top-down initiatives and consociational (relating to or denoting a political system formed by the cooperation of different social groups on the basis of shared power) agreements. Now the initiative is equally grass-root at the electoral level and committedly government-led at the state level. This new fusion has never been experienced before.

There is authenticity as well, but it is the authenticity of the progressive kind and not the chauvinistic variety of old. So, there is plenty of room for optimism. The prospects are not only pleasing, but those in power are also not vile. At the same time, there is no denying the pitfalls ahead even though there is none that is obvious now. For caution, just look at the fall of the United States of America. From the cloudy heights of post-racial America that Barak Obama briefly heralded to the racial pits of Donald Trump. Fortunately for Sri Lanka, it may be that the country has had its share of Trumps already and is now ready for a new beginning.

By Uditha Devapriya

In his address to parliament last Thursday, Sri Lankan president Anura Kumara Dissanayake called for a political culture free of racism and divisiveness. He said that democracy does not mean forcing everyone to unite under a single umbrella, but rather letting diverse viewpoints and ethnic interests flourish against the backdrop of multi-party politics. “We do not advocate for one-party rule,” he declared. “It is the responsibility of our government to represent and address the needs and aspirations of all citizens – regardless of whether they voted for us or not.”

There are things this government can and cannot do. In the realm of foreign policy particularly, it is constrained by factors far beyond its control. In terms of economic policies and reforms, too, it is not free to pick and choose. What we have seen in the last three months is a party demonized unfairly as left-wing, fringe, authoritarian, and communist positioning itself to the centre on issues like the IMF agreement. Yet as President Dissanayake’s meeting with the IMF last Monday shows, it is possible to negotiate for better terms within an existing agreement framework. The NPP has the mandate for this, and it seems willing to honour that mandate.

The NPP’s wins across all but one of Sri Lanka’s 22 electoral districts shows that it can go where previous governments have not. It can show that it is serious about reconciliation, without the half-baked rhetoric that governments both nationalist and reformist have touted for the last five or so decades. Here, of course, some caution is called for. The NPP’s victory in the north and east does not signal a post-racial moment or the end of the ethnic politics in Sri Lanka. As analysts have noted, ITAK’s defeat paved the way for other independent groups and candidates to emerge in these regions, many of whom hold hardline positions on issues like post-war justice and accountability. The NPP cannot ignore these.

And yet, it is evident that the old politics has been rejected, in both the south and north. While we have yet to see what drove the people of the north and east to vote in such large numbers for the NPP, they seem to have grown tired of the rhetoric of reconciliation that traditional parties parrot, whether in Jaffna or Colombo 7. We need to respond to these shifts accordingly, by approaching minority concerns from a radically different perspective – one which accounts for more concrete issues, what you and I could call “bread-and-butter problems.”

More than any other party, the NPP succeeded in linking popular calls against elite politics with socio-political demands. In the run-up to presidential elections in September, the Ranil Wickremesinghe government used statements by Kristalina Georgieva to show that it had done well on the economic front.

Almost like a mantra, supporters of Wickremesinghe stated that he had saved if not stabilized the economy – despite the slew of austerity measures his government imposed on vulnerable groups. That the NPP managed to galvanize opposition to the IMF agreement in terms of the elite’s complicity in such measures without calling for a complete exit from it shows how pragmatic it has become.

However, pragmatism can only take you so far. Like I said, there are things the government can and cannot do – things it should and should not do. People voted in large numbers for a change – in terms of removing the privileges granted to the elite, restoring welfare measures cut off by previous regimes, and searching for new partners and alliances globally, in light of a second Trump presidency. There are no shortcuts to these reforms. If they cannot be achieved overnight, they should be achieved as soon as possible. And people need to ensure they are.

Governing a country is different to winning an election. The NPP is perhaps the best example of how challenging it is to administer a system that has been captured by interest groups for so many decades. With more than 150 of its 159 MPs entering parliament for the first time, there is naturally an expectation that it will honour fundamental pledges made in relation to draconian and outdated laws. Three, in particular, were discussed and debated by opposition parties before elections: the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA), and the Online Safety Act (OSA).

As many commentators, even those critical of the NPP, have noted, it is unfair to expect miracles from a government that has been given the task of cleaning the parliament and the system overnight. Perhaps this explains why the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government failed so abysmally. People voted in large numbers for a man they saw as a complete outlier, a maverick they thought would achieve what they wanted overnight. Yet the then government merely took this as an excuse to push through bad policies and worse reforms. The NPP, fortunately, does not have this issue – its parliamentary group is almost completely occupied by newcomers who seemingly see, and frame, issues from a different perspective.

Yet as it goes about the difficult task of governing a country – a bankrupt economy that will have to start repaying its debts by 2027 – the NPP would do well to remember the promises it made in relation to these laws. The NPP – or rather, the JVP – has been at the receiving end of those laws for so long. It is not enough to backtrack on them once they get power.

Over the last few months, Sri Lanka has achieved many things. To mention just one, it has elected its first woman prime minister since 1994 – and that from outside the political Brahmin class. She is also the first prime minister in this country to hail from a social science background – specifically, anthropology. The parliament itself has several MPs from trade union and social science backgrounds. These are fields which question the existing social order, which seek to overturn if not improve it. It would be a pity if, having been elected to high office, they turn back on the same issues and concerns they were voted in to resolve. We cannot forget or trivialize that mandate. And it is essential we remind them of it.

Uditha Devapriya is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy think-tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk.

“The Prime Minister felt betrayed. She was embarrassed, bitter and angry. She was sensitive to Mrs. Gandhi’s feelings”

Excerpted from the autobiography of MDD Peiris, Secretary to the Prime Minister)

Mrs. Bandaranaike had an excellent grasp of foreign affairs. Foreign office veterans like Ambassadors Vernon Mendis, Arthur Basnayake and others would vouch for this. But Prime Ministers are extremely busy people, particularly when they also handled heavy Ministries such as Defence and Foreign Affairs, and Planning. When they sit down to three to four hours of concentrated work, in which time they deal with scores of files and hundreds of issues, they cannot be expected to be sensitive to every nuance.

That is why they need to be assisted by mature and highly competent staff work. This places an immense responsibility on the public service and it requires high quality team work from the service. One major slip can bring disaster, whereas sound and consistent work can correspondingly result in many benefits. There is also the fact that good governance requires an effective public service, whose collective experience and institutional memory should be tapped. In a changing political scenario, the role of a good public service is to provide stability and a degree of continuity.

In order to achieve this the public service must develop the capacity for high quality analysis and the selection of possible options based on this analysis. In the case of the important letter (to Mrs. Indira Gandhi mentioned last week) submitted for the Prime Minister’s signature that had not happened. She had been presented in a busy moment with just one choice. With a heap of another 40 to 50 files awaiting her attention; with other appointments and deadlines approaching; and with a substantial number of telephone calls distracting her attention and disturbing her concentration, it was not a surprise that the letter was signed.

At the level of the Prime Minister, and now the President, the consequences of shoddy work can be quite serious. That is why a partnership based on objectivity, competence, professionalism and trust is necessary between a public service of highly competent officials and the political leadership of the country. If such institutional arrangements are inadequate, or do not work, efficiency, effectiveness and opportunity will suffer and a country’s overall prospects will be diminished to that extent.

The discussions with India continued at official levels. They began sometime in 1973 when the Prime Minister was returning from a visit to Yugoslavia where she was taking treatment from time to time for a bad knee. On her return she had come via Delhi and met Mrs. Gandhi. There, at the political level two important decisions had been taken. An agreement was to be signed confirming Sri Lanka’s sovereignty of the island of Katchativu and also demarcating the maritime boundary between the two countries.

Furthermore, the two Prime Ministers had agreed to solve the question of the balance 150,000 of the people of Indian origin in Sri Lanka, on the basis of India absorbing 75,000 and their natural increase, and Sri Lanka, the balance 75,000 with their natural increase. The Prime Minister told me that because of sensitive domestic political reasons the Indian Prime Minister wanted this kept secret for a period of about six months.

In the meantime, two small selected groups, one in India and one in Sri Lanka were to liaise and draw up the maps, charts and legal documents to give effect to these decisions. The Prime Minister wanted WT Jayasinghe and me to handle matters on our side. She was not going to inform anybody else, certainly no one at the political level, not even her Cabinet. It was vital that nothing leaked out. WT and I set to work. His considerable expertise in Indo-Sri Lanka issues proved to be very useful.

As we proceeded, with the Prime Minister’s approval the Attorney General Victor Tennekoon Q.C. was brought into deal with the legal issues, and a relatively young Assistant Superintendent of Surveys Mr. Herath, was brought on board to handle the maps and charts that had to be drawn up to demarcate the maritime boundary. He was later to become Surveyor General. All were well briefed on the necessity for absolute secrecy.

WT occasionally visited India and a few Indian officials occasionally visited Sri Lanka on these matters. Our team had several meetings among ourselves to meticulously produce the varied drafts that were necessary. In due course, the date for the simultaneous signing of the agreements in Delhi and Colombo was fixed. There were to be two sets of originals. WT was to go to Delhi and have the documents signed by the Indian Prime Minister. Foreign Secretary Kewal Singh was to come to Colombo with the other set and get them signed by the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. This signing was to take place simultaneously in Colombo and Delhi at a given time during late morning.

I had been reminding the Prime Minister that the Cabinet had to be informed and their formal approval obtained for these agreements, and also that the President Mr. William Gopallawa had to be briefed. The President was briefed by her earlier, but she was going to inform the Cabinet only at 9 a.m. on the morning of the signing at a special Cabinet meeting called for this purpose. The arrangement between the two countries was that an official communique was to be released immediately after the signing, simultaneously in Delhi and Colombo.

The Indians were sensitive to any information leaking out before that. The Prime Minister in turn did not want to risk informing a large Cabinet of Ministers, about these developments until almost the last moment. Information on various matters had been leaking out from the Cabinet periodically, and she was aware of certain friendships between some of her Ministers and certain newspapermen. Therefore, she did not want to take a chance.

When WT went to Delhi with the documents, I became Acting Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Affairs. WT briefed me and said that the Indian Foreign Secretary would be coming after a stop over in Bangalore, by a special Indian Airforce flight at 11.00 in the night to the Ratmalana airport. He wanted me to personally meet the Foreign Secretary, put him in my car and take him personally to the suite booked for him at the Hotel (Ceylon) Intercontinental. He emphasized that I should do exactly as he had said and extend these courtesies because Kewal Singh and he enjoyed very good personal relations and that the Indian Foreign Secretary had been “most gracious” to him.

I therefore, followed his instructions to the letter. I was at Ratmalana airport on a dark night and greeted the Indian Foreign Secretary on his arrival. By that time I had informed the Acting High Commissioner for India of the travel arrangements for Mr. Kewal Singh in my car. The Indian High Commissioner had proceeded to Delhi for the signing. Everything went according to schedule, and I got back home during the early hours of the morning after leaving the Foreign Secretary in the hotel.

The next morning the Cabinet was called into session at very short notice. The Prime Minister had informed Alif the Cabinet Secretary, at something like 6 o’clock in the morning to summon the Cabinet at 9 a.m. Mr. Alif was naturally somewhat alarmed at this unexpected emergency meeting and had wanted to know what to tell the Ministers. The Prime Minister had merely said, that she would personally inform them when they met. A nonplussed Mr. Alif next telephoned me. In order to allay his anxiety, I could only tell him that the Prime Minister probably would be conveying some good news, but that beyond that I was unable to say anything.

The Cabinet duly met at 9 a.m. The announcement had been made amidst great jubilation. Special kiribath was served. The Cabinet passed a vote of appreciation and thanks on the Prime Minister’s achievement, and a few minutes before 10 a.m. the meeting was over. The signing was to be around 11.30 a.m. By about 10.45 a.m., I received a frantic call from WT in Delhi. Information about the agreements, the time of signing and various other details were coming over the Press Trust of India telex machines from Colombo!

A distressed WT was asking me, how in these circumstances, he was going to face Mrs. Gandhi! This was greatly shocking. Extremely sensitive and important issues that had been kept absolutely secret by the Prime Minister and by a maximum of about five or six public servants for well over a year, whilst actually working on the subjects were out in public and had reached New Delhi within half an hour of a Cabinet meeting. The Prime Minister felt betrayed. She was embarrassed, bitter and angry. She was sensitive to Mrs. Gandhi’s feelings.

We were quite depressed. I was particularly distressed at the unenviable and embarrassing position WT was in Delhi. But the damage was done. The only saving grace was the sympathetic understanding of Foreign Secretary Kewal Singh in Colombo, and as WT related later, the magnanimity of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in Delhi. Mrs. Bandaranaike took quite a while to get over what was to her, a nasty experience.

The year 1975 was a busy and significant. In January, The Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies was inaugurated. This Centre which was to focus on all aspects of international studies, including international law; international economics; elements of diplomacy and foreign languages was named after Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike. The inaugural lecture was given by the distinguished Indian Civil Servant and Diplomat Shri KPS. Menon.

Abolition of the Sri Lanka Overseas Service under “any other business” triggered a case of apoplexy.

It was during the first half of 1975 that the Cabinet took a most astonishing decision. I was not aware of it until the Director General of Foreign Affairs, Vernon Mendis suddenly burst into my room. When I looked at his face, I instantly understood what apoplexy looked like. Vernon was red in the face and almost incoherent. Speech was clearly difficult, and this was alarming in the case of one who was usually fluent of expression and grand and sweeping in style, a style in fact which seemed to irritate some.

I asked him to sit. But he wouldn’t. He was too agitated for that. Once he was capable of rational discourse he asked me “Do you know, that the Cabinet has abolished the Sri Lanka Overseas Service under “Any other business?” It was now my turn to be struck dumb. I couldn’t believe it. Vernon assured me it was true and thought that Tissa Wijeratne was behind it. Vernon’s information was that some LSSP ministers had raised the issue, that it was not necessary to have two services, an administrative service and an overseas service, and that officers should be able to move between the two services. This was thought to be beneficent to both services in that selected officers of both, would be exposed both to domestic and foreign issues and experience thereby deepening the maturity and skills of the senior public service as a whole.

After further discussions, the Cabinet had decided to abolish the overseas service. It was also believed that this result was achieved through canvassing by certain well placed members of the administrative service who had political connections. The charge was that they were seeking a short cut to foreign travel and foreign assignments in a climate of stringent foreign exchange restrictions and severely curtailed opportunities for travel abroad.

Whatever the truth or otherwise of all these, it was a decision seriously detrimental to the conduct of our foreign relations and over time an end to the specialization and expertise built-up in the Foreign Ministry through several decades. It would also have opened us to a degree of international ridicule. There were undoubtedly, inefficient lazy and even venal officers in the overseas service. But such examples were not confined to the overseas service. In any case, if that was seen to be the problem, the remedy was not to abolish the entire service, but to deal with the deadwood.

Vernon, WT and I spoke to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet decision was rescinded. I told the Prime Minister that I was very surprised that this had happened at a time when she was both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. The decision however, had been taken at the tail end of a four hour Cabinet meeting when obviously the powers of concentration were seriously reduced, and the Ministers had succumbed to some ostensibly attractive arguments. During the course of my career I was to see other surprising decisions taken by other Cabinets under the agenda item “Any other business.” This item sometimes seemed to stimulate leaps of imagination unrelated to any basis in reality.

More apoplexy

Speaking of apoplexy, the other such episode I witnessed during this period related to Dr. Mackie Ratwatte. He too burst into my room, face on fire, and incoherent of expression. In the case of Mackie, it was all the more astonishing, because no one had imagined possibilities of such athletic energy in what was a sedate personality. What had set off the condition in this case was a young man, from the Prime Minister’s electorate of Attanagalla. He had been coming to see Dr. Ratwatte at least two or three times a week for months, begging to be placed in any kind of employment. At last Dr. Ratwatte had found a temporary job for him as a watcher at the Film Corporation.

Three days later, (the day on which Dr. Ratwatte came charging into my room,) the person had turned up and requested him to find him another job, complaining there were so many mosquitoes in the night in the Film Corporation premises that he could not sleep a wink! And this was supposed to be a watcher! Mere banishment of the delinquent from his presence was not sufficient for Mackie. He simply had to share his sense of outrage with someone. Hence his apoplectic presence before me. I had to stop all work and listen patiently to him until catharsis was achieved.