Wednesday 26th March, 2025

The Opposition has taken umbrage at President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s talkathon, as it were, in Parliament last Friday, when the final vote on Budget 2025 was held. Some SJB MPs have claimed that the Chair had their microphones switched off so that the President could hold forth uninterrupted, and he used the budget as an excuse for haranguing the House. The government MPs have sought to counter this argument. They insist that President Dissanayake, as the Minister of Finance, only exercised his constitutional right to address the House on the final day of the budget, and there was nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

There have been numerous instances where the legislature became a captive audience for the Executive Presidents—and even loquacious Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders. Sri Lankan politicians have a propensity to talk nineteen to the dozen just to hear their own voice. However, there is more to the recurrent argy-bargy over presidential grandstanding in Parliament than the Opposition’s aversion thereto; the tendency of the Executive Presidents to subject the legislature to their loquacity can also be seen as symptomatic of the erosion of the separation of powers.

What has fuelled the ongoing campaign for the abolition of the executive presidency is that the Presidents tend to act like harum-scarum private bus drivers when they have control over Parliament. They tend to bulldoze their way through. The situation becomes even worse when the Presidents’ parties happen to have supermajorities in Parliament.

The Executive Presidents are compelled to act with some restraint when parties other than their own gain control over the legislature, as evidenced by the experiences of President D. B. Wijetunga from August to November 1994, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga from 2001 to 2004, and President Maithripala Sirisena from October 2018 to November 2019. Presidents J. R. Jayewardene, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, by virtue of being the leaders of the ruling parties with supermajorities, reduced the Legislature to a mere appendage of the Executive. President Ranasinghe Premadasa also did likewise although his party did not have a two-thirds majority in Parliament. This unwholesome practice has continued over the years without a hiatus.

The constitutional requirement that the Executive Presidents attend Parliament once every three months, along with their power to address the legislature and hold Cabinet portfolios, has enabled them to dominate—if not undermine—the legislature. Some Presidents have leveraged their power to address Parliament to project their authority and overshadow legislators. One may recall that the last Parliament had the then President Ranil Wickremesinghe walking in, making speeches, and even asking some Opposition MPs to shut up.

The JVP, a bitter critic of the executive presidency, has pledged to abolish it. Its leaders made their support for Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2004 presidential race conditional to his pledge to scrap the executive presidency. He, true to form, reneged on his promise. The JVP was also instrumental in having the 17th Amendment and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution introduced to curtail the powers of the Executive President. The 21st Amendment, which did away with some of the presidential powers, restored by the 20th Amendment, was also introduced partly due to JVP’s pressure exerted through Aragalaya (2022). Unfortunately, the Constitutional Council, which was created to fetter the excessive executive powers of the President, has become a rubber stamp for the Executive.

Today, the JVP has a two-thirds majority in Parliament and boasts of having expanded its support base across the country. Curiously, not much is heard about its pledge to abolish the executive presidency.

During an interview with the government-controlled ITN, on 04 Dec., 2024, in answer to a question about the JVP’s promise to scrap the executive presidency, JVP Central Committee member, legal advisor and Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala, said that the JVP/NPP leaders would not be able to conduct another presidential election campaign ‘with their clothes on’ as they had pledged to abolish the executive presidency on a priority basis.

Whether the JVP/NPP leaders will care to carry out their promise to abolish the executive presidency expeditiously or make another Machiavellian about-turn and conduct their party’s next presidential election campaign—with or without their clothes on—remains to be seen. What they should do urgently is to ensure that the President not only respects the doctrine of the separation of powers but also is seen to do so by refraining from subjecting Parliament to boastful bluster and snide remarks. They laid into the previous Presidents for haranguing Parliament, didn’t they?

Tuesday 25th March, 2025

The JVP/NPP government is still upbeat about the passage of its maiden budget with an unprecedented majority of 159 votes. That was no mean achievement, but everybody knew that the ayes would have it. Euphoria invariably gives way to the sobering reality in politics. A serious problem is already looming on the horizon.

The harvesting of Maha season paddy is drawing to a close. It was forecast that the country would be able to produce about 2.9 million MT of paddy during the 2024/2025 Maha season, but the harvest has dropped to about 2.4 million MT, according to Minister of Trade Wasantha Samarasinghe, who told Parliament the other day that the government would not hesitate to import rice, if necessary.

The sharp drop in the Maha paddy harvest is mainly due to floods in rice-growing areas. The government pledged that the Paddy Marketing Board would purchase about 300,000 MT of paddy to build a buffer stock to make market interventions, if necessary, but it could buy only 60 MT of paddy, according to media reports. Paddy farmers’ associations and agricultural experts are warning that rice prices are likely to increase further during the upcoming festive season, and the country will experience a rice shortage towards August 2025. When the government failed to make large-scale millers release adequate rice stocks to the market, last year, it opted for imports, but its leaders thundered in Parliament that they would never import rice again after the 2024/2025 Maha paddy harvest!

Rice, which is also a cultural staple in this part of the world, plays a significant role in Sri Lankan politics, as is public knowledge. The possibility of a rice shortage must therefore be a disconcerting proposition for the JVP/NPP government, with about six weeks to go before the local government elections. All signs are that the much-delayed Provincial Council elections, too, will have to be held either towards the end of this year or in early 2026. The government will have to ensure that rice is freely available at affordable prices.

Having come into being in the mid-1960s, the JVP rose to national prominence circa 1970 by taking on Dudley Senanayake’s government, which it condemned as a US puppet. Claiming that the CIA was planning to keep that administration in power regardless of the outcome of the general election to be held in 1970, the JVP closed ranks with the SLFP-led United Front led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike and urged the public to give that alliance a supermajority to defeat what it called a CIA conspiracy. The UF won a two-thirds majority. One of the main reasons for the fall of that UNP government was a reduction in the rice subsidy. (The following year, the JVP took up arms against the UF government!)

Five and a half decades on, the JVP is in power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament. It is now eating out of Uncle Sam’s hand! Dudley Senanayake is long dead, but the JVP has another Dudley to contend with, and rice has become an election issue again.

Several farmers’ associations which threw their weight behind the JVP/NPP, helping make last year’s regime change possible, are now on the warpath. They are of the view that the government, in spite of its rhetoric, will continue to be at the mercy of the rice millers’ cartel led by Dudley Sirisena, who, they say, is running a kind of parallel government together with other powerful millers capable of making political leaders bend to their will.

Unlike in 1970, when the JVP went all out to defeat Dudley of Mirigama to help install a government led by the SLFP, today, it has had to tame Dudley of Polonnaruwa for its own sake; it has its work cut out, for the rice Mafia has prevailed over successive governments and humbled even those who take pride in having defeated the LTTE.

Monday 24th March, 2025

Anything is possible in Sri Lanka. In the popular sci-fi movie, Transformers, we have alien robots disguising themselves as cars, etc. That is Hollywood fantasy, but in this land like no other, there has been a real-world instance where tractors became cars, as it were!

Sri Lanka, blessed with fecund land, is described as a country where seeds thrown anywhere sprout and mature in record time. Sadly, it has also become a fertile ground for corruption, which has eaten into its vitals. Politicians are usually blamed for this sorry state of affairs. They no doubt deserve all the flak they are receiving, but others, especially the critics of the political authority, public officials, and business leaders, are no better.

A mega racket involving vehicle imports has come to light. The COPA (Committee on Public Accounts) and the Auditor General’s Department have blown the lid off a racket, where some unscrupulous elements imported luxury vehicles by declaring them as tractors. They have disclosed several instances where hundreds of vehicles were imported fraudulently, and the Customs documents were falsified to cover up those rackets at the expense of the state coffers. Those revelations were made when the bigwigs of the Department of Motor Traffic (DMT) were summoned before the COPA the other day. The falsification of vehicle registration documents by some corrupt officials in the DMT has also caused huge losses to the state. The COPA members and the Auditor General were right in laying into the DMT top brass, who could not provide satisfactory answers to the questions posed to them.

The COPA has promised tough action against corrupt elements in the Customs and the DMT. If corruption in vital state institutions can be eliminated, or at least minimised, the government will be able to increase its revenue significantly without burdening the public with tax and tariff increases.

The COPA and the Auditor General’s Department deserve praise for their revelations, but there is reason to believe that they are only scratching the surface of the problem of corruption in the Customs, the DMT, etc. Urgent action should be taken to ensure that freight containers that pass through the Customs undergo stringent tests, and nothing is left to chance. Worryingly, checks on shipping containers are characterised by a chronic laxity, which leaves room for corruption.

One may recall that in January 2025, as many as 324 red-flagged freight containers were released via the so-called green channel without being scanned. The reason given for green-chanelling them was that such extraordinary measures were essential to clear a backlog of containers caused by delays on the part of the Customs! The government also claimed that it had acted on a recommendation made by a three-member committee. Relying on the opinion of the officials of an institution notorious for corruption on such sensitive matters is like seeking the advice of a female clairvoyant to catch a thief who happens to be her own son, as a popular local saying goes.

Many containers had been released in a similar manner under the previous administration as well, the government said. But it was to discontinue such corrupt practices that the people ousted the last regime and voted the JVP-led NPP into office. We pointed out in a previous editorial comment that in 2013, a freight container that a businessman tried to have green-channelled by producing a letter from the Office of the then Prime Minister D. M. Jayaratne, was found to have a haul of heroin weighing as many as 131 kilos.

By opening that container and conducting a thorough check, which yielded the narcotics concealed in cans of grease, the Customs proved that they were not without honest, intrepid officers; such personnel should be recognised and rewarded. A large stock of cocaine weighing 218 kilos was detected among sacks of sugar in a freight container delivered to the Economic Centre, Ratmalana in 2017. This is why no cargo containers should be released via the green channel. They can carry anything––undeclared vehicles, lethal items, narcotics or hazardous waste.