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Editorial

Sadu, sadu, sadu!

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Friday 28th January, 2022

Ven. Athureliye Rathana Thera has said he will not re-enter Parliament after serving the current term. Speaking at a public event in Moneragala on Wednesday, he said he would devote his time and energy to social work without engaging in power politics thereafter, and he would be able to do much more for the people as a social worker. Age, experience, setbacks, internal disputes of his party, Ape Jana Bala Pakshaya (AJBP) and reality seem to have had a sobering effect on the firebrand monk. Other Buddhist monks who entered Parliament with him in 2004 became disillusioned with politics much earlier. Some of them failed in their re-election bids while others gave up politics altogether after serving the first term, and realising that religion and politics did not mix.

It was a huge mistake for Buddhist monks to enter Parliament. Some of them contested the 2004 general election from the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), claiming that they needed political power to ‘save the nation’, but it is doubtful whether any intelligent person bought into their claim. Many people, however, voted for the JHU as they were fed up with the UNP and the SLFP and therefore wanted to give vent to their anger.

By entering Parliament, those monks unwittingly gave the impression to the public that they considered the MPs to be better able to serve the people than the member of the Maha Sangha. The presence of Buddhist monks in Parliament, which is full of political dregs, also led to the desecration of the sacred saffron robe. Some of the ‘MP monks’ even suffered blows at the hands of their unruly lay counterparts during brawls in the House and had to be hospitalised.

Following the last general election, there was a clash in the AJBP between two groups supporting Ven. Rathana and Ven. Galaboda Atte Gnanasara over the party’s National List slot; it caused an affront to the dignity of the Maha Sangha. Strangely, the Mahanayake Theras did not care to intervene to knock some sense into the warring monks although they give lay politicians unsolicited advice and even tell the latter how to run political parties and the country.

Unfortunately, in 2004, the JHU monks did not realise that some crafty laymen thirsting for power were using the Maha Sangha to compass their political ends. They used the JHU as a stepping stone. The Buddhist monks should have known better. They would have been able to influence state policies and safeguard the interests of the voiceless far more effectively without getting involved in dirty politics. Ven. Rathana says he will do so after leaving partisan politics. If only he had realised this in 2004, and acted accordingly.

In 2014/15, another group of politicians used Ven. Maduluwawe Sobitha Thera to achieve their political goals. People reposed their trust in the outspoken monk, who fought for their rights, and the wily politicians succeeded in capturing power. Maithripala Sirisena became the President and Ranil Wickremesinghe the Prime Minister.

Ven. Sobitha was utterly disappointed with the yahapalana politicians at the time of his demise, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Politicians do not scruple to use even the Mahanayake Theras. It is not out of any love for them that political leaders often visit temples; they do so to attract media attention.

One’s gorge rises when one sees Buddhist monks at political events. We have some Buddhist temples doubling up as political offices and promoting divisive politics.

Now that Ven. Rathana has wised up to the fact that it is infra dig for him to hold political office and he could do much more for the people without holding political office, it is hoped that other Buddhist monks will also try to rise above dirty politics.



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Editorial

Reform political parties and their leaders, too

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Thursday 28th March, 2024

The government is going hell for leather to bring forth electoral reforms as if there were no tomorrow. It would have the public believe that the current electoral systems are full of flaws, which need to be rectified as a national priority if the country is to be put right and progress ushered in.

System bashing, as it were, has become the vogue in this country. Everyone is calling for a system change these days. Even those who have ruined the economy and enriched themselves at the expense of the public are doing so obviously in a bid to deflect criticism directed at them. A country doubtlessly needs robust systems in all sectors, but what Sri Lanka needs more than anything else, at the present juncture, is the restoration of the rule of law.

Former Chairman of the Election Commission, Mahinda Deshapriya, at a discussion on electoral reforms, the other day, rightly pointed out that unsavoury characters must not be nominated to contest elections. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, PC, was also present at the event. In response to Minister Rajapakshe’s criticism of the current electoral system, Deshapriya said the problem of miscreants being elected to political institutions had to be tackled at source. He argued that the political parties had to refrain from nominating malefactors. One could not agree with him more.

All political parties conduct interviews to select candidates, and, therefore, it is the party leaders who have to take responsibility for nominating political dregs to contest elections. They must sift out miscreants at that point. This will be half the battle in cleansing politics and raising the standards of political institutions, especially Parliament.

Minister Rajapakshe argued that the rogues who were rich enough to throw money around obtained the highest preferential votes at elections. This argument is not without some merit, but there have been numerous instances where moneybags could not overtake other candidates in elections.

In the 2004 parliamentary polls, several members of the JVP, which contested as a constituent of the SLFP-led UPFA, came first in districts such as Colombo, Gampaha and Kurunegala. Obviously, they fared so well in spite of being outspent by many other candidates. Dullas Alahapperuma conducts very clean and inexpensive election campaigns, which are free from polythene, posters, cutouts, etc. He has disproved the argument that the Proportional Representation system has made election campaigns extremely costly. He wins handsomely in the Matara District. Why can’t others emulate him?

There is also a campaign against the preferential vote or manape, which is made out to be a source of evil. If it is scrapped, political party leaders will be able to nominate their favourites to contest elections and enable them to enter Parliament, etc., at the expense of the popular candidates who deliver votes to their parties. It was to prevent the party leaders from resorting to such arbitrary action that the preferential vote system was introduced.

At present, people can decide who should represent them by voting for political parties of their choice first and marking their preferences for candidates. If manape is done away with, the party leaders will have unbridled discretionary power to ensure that only their favourites are returned. Given the sordid manner in which they manipulate the National List by engineering vacancies to smuggle their loyalists into Parliament, how bad the situation will be in the event of the preferential vote being abolished is not difficult to imagine.

That the preferential vote leads to election violence, especially internecine intraparty disputes, is also a big lie propagated by violent characters in the garb of politicians. The JVP has been free from preferential vote battles because its candidates put their party before self. They are worthy of emulation.

The government ought to tread cautiously when introducing electoral reforms. The mixed-member electoral system under which the last local government elections were conducted in 2018 plunged the country into chaos with the number of local councillors doubling to more than 8,000. Now, efforts are being made to change the new system!

The need, in our book, is for the political parties and their leaders to be reformed more than the electoral systems.

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Editorial

Vulpine praise for a Trojan horse?

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Wednesday 27th March, 2024

The mere sight of a notorious pickpocket usually prompts people to check for the safety of their wallets or purses even if he is not looking for prey. The SLPP-UNP government has the same reputation as a cutpurse, and therefore the public tends to view everything it does with a jaundiced eye. Its recent undertaking to introduce electoral reforms has therefore triggered howls of protests from those who cherish franchise. The Opposition has accused the government of trying to put off national elections on the pretext of introducing electoral reforms.

Government politicians are full of praise for the proposed electoral reforms, which are widely seen as a Trojan horse. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe has sought to dispel doubts and suspicions in the minds of the public about the proposed electoral reforms. He has said they will not cause elections to be postponed. He may be telling the truth, but Sri Lankans usually do not believe anything until it is officially denied. So, the government will have a hard time trying to convince the public that it is not trying to postpone elections again. It ought to explain why it announced its decision to reform the parliamentary electoral system ahead of the coming presidential election.

The blame for postponing elections should be apportioned to all self-righteous members of the current Parliament as well as President Ranil Wickremesinghe. They have suppressed the people’s franchise on several occasions.

In 1975, an SLFP-led government postponed a general election by two years. It abused its two-thirds majority in Parliament for that purpose, and dealt a severe blow to democracy; resentful electors voted overwhelmingly for the UNP at the 1977 general election. President J. R. Jayewardene abused his steamroller majority in Parliament to cause a general election to disappear in 1982 by conducting a heavily-rigged referendum. He did so because he feared that he would lose his five-sixths parliamentary majority if a general election was held. Wickremesinghe was a Cabinet minister in that repressive regime.

In 2017, the UNP, the SLFP, the TNA, the SLMC, etc., voted for the Provincial Council Elections (Amendment) Bill, which helped postpone the PC polls indefinitely. UNP leader Wickremesinghe was the Prime Minister and SLFP leader Maithripala Sirisena the President at the time. The incumbent SLPP government postponed the Local Government (LG) polls, in 2021, on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s watch. The SLPP dissidents cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for that poll postponement, for they had not broken ranks with the SLPP administration by that time. The SLPP and the UNP postponed the LG polls last year by claiming that funds could not be allocated for an electoral contest owing to the country’s pecuniary woes.

In a previous editorial comment immediately after the announcement of the government’s decision to bring in new laws to elect 160 MPs under the first-past-the-post system and 65 MPs under the Proportional Representation, we pointed out that electoral reforms could entail long-drawn-out delimitation processes. Fear that it may not be possible for a general election to be held until the conclusion of the delimitation process pertaining to the proposed electoral reforms is therefore not unfounded.

The People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) has warned of the possibility of such a situation coming about. A government that fears elections will do everything in its power to postpone them. The SLPP-UNP regime is no respecter of public opinion and has no sense of shame; it therefore does not scruple to safeguard self-interest at any cost.

If the government is serious about allaying the people’s doubts and suspicions about the proposed electoral reforms, it will have to give a legal assurance that they will not lead to poll postponements. PAFFREL Executive Director Rohana Hettiarachchi has rightly called for the incorporation of a specific clause into the electoral reforms draft Bill, which is said to be on the anvil, to enable the Election Commission to conduct a general election under the existing PR system in the event of the delimitation process dragging on indefinitely. Nothing else will do.

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Editorial

Easter Sunday carnage: Vital aspect overlooked

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Tuesday 26th March, 2024

Former President Maithripala Sirisena, who declared last Friday that he was aware of the identity of the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday terror attacks, made a statement to the CID yesterday. His political opponents are baying for his blood; among them are those who were in the Yahapalana government at the time of the carnage. Some of them have even called for grisly penalties for Sirisena, such as drawing and quartering!

The ongoing political battle over the Easter Sunday terror mastermind’s identity, conspiracy theories involving local politicians, the vilification of Sirisena, etc., have eclipsed a critical dimension of the carnage—the possibility of an external involvement. Instances of bloody conflicts, uprisings, terror attacks and other forms of shocks being used to make feeble economies scream and jolt the developing countries, caught up in the great power rivalry, out of their strategic alliances and to engineer radical geopolitical shifts are not rare.

As for the Easter Sunday attacks, there are two major schools of thought. One is that they were engineered to catapult national security to the centre stage of politics in favour of wartime Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was planning to run for President in 2019. Gotabaya announced his candidature a few days after the carnage. The other school of thought is that there was a foreign hand in the Easter Sunday carnage, and the conspirators sought to destabilise Sri Lanka to compass their geopolitical ends.

The PCoI (Presidential Commission of Inquiry), which probed the Easter Sunday attacks, dealt with the alleged foreign involvement perfunctorily. Only an eight-page chapter in its bulky report has been devoted to the claim of a foreign hand in the attacks. The witnesses who expressly testified that there was ‘an external hand or conspiracy behind the attacks’, according to the PCoI, are Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, former President Maithripala Sirisena, former Minister Rauf Hakeem, former Minister Rishad Bathiudeen, former Governor Azath Salley, SJB MP Mujibur Rahman, former SIS Director SDIG Nilantha Jayawardena, former STF Commandant M. R. Lateef, former Chief of Defence Staff Ravindra Wijegunaratne, former SDIG CID Ravi Seneviratne and former CID Director Shani Abeysekera. Dismissing their statements as mere ipse dixits (assertions made but not proven), the PCoI has said, in its report, that it did not find any such foreign link. It has, however, recommended that certain identified parties be further investigated. This recommendation has not been implemented.

We argued, prior to the release of the PCoI report, that it was possible that Zahran and his gang had taken orders from a fake ISIS created by a foreign spy agency. The PCoI has quoted SDIG Jayawardena as saying that an Indian named Abu Hind ‘may have triggered the attacks’: “He [Jayawardena] went on to imply that the intelligence agencies that provided him with the intelligence on 4th, 20th and 21st April 2019 may have had a hand in the attack.” According to the PCoI report an ‘international expert on terrorism, who testified in camera, said, “Abu Hind was a character created by a section of a provincial Indian intelligence apparatus, and the intelligence that the Director SIS received on the 4th, 20th and 21st April 2019 was from this operation and the intelligence operative pretending to be one Abu Hind. Operatives of this outfit operate on social media pretending to be Islamic State figures. They are trained to run virtual personas.” The PCoI report says, “The testimony was that Zahran believed Abu Hind was the Islamic State regional representative. Abu Hind was in touch with both Zahran and his brother, Rilwan, and had spoken to Naufer. This part of the evidence is confirmed by the testimony of Hadiya [Zahran’s wife].” It is mentioned on page 220 of the report that according to the aforesaid international expert, ‘the Indian Central Government was not aware of the intelligence obtained by the provincial outfit’.

The allegation that there was a conspiracy behind the Easter Sunday attacks to enable the SLPP to capture state power must be probed. Similarly, there is a pressing need for a thorough investigation to find out whether an external force was behind the carnage.

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