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| Parties? What parties? |
The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) enjoys a Parliamentary
majority. The party has all but elected
the new President as its leader, the very same individual who ran against the
candidate fielded by the SLFP. The
United National Party (UNP) has the second largest number of MPs (second by a
large margin, note). The Prime Minister
of the Country is Ranil Wickremesinghe (Leader of the UNP) whereas the
Opposition Leader is Nimal Siripala Silva of the SLFP. Both were hand-picked by President
Maithripala Sirisena, the former consequent to an electoral pact and the latter
in view of a changed political order and people adjusting to new
realities.
So we have a President who was backed by the UNP and who is
also the leader of those who backed the man who ran against him. The UNP has the numbers in the Cabinet but
the SLFP has the numbers in Parliament.
The office of the President is endowed with close to absolute
power. ‘Balance’ in this context is totally
dependent on the good will of a single individual, Maithripala Sirisena; for
100 days, if the man and his merry men and women of pre-election support and
post-election embrace deliver on the promise of constitutional and electoral
reform.
Right now it’s all a scramble. The SLFP recovered quickly from the rude
shock it received from the voters and after a quick cost-benefit analysis
backed the winner. The UNP received a
shock of its own because all of a sudden the party finds itself besieged in Parliament
by greater numbers that are Sirisena’s to play with. Everyone is busy getting ready for a General
Election or so it seems, for all actions seem to flow from an acute
consciousness of this rather than engagement with (or for) the 100 Days Program
Sirisena pledged to implement.
Given the fact that this country has been saddled with the
J.R. Jayewardene Constitution for 37 years, the people are likely to forgive
the government if all this takes longer than 100 days to implement. However, the political will to see it through
as well as action that matches the good governance rhetoric of the President
during his campaign, will and must be assessed.
Meaningless foot-dragging will be noted as will the mindless embrace of
whatever is marginal to the program. It
is not unnatural to be distracted but the people will note over-indulgence.
There are two broad areas where intervention was promised
and is expected: a) the investigation of wrongdoing allegations and punishment
of wrongdoer, and b) correction of system anomalies. We have seen expected zeal with respect to
naming names with respect to ‘a’ above.
What’s come out so far is ‘allegation’ with little fact-support and even
less will to prosecute. It’s in the area
of ‘b’ above that the Government is showing a lot of sloth.
Two things need to be addressed when changing systems:
personnel and structures. The first is
relatively easy and here the appointments to key positions have been
disappointing. While acknowledging that
there is a massive human resources problem in the country where it is hard to
find decent and honest people in the relatively small pool of the skilled, the
Government could have done better.
Track records are not easy to hide these days and yet whoever shortlisted
the choices have demonstrated unpardonable myopia.
The more difficult and also the more important task is that
of addressing structural flaws and correcting them. This requires reform of the constitution and
the overall institutional arrangement.
It is early days, yes, but the Government is not showing signs of
getting cracking in this regard. The
issue of electoral reform has been debated to the point of exasperation. Broad consensus was obtained in the
Parliamentary Select Committee on this subject, headed by Dinesh
Gunawardena. With respect to the
Executive Presidency and its flaws, Maithripala Sirisena’s manifesto is a good
‘working document’. The work need not
drag though. So far we’ve got solemn
promises and the appointment of committees to set up good-conduct norms,
necessary of course but woefully insufficient.
Reducing fuel prices, raising salaries and tossing out other
election-goodies is all well and good, but this was a President who came to
reform structures and not the nature of state-largesse. It is high time that both major parties
understood that in the year 2015 ‘parties’ are less important than particular
configuration of political forces.
People come and go. Moments
pass. Things don’t look the same.
Fixation with party (as opposed to program –
forget ‘ideology’, that particular creature died some years ago as far as the
UNP and SLFP are concerned) is ‘old hat’.
The ‘new hat’ demands seizing the moment, this window of opportunity,
not because it will help the politician (it will reduce the creature) but it is
what the people demand and political fortunes require that they be sensitive to
this demand.
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