“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.â€Â
– George Orwell
As an example of monumental irrelevance for the cause of peace in Sri Lanka and as a testament to the awesome political bankruptcy of this government, it is hard to beat the May Day 2007 document released by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), purporting to be its constitutional reform proposals. It has, to paraphrase Ferdinand Mount, all the intellectual oomph of a tranquillised vole. Reading through the document, disbelief gives way to perplexity, and eventually, to hilarity. Perhaps never in the history of the Sri Lankan conflict has such a measly offering of constitutional primitivism been made public, with a straight face, as the constitutional reform proposals of a government of Sri Lanka. There was more than a smidgeon of elitist snobbery in the way some lawyers and academics associated with the government’s anti-federalist viewpoint have critiqued the Majority Report of the Experts Panel, and the LTTE’s ISGA proposals as being conceptually suspect. What a pity that this hauteur will now have to be curbed in the light of the tragicomic SLFP proposal.
But that is where the laughter stops for the rest of us as well. There is no doubt that the SLFP proposals are an accurate representation of the political mindset of this administration with regard to constitutional reform and conflict resolution, just as much as it is a reflection of its competence. To the extent that they can be dignified with the term ‘constitutional proposals’ they represent a strident form of Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism of the 1940s Vidyalankara brand. They are also populist in that they solely address the JVP, JHU and hard-line SLFP constituencies in the South, not the Tamils and the Muslims (whose own constitutional proposals are a matter of public record) or the broader Sri Lankan polity. Politically, therefore, it is consistent with the line this government has always taken that the ethnic conflict will be dealt with militarily, and the only constitutional reform contemplated with regard to spatial expansion of political power at the periphery will be along strengthening local government. If that be the principle, its articulation in the SLFP document reveals not merely abysmal drafting but also fundamental conceptual incoherence as to how the proposed district and sub-district level institutions will function. What they would do, and perhaps this is in fact the real intention, is to consolidate party-political clientelism at the local government level. The effective abolition of an intermediate level of devolution as in a proper federal system (or indeed as provided under the Thirteenth Amendment!), as the examples of Mexico and Indonesia show, ends up in a political dynamic that eventually strengthens the centre. By this, the democratic dividends of greater accountability, transparency and responsiveness offered by decentralisation in federal-type arrangements are negated. This is underscored by the functions envisaged for the President in the schema of decentralisation such as the power of appointment of district chief ministers, the contemplated abolition of the 1978 executive presidency notwithstanding.
The SLFP proposals are a total rejection of the way the politics of moderation with respect to peace, and corresponding ideas for constitutional reform, have painfully developed over the past three decades or so. In countries like Sri Lanka, federalism is not the stuff of intellectual fantasies of liberals; the stakes are much higher than that. The refusal, in both our autochthonous constitutions, to recognise the pluralist ethno-political foundations of the State, has led to the birth and consolidation of armed secessionism. Federalism is a constitutional organising principle that is first and foremost about the political unity of the country, which allows minorities a measure of autonomy for the expression of identity through constitutional politics. By allowing the latter, federalism opens up the space for the articulation of a truly national identity on the basis of non-coercive consent. The symbiosis of unity and diversity offered by the federal principle is thus a constitutional imperative, not a luxury, in addressing secessionist conflicts such as that we face. By the espousal of unreconstructed majoritarianism as these proposals do once again, the government is perpetuating the conflict for several generations more, through the validation of secessionism as the only available honourable response to the majority community’s unwillingness to share power through autonomy.
This decrepit political mentality that informs the SLFP proposals is perhaps exactly what this government understands by democratic government: ramshackle institutions animated by clientelism that is a haven of corruption, nepotism and nationalist authoritarianism. It is not only in relation to the pitiable proposals regarding decentralisation that this is evident: witness the incoherent modalities proposed for a crony-packed Senate.
The dubious consolation that these proposals are bound to be laughed out of court as far as the international community is concerned, is rather spoilt by the irritating claim made by the document to being a genuinely ‘indigenous’ model of a Grama Rajya. This claim to authenticity is an affront to any self-respecting Sri Lankan citizen apart from the bucolic yokels to whom they are addressed.
In sum, then, to describe these proposals as pitiable in content and awfully incompetent is to miss the more important point (although this is surely also the case). The real significance of this is that the SLFP proposal – reflecting the mindset of the real power-wielders in this administration on the fundamental questions of peace, conflict resolution and constitutional reform – represents a peremptory withdrawal to the foothills of a particularly ominous and atavistic Leviathan. Upon the darkening Sri Lankan political stage, strut the forces of nationalism, which as Orwell again so cleverly defined, “…is power hunger tempered by self-deception.†There is perhaps no better way to describe the SLFP’s ‘constitutional proposals’ than that.