May all beings be happy!

PRIME CANDIDATE – While the Constitution formally spells out procedure to be followed in a national emergency, the present PM’s hosting of past MPs at an informal political forum this week may be a move from an anti-democratic power-game playbook 

A long time ago, in a democracy far, far, away, the republic rested on a three-legged stool. But that was before two wars were declared on ‘we, the people’ by they those supreme elected representatives of ours. 

First there was the late great coup that wasn’t, which fizzled out after fifty-plus days of sparks and sundry banging noises. Because the courts had the courage to say a well-considered sharp, short, ‘no’ to a has-been politico. 

Then there is the incipient coup d’etat in the offing. The old iron ‘jackboot bureaucracy’ fist in a new velvet glove of ‘oligarchic governorship’. Which, of late, had neither Court to critique or stymie it; nor still that House to challenge or sanction would-be autocrats seizing the day. 

So if the pandemic is in fact a portal, as a political writer with a social conscience has essayed, the state of our nation hesitates in the doorway. We are paused precariously on the threshold, hovering like a socially distancing visitor evaluating the chances of making a dash for it. Under cover of waging another war, a reboot is taking place all around us. And just like that, we’re on the cusp of going from a newfound freedom to some nasty strain of feudalism once again.

Reboot

As a small number of past MPs met with the present PM on Monday, it was evident that the Constitution has the same value as a roll of toilet paper for some ‘ancien régime’ politicos. There is no future in legal interpretations of the law in a land where rule-BY-law has arrested the rule-OF-law. 

The supreme law of the land clearly spells out how transactions between the executive and the judiciary should take place in a time such as this… pandemic, emergency or not, and all that jazz. So it is disingenuous at best and downright self-serving at worst to ignore the warnings sounded by civil, societal and legal-constitutional watchdogs.

Even political parvenus such as backbenchers on the lookout for the main chance know better in their secret hearts that bad advice leads good governors astray, or eggs on evil ones. And while it is better, perhaps, not to know how laws and makeshift budgets are made, one doesn’t readily disregard the laws governing relations between branches of government. Not by lopping off two inconvenient dendrons like the legislature and the judiciary. Not without running the risk of the nation-state falling off the tree. 

Maybe the prime minister – who’s hardly an arriviste or a tyro at parliamentary politics – wore a knowing smile as he smugly chaired the meeting at Temple Trees earlier this week because his star is in the ascendant. Again and again, as is perhaps not uncommon for a wily politico who has waged many ministerial wars and also lost a few key magisterial battles. 

Under ‘Rajapaksa 2.0’ powered by a hopeful hyper-presidentialism taking shape under covert face-masks and vigorous hand-washing, he et al. look set to add more feathers to a cap that already holds the tributes of defeating terrorism and driving unprecedented progress. While, of course, the critics would point to flourishing nepotism. On the other hand, whoever erected a carefully named national installation after any critic?  

The poetic justice of a former all-powerful president, whose hopes have been dimmed by an act of parliament – now grandly laying down the law to those political opponents among others who ousted him, with a little help from the voter – must taste sweet to a man whose ambitions hold in thrall one more powerful than he is at present. His largesse conceals larger ambitions. That he is a spent force is but a wet dream of those who would wish away his presence and his power, not to mention his potential.

Monarch of all he surveys

But just who does he think he is? Some medieval monarch granting troublesome barons a stormy audience? Mais oui. And where does he see this all ending? At some Runnymede – a meadow where our modern-day king meets his peers – with a sort of ‘reverse Magna Charta’ (the power of parliament being suborned)? Maybe. 

Will there be a verbal signing over of the sovereignty of the people and their representatives to the new ‘kings of infinite space’? Or what more than schooling in how to eat humble pie and return to their own safe homes, their hats in hand and tails between legs, did the protesting members of a dissolved legislature expect to get? It is a mistake to think democracy can be negotiated over a baronial table than across the floor of a constitutional assembly.   

This is not as funny – whether ha-ha or peculiar – as it may sound. For all his smiling baby-kissing sugar-daddy amiability, Mahinda Rajapaksa is still a menacingly formidable force and not a tame bear to be baited with impunity. The political circus which made that fatal error lies in ruins all about the remains of democratic-republicanism. Even if a convenient pandemic hadn’t offered its services to the regime, its political opposition would probably still be slouching around wondering how to stop a juggernaut. It has swept all before it since 2005 (bar a brief hiatus between 2015 and 2019). 

Discretion: The better part of valour?

No amount of ‘nothing-buttery’ on the part of his political opponents can reduce the former president’s chutzpah to a cipher. Say, for e.g., ‘nothing but those last gasps of a has-been’; or ‘nothing can come out of it because the polls will redress the power balance’. Or hope to compromise his personal ambition through appeals to fair play, national interest or the letter of the law. Like the UNP, SJB and JVP think they have done by boycotting the summons to meet and greet. It remains to be seen if their absence combined with their proxies taking the battle to Court will red-flag a rampant bull.   

So it would behove a vainglorious Ranil Wickremesinghe and his article- and clause-citing coterie to get real. Also, the curiously cooperative TNA would do well to remember that they’re hoping to subvert or strong-arm the Machiavellian architect of the UNP’s neutering and the SLFP’s decimation. Even to suspend principle and play ball with a strategic objective can prove dangerous. Because it will set pseudo-legal precedents and set-back the arguments fronted by constitutional interpreters that government must walk the talk of responsible governance in times of emergency. On top of that, MR now seems set on the dismantling of a democratic-republic and two-thirds of its governmental apparatus until polls can supply him an upper hand. 

Despite Ranil’s feeble protests to the contrary – that “this is not the time for adversarial politics” – it’s precisely the moment when the opposition needs to step up to the plate. Unless, of course, fear and/or frightful backroom deals have twisted the UNP’s camisoles out of shape and made their liberal-democratic credentials slip further? Democratic-republicans who’ve been keeping tabs on their leader’s career would be forgiven for wondering when, if at all, the country’s main opposition party will speak truth to power in the national interest?

So Ranil & Co. will not – like some lame martyrs in the avant-garde imperial arena – be torn between two brothers. Not quite in the way Mary MacGregor was in that maudlin mid-’70s song anyway. But maybe more so feeling like fools for not having attended the forum in the end after saying they would in the first place. At least they got off having their bottoms smacked or their wings torn off a strip at this tête-à-téte. 

Still: if there’s anything more lamentable than the UNP’s ‘greatest treason’ – doing the right thing for the wrong reason – it is not doing the louche thing in a pragmatic cause. But at least the SJB has grown a pair and the Young Pretender to the Green Throne is carving out his own path as a contender for leading what’s left of the political opposition meaningfully. And challenging the incumbents in Court into the bargain…

All the president’s mien

Maybe it will take more than political powwows for our polity to emerge from the pit of partisan horse-trading with its democratic ethos intact. Perhaps the Courts are – now as then – the last bastion. And the FR suit filed by the likes of the CPA (against the dissolution of parliament and a fixing of an ostensibly extra-constitutional election date) could be the hard route ahead. Maybe Sajith’s suit contra the powers that be takes a different route to the same destination: a shifting of the battle-ground from the court of public opinion to the law-courts?

Meanwhile, 19A or not, the tandem of president and prime minister is working well – warts and all. Paradoxically, it seems to be doing so precisely when the powers that be are evenly yoked. Or at least on the same page and not from parties that can check and balance each other out. Oh the irony of how poorly it worked for a previous pair… so-called ‘champions of liberal democracy’ as they were thought-to-be. MR must have been smiling all the way to the forum.    

There has been solid support for the regime’s major project from the protagonist’s admirable brother. Not one to beat about the bush or let a good crisis go to waste, his excellency has all but captured the state apparatus and delivered it in spades to his long-in-the-tooth sibling.  

From their point of view, it is a peach of an opportunity to consolidate centralised power in the name of national security, public health and well-being, and developmental imperatives. But for all the storm-in-a-teacup fuss made by bothersome constitutional pundits, the commander-in-chief himself would be sitting in clover and duly acknowledging the plaudits of the adoring crowd as to how he has handled COVID-19 to date. Live and let live however, for the rank and file subject to a ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ – noble 300! – and hats off to the front-liners faithfully following orders… cannon and corona to the right and left of them…  

The cost of orderly chaos 

The only butterfly-wing storm on the horizon is misuse of a Vote on Account by the incumbent administration. This government has breached the legal borrowing limit of Rs. 721 billion imposed by Parliament in October 2019 for the period January April 2020. 

Of the total borrowings of Rs. 841 billion by Sri Lanka in this period, Rs. 702.3 b had come from Treasury bills and bonds. Part of it out of the $ 500 million loan from China Development Bank. And a further Rs. 42.5 b from Sri Lanka Development Bonds. 

Do the math and the conversion, and you will see that excess borrowing in the time under scrutiny is Rs. 120 b to date… 

There is also the most recent Cabinet approval granted to borrow Rs. 15 billion from the China Development Bank to develop 100+ kilometres of roads. #polls #priorities – ’nuff said.  

G(r)in and bear it not quite a tonic

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The president got a lifetime curfew pass from his people. At least, it seems so. For those who would oppose him directly are few and far between. And even the civil society litigators to bell the tiger come out like the fog – ‘on little cat-feet.’ 

The House got surrounded by a remilitarising regime. Critics of the putsch and their oligarchs on social media have had their knuckles rapped. Worse has been threatened against those who rock the boat by no less than the Acting IGP. 

And a time-honoured tried and tested system – parliamentary oversight of presidential opportunism – was shown a door from which it will be hard to find one’s way back in to the warmth and light. 

If you can spare a moment from second breakfast, brunch or elevenses (or maybe even that pre-noon G&T that you’ve been rationing like it’s the Apocalypse already), perhaps it might interest you to look out of your lockdown window. Catch that despotic parade pass by.  

Also wave goodbye to the hard-won liberties of seven decades and more of democracy and its attendant way of life? As the republic rounds a cul-de-sac and roars off into the sunrise under a whole new regime!

All is well. Move on there, you. Nothing to see here…

As you go, spare a thought for how COVID-19 could be a call to arms on the part of not only the rebooting military/bureaucracy, but also the republican man and woman (not in the street; but at home, and absenting themselves from civic discourse). It can be a cry against the incipient Caesarism: whereby one, or two, or a brace of ambitious consuls are testing the limits of the law, courts, public approval and electoral pliability

(Journalist | Editor-at-Large of LMD | Writer on real freedom and feudalism redux in Sri Lanka)