The Great Retrogression and the new Constitution

The Government has not merely cooked its own goose, it has roasted it feathers and all, burning to ashes the hopes of the country’s younger generation with it. Sri Lankans are standing in queues for items that are either in short stock or suddenly expensive or both—something they never experienced during civil wars and terrorism – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

The Sinhala peasantry that loved the Rajapaksas since the pre-Independence days of the State Council, is angrily demonstrating, many declaring themselves ex-Pohottuwa voters, trashing effigies sporting a mask of the President’s face, and at least in one township, uprooting and upending billboards with the Rajapaksas on them. The alienation of the bedrock Sinhala peasantry and the Sinhala rural heartland seems the long-term political achievement and legacy of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa

Whoever would have thought that post-war Sri Lanka, which under President Mahinda Rajapaksa was clocking the second highest growth-rate in Asia after China, would wind up in the abyss it is today, on his younger brother President Gotabaya’s watch.  

Underdeveloping Lanka

It was a path-breaking intellectual giant, the radical economist Andre Gunder Frank (his last book ‘Re-Orient’ was often mentioned admiringly by Lakshman Kadirgamar) who first pointed out that ‘backwardness’ was not the same as ‘underdevelopment’. Backwardness is a state, underdevelopment is a process. Sri Lanka under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is undergoing a process of underdevelopment; it is going backward.

Sri Lankans are moving back to the use of kerosene oil instead of gas. They are standing in queues for items that are either in short stock or suddenly expensive or both—something they never experienced during civil wars and terrorism. 

Young Sri Lankans who stayed through the war are going abroad. Those who came back after the war are leaving. To put it bluntly, they are all leaving under the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, desperate at their economic prospects and therefore, their future. 

Many are also from families quite comfortably off and where the head of the household is quite well-established. In most cases among the well-educated and well-to-do, the drive for migration comes from educated young women, including those who are married. Their point is that they do not want their children growing up in the place this country has turned out to be. 

A.G. Frank was building upon the postulate of Raul Prebisch, the Head of the UN Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) that there was a net outflow of resources (‘surplus’) from Latin America to the global North. The famous Uruguayan editor and writer Eduardo Galeano extended this idea in an enormously influential book unforgettably titled ‘The Open Veins of Latin America’. In President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka too there is a net outflow—of human resources, of ‘human capital’.  Not since the ethnic violence of 1958 and 1983 has there been so conspicuous a drain of skills, ironically, this time from within Sinhala society.  

What we are witnessing, to use Gunder Frank’s indelible phraseology, is ‘the development of underdevelopment’. 

The Sinhala peasantry that loved the Rajapaksas since the pre-Independence days of the State Council, is angrily demonstrating, many declaring themselves ex-Pohottuwa voters, trashing effigies sporting a mask of the President’s face, and at least in one township, uprooting and upending billboards with the Rajapaksas on them. The alienation of the bedrock Sinhala peasantry and the Sinhala rural heartland seems the long-term political achievement and legacy of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. 

President GR’s election manifesto pledged the conversion of Sri Lanka’s agriculture to an organic mode, over a period of a decade. If he signed-off on that pledge it is because he understood that the conversion required much preparation and a long transition. Why then did he decide to overturn that pledge and perspective and implement the policy, nationwide, at one go? 

Having violated his mandate on this major, basic issue, why did he not explain the reasons to the people? How can you impose what looks like a sudden change of heart i.e., a whim, upon millions of peasants and consumers and the entire economy, precisely when the country was/is in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic? 

The President recently appointed by a new Task Force, for Green Agriculture. “The task force is responsible for…identifying the organic fertiliser required for various crops and improving the quality of such fertiliser production, producing pesticides and weedicides locally...” (Daily FT) 

Why wasn’t this Task Force appointed before, as preparation for the Presidential policy on fertiliser, weedicides and pesticides—not after, as postscript? 

As the price of local products rise due to the lifting of price controls, a young man outside a supermarket to buy milk-food queried (in Sinhala) “whether the cattle in Nuwara Eliya are paid in US Dollars”.

President GR must surely know that for the inflow of foreign investment that he desires, as well as to generate production and the revenue needed to retire the country’s debts, the country requires social and political stability, but he must also surely know that in today’s world, where his regime is in the crosshairs of the international media, the UNHRC, the EU and legislators in the world’s great democracies, that stability cannot be imposed and has to be democratic, dialogic, consensual.

His own policies towards the peasantry, the pedagogical community, and the students, are generating instability. This will only worsen if Sarath Weerasekara and Dilum Amunugama’s ridiculous threats are carried out. 

Police/Military repression or rule cannot manage the crisis. The island is under international scrutiny and is already the cockpit of great power competition. For too many reasons to list this is no Myanmar, and on a small island there is literally no place for any explosion to be localised or dissipate harmlessly. Repression coming on top of material privation can only cause the whole place to explode. From the paddy field and provincial town to the supermarket queue and the passport lines, the citizens—mainly self-confessed and self-flagellating (Sinhala) SLPP voters – are acerbic about the President and Government. There is no coming back from this, whether or not the Port City and tourism take-off

Repressive reflex

Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekara actually used the T word, “terrorism” when talking about the teachers’ strike: 

‘“…We destroyed terrorism. Whether the root cause of that terrorism was fair or not, terrorism cannot be justified, because it is innocent civilians who die from it. Similarly, whether or not the teachers’ grievance is fair, we cannot justify their strike because it is our children who suffer from it,” the Minister said.’ (EconomyNext – https://economynext.com/sri-lanka-teachers-strike-minister-threatens-legal-action-if-teachers-disrupt-school-reopening-87137/)

Tough tactics at a time of the material privation of the masses can only trigger a chain reaction of social explosions. The teachers unions worldwide are a pretty strong network, and if the regime’s buildup of threats and strongarm tactics manifests itself in actual repression and dismissals, the Government can kiss goodbye to GSP Plus. It will also find the global confederations of teachers lobbying their legislators for measures against the Sri Lankan Government. 

The SLFP-led Coalition Government of 1970 dissolved the Land Army set up by Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake for his Green Revolution. The dismissed, unemployed Land Army members landed up in the JVP uprising of 1971. In July 1980, the UNP Government of President Jayewardene dismissed tens of thousands of striking workers, who did not wind up in the JVP’s insurrection but their dismissal severely weakened the legitimate, visible, open trade union movement and its conventional mode of struggle, thereby opening a much wider space than in 1971 for insurrectional violence from a covert terrorist grid.    

As the wartime commander of the Civil Defence Force, a localised paramilitary militia, Minister Weerasekara should perhaps lower his profile and be less pugilistic in his stance while a dedicated mechanism of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is collating data and preparing strategies for possible prosecutions under universal jurisdiction. 

In Sri Lanka today, patriotism-nationalism is angered by the fire-sale of national assets to foreign interests. The peasants, workers (“govi-kamkaru”), teachers, principals, middle-classes and student youth are outraged by the Government’s economic and social-educational policies. Social sentiment is indignant about the dominance and privileges of a single family-clan. Democratic sensibility is incensed by the hyper-centralisation of power and subordination of the state machine to the ruler. 

None in Cabinet except for Prof. G.L. Peiris would be familiar with two famous theories of social science regarding revolutions, and Prof. Peiris will keep them quite strictly to himself. One is that explosions happen when “the revolution of rising expectations meet the counter-revolution of rising frustrations”. The victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the Pohottuwa was such a period of rising expectations fanned consciously by the incessant hype of the local FOX News. The second is that revolutions happen due to ‘relative deprivation’: if people have lived reasonably well for a relatively long time and are suddenly quite badly off, they feel deprived relative to their life until that point—and that is explosive. These two well-tested theories are manifestly relevant to Sri Lanka today. 

Chairman Mao said “a single spark can start a prairie fire”. The prairie, or rather the paddy field, is ready. Will Sarath Weerasekara provide the spark? 

A citizenry long accustomed to welfarism as well as the open economy, and possessing a finely-honed experience of using universal suffrage as a lever-cum-weapon, is certain to react to its present trauma by bidding an electoral long goodbye to the Rajapaksas. 

There are likely to be two regime responses to such a prospect. One is to make as much money as possible through sell-offs and the Port City. The other is to try the Myanmar mode. There could of course be those who try a bit of both.  

Police/Military repression or rule cannot manage the crisis. The island is under international scrutiny and is already the cockpit of great power competition. For too many reasons to list this is no Myanmar, and on a small island there is literally no place for any explosion to be localised or dissipate harmlessly. Repression coming on top of material privation can only cause the whole place to explode. 

From the paddy field and provincial town to the supermarket queue and the passport lines, the citizens—mainly self-confessed and self-flagellating (Sinhala) SLPP voters – are acerbic about the President and Government. There is no coming back from this, whether or not the Port City and tourism take-off.  

Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Marxist political science, remarked that a crisis can be recognised as ‘organic’ when social classes detach themselves from their traditional political parties. Beginning with the social de-linking which caused the UNP’s extinction and the SLFP’s shrinkage, an ‘organic crisis’ in the Gramscian sense is dramatically manifested in the decisive pivot of the Sinhala peasantry and middle-classes away from the Gotabaya presidency and the Pohottuwa administration. 

In his Army Day speech, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa raised the spectre of “religious extremist terrorism”. This cannot be discounted, just as an attempt at resurgence by residual LTTE cadres cannot be discounted, going by Indian intelligence reports. However, little of this will accrue to the political benefit of the Rajapaksas, especially after the reasonable doubt raised by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the Catholic Church and the lay community here and overseas. 

With the eternal leadership of Wickremesinghe having predictably culminated in the electoral extinction of the UNP, the Rajapaksas have no ‘anti-national’ political rival to play the patriotic card against. 

The Government has not merely cooked its own goose, it has roasted it feathers and all, burning to ashes the hopes of the country’s younger generation with it.  

Young Sri Lankans who stayed through the war are going abroad. Those who came back after the war are leaving. To put it bluntly, they are all leaving under the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, desperate at their economic prospects and therefore, their future. Many are also from families quite comfortably off and where the head of the household is quite well-established. In most cases among the well-educated and well-to-do, the drive for migration comes from educated young women, including those who are married. Their point is that they do not want their children growing up in the place this country has turned out to be

Redemption road

But there is now a chance to change everything for the better. As Prof. G.L. Peiris announced:

“Work on Sri Lanka’s proposed new constitution has been finalised... the draft constitution will be ready by the end of the year once it has been through the Legal Draftsman’s Department…So, in January 2022, Sri Lanka’s parliament will have the opportunity to focus on the new constitution…” (EconomyNext – https://economynext.com/sri-lankas-proposed-new-constitution-to-be-ready-by-jan-2022-minister-87171/)

A new constitution, unlike an amendment, will mandatorily require a Referendum. A decisive victory for NO—as a vote of protest and no-confidence—is the shortest, surest path to renewal for this nation.

The 1972 and 1978 Constitutions were animated by great universalist ideas which had been explicitly canvassed for many years: firstly, a republican form of state centred by definition on popular sovereignty, and secondly (building on the first), a directly-elected executive presidency. 

By contrast, the public is yet to get even a whiff of the great animating idea behind the new basic law. As Presidential candidate, Gotabaya Rajapaksa never aired an idea which he said he would incarnate in a new constitution. His election manifesto contained no such identifiable concept.

We can assume therefore that the draft constitution will enshrine the Gotabayan ethos. The ultra-nationalism of the GR Presidential project as manifested in the Ruvanwelisaya investiture address, the hyper-centralisation of the 20th amendment writ larger, the hyper-securitisation infusing and radiating from the Gotabayan discourse, the militarisation of State administration, and President GR’s “wish” expressed to China’s President Xi “to learn the governance experience of the Communist Party of China”—such elements will shape the new foundation and edifice of the Sri Lankan state. 

In December 1982, the rightwing authoritarian regime of President Jayewardene held a Referendum which it won by force and fraud, including the jailing of Vijaya Kumaratunga on the absurdly fake charge of being a Naxalite. Every single catastrophe and tragedy that befell this island after that—Black July ’83, two shattering civil wars north and south, a foreign military intervention—flowed from and through that accursed portal in our contemporary history, the referendum of December 1982.

If the quasi-militarised regime of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the most insensitive we have witnessed, which has visited unparalleled economic hardship upon the citizenry and is arbitrarily destructive of the livelihoods of the backbone of our nation, the rural peasantry, gets its own custom-tailored form of state, winning next year’s Referendum, the country will enter the worst cycle of political and socioeconomic conflict we have experienced. It may not survive as a single, united state and may end up like Cyprus or ex-Yugoslavia.

This is still a democratic republic in which sovereignty derives from and is ultimately vested in the people. We the People can decisively stop this travesty and tragic cycle by massively voting NO.  

Bypass, backlash

What if the incumbent regime uses its control of all arms of the State and its two-thirds majority in the house, to gavel through a new constitution without a referendum? 

The regime may try to bypass a referendum by arguing that the 1978 Constitution was not promulgated via a referendum and the 1972 Constitution was an autochthonous one promulgated by a rupture. 

All that would be specious argumentation because the 1972 Constitution was a rupture with the British monarchy as the nominal head of state and issued from the National State Assembly. Furthermore, the currently existing 1978 Constitution specifically prescribes the mode for change. The 1978 Constitution itself secured an explicit mandate at the 1977 General election because JR Jayewardene, unlike Gotabaya Rajapaksa, made public the specific change he proposed since late 1966, 12 years before it came into being, and again unlike Gotabaya Rajapaksa, included it concretely in his winning manifesto of 1977.

A unilateral ‘stealth override’ of the 13th Amendment would be tantamount to the unilateral abrogation of a bilateral agreement, namely the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord triggering a reaction by the Government of India and possibly an appointment of a special envoy. 

This regime has morally and ethically forfeited its right to a new constitution, having violated the Social Contract by divesting the citizenry of economic security. The country is likely to resist an extra-constitutional imposition of a new constitution. If the constitutional method of a referendum is thwarted, comparative political history shows that the right of resistance, rebellion and revolution which John Locke explicitly spoke of, tends to become activated.  

Raising the Army’s 1 Corps, fusing existing elite units into a single mobile reserve strike force (Kilinochchi-based) must be applauded as a national asset. However, the President and power-elite must know that for the past half-century, autocracies the world over, from Portugal, Greece, Spain, the Shah’s Iran, through Latin America, Soviet-era Eastern Europe and the USSR, to the Philippines, South Korea, Indonesia and the Arab world, were toppled by democratic, national-popular upheavals, not because those regimes suffered a deficit of harsh laws, ubiquitous intelligence agencies, and elite strike-forces with battle-hardened commanders.