federalidea.com

by Rajan Philips

“I don’t know how Colvin managed to put up with those SLFP fellows. I would have flung the whole draft of the constitution at them and walked out.” That was N.M. Perera giving a cavalier assessment on the making of the 1972 Constitution to LSSP insiders after the break-up of the United Front in 1975. “That was the difference”, Colvin R. de Silva, the chief architect of the First Republic, would later chuckle, in private.

Flash forward thirty five years. It is now the turn of NM’s nephew and lone LSSP Minister, Tissa Vitarana, as Chairman of the All Party Representative Committee on Constitutional Reform, to demonstrate all of Colvin’s patience and none of NM’s frustrations in steering a motley group of politicians, most of them supporters of the present Government, to reach a consensus on constitutional change. And the stakes now are considerably much higher, and gravely so, than in 1972.

Tissa Vitarana has been ridiculed by uncharitable detractors as someone without any constitutional expertise, and even those who recognize the need for constitutional change silently laugh at what they consider to be Vitarana’s naïve optimism about persuading the current regime to commit itself to a devolution package.

For the record, Tissa Vitarana brings exemplary credentials to his current tasks. One of Sri Lanka’s pre-eminent medical scientists who was much loved and respected by his peers during his long stint at the Medical Research Institute, Dr. Vitarana is showing all the trademark seriousness of a scientist and the patience of a researcher. More important, he brings to his task a resolute commitment and quiet passion that are sadly lacking in contemporary Sri Lankan politics.

In the 1980s, in Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau brought in a Professor of Mathematics with some political experience to spearhead the controversial task of amending and bringing home at long last the Canadian Constitution from Westminster, London. Mr. Trudeau, himself a constitutional expert among other accomplishments, reasoned that there were enough people around to write a constitution but he needed someone to get it through parliament.

So too in Sri Lanka, after twenty or more years of constitutional debates and drafting, there are enough drafts to draw from and enough experts to write up a constitution overnight to address minority concerns while satisfying a majority of Sri Lankans, if only the political intermediaries can get their act together and reach some agreement among them.

The two doughty Ministers

The task of reaching consensus would be made much simpler if it is backed up by sincere presidential leadership. But the lack of that leadership at the present time is no reason to abandon the task itself. And it is this huge void that Tissa Vitarana is gallantly filling. Supporting him quite comradely and with equal commitment and passion is D.E.W. Gunasekera, the Minister of Constitutional Affairs and the sole representative of the Communist Party in the Rajapakse cabinet.

In any other government, in any other country, the Head of State and the Head of Government would try to get the maximum results out of Ministers like Vitarana and Gunasekera. But in the Rajapakse regime the two Ministers are primarily used for “show and tell” – to visiting foreign government and agency representatives that the government is serious about implementing a devolution package. Rest of the time, every kind of monkey spanner is thrown in their works either directly by the President himself, or indirectly by his attack poodles within the governing coalition.

For the sake of the country and its future, and true to the inspiring political tradition they belong to, Ministers Vitarana and Gunasekera should ignore the insults flung at them, even if they are from the highest oddity in the land, and stick to their tasks with perseverance and patience.

As Chairman of the APRC, Dr. Vitarana has come close to finalizing a consensual document for constitutional change. There is consensus among all the Parties in the Committee, including the Rajapakse-SLFP, the MEP and JHU, as well as the UNP which is keeping its distance from the Committee, that the principal unit of devolution should be the Province, while allowing for further administrative devolution at the district and local levels. This is welcome return to sanity after the unnecessary legal diversions and the Rajapakse-SLFP’s second-guessing about lowering the unit of devolution to the district level.

Eschew labels and be easy on merger!

There are only two matters of disagreement in Vitarana’s draft that is in circulation, namely, the labeling of the constitution and the question of the North-East merger. The three hold-outs are the Rajapakse-SLFP, the MEP and the JHU, who want the label ‘UNITARY’ tagged on to the constitution and who want the Northern and Eastern Provinces to be permanently de-merged.

It is most unfortunate and quite unnecessary that the UNITARY label should become a bone of contention in the APRC deliberations. Thanks to Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama’s recent intervention in the Sunday Island, we now know the genealogy of the UNITARY label in the two Republican Constitutions. The label was first included in the 1972 Constitution at the insistence of a senior SLFP Minister (whose name Dr. Jayawickrama unfortunately chose not to reveal) and against the wiser counsel of Dr. Colvin R. de Silva. Despite this idiosyncratic insertion, the term has since been elevated to sacrosanct status by contrived arguments by lawyers and assertions by ignoramuses. Politically, the label has done loads of harm and little good to the cause of Sri Lanka’s political unity.

It is foolish to suggest that the UNITARY label is necessary to protect Sri Lanka’s territorial unity. On the contrary, the label has provided the single-most trigger for the greatest challenge to the self-same unity. And to insist on preserving that label as part of a constitutional change would be contrary to the very purpose of that change, namely, to address the challenge to the island’s unity by creating a devolved state structure. Prudence and commonsense commend that the proposed constitutional change stay clear of labels-be it the preferred ‘U’ word, or the accursed ‘F’ word.

Equally, there is no need to be hung up over the North-East merger and make it the pretext for creating disagreement within the APRC. As I discussed two weeks ago in these pages, the ground realities in the Eastern Province are quite different from what they were when the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement was entered into and Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, both based on the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. It is again prudent and proper to leave it to the peace negotiations to work out the units of devolution for the two Provinces based on the political aspirations of the Tamils and the security realities of all three communities in the East.

Let the APRC complete its Mission

At this point in the process, it will be criminal to prevent or slow down the APRC from completing its task. President Rajapakse should show leadership and direct his minions to stop crowing about the UNITARY label and the de-merger of the North-East.

Far too long the game has been going on that the President is constrained by the JHU, while the JHU has been taking cover under the Mahinda Chinthanaya. There was a time when J.R. Jayewardene used to pretend that he was hamstrung by Cyril Mathew and his Sinhala-Buddhist constituency and used that as the pretext for inaction and procrastination. When JR finally fired Mathew in 1984, it was too late, the damage was done, and more to the point, as Dr. Colvin R. de Silva characteristically put it, “there was not a bloody hum on the road!”

And so it is time that Mahinda Rajapakse called the JHU’s bluff, unless he wants the JHU to cover his own bluff! He should equally call the JVP’s bluster that it will vote against the Government’s budget if the President were to support the APRC proposals in their present form. Despite our best expectations and the efforts of eminent Indian progressives, the current JVP leadership is irredeemable on the national question. It is time that Mahinda Rajapakse separated himself from the JVP degenerates and the JHU upstarts.

Together, they account for less than a quarter of the representation in Parliament and much less in the country, even among the Sinhalese. If President Rajapakse is not willing to treat them according to their insignificance, others in the Government and in the Parliament should lean on him to do so. Within the government and in the cabinet, the academic likes of Sarath Amunugama (Sociologist), Wiswa Warnapala (Political Scientist) and G.L. Peiris (Law Scholar and one-time Peace Negotiator) should educate the President rather than amplify his inane vibes. In fact, they should take a public stand and stand with Tissa Vitarana and D.E.W Gunasekera. If not, they will for ever stand condemned of what Julien Benda called in the France of the 1920s – ‘the treason of the intellectuals’.

Outside the Government but within Parliament, Ranil Wickremasinghe and Mangala Samaraweera should stop playing hide-and-seek and opportunistically waiting for the Rajapakse regime to self-destruct itself. Instead, they should proactively support the APRC recommendations and force President Rajapakse to unequivocally commit himself to the same recommendations. A sincere parliamentary consensus and presidential commitment on the APRC recommendations are necessary conditions to effectively address the LTTE’s isolation and intransigence.