Politics Beyond 22
Twenty two is not perfect. Far from it, perhaps light years far. Yet, in a season of defeats and setbacks, it is a win for Sri Lankan democracy, and for those Sri Lankans who would be free citizens rather than obedient subjects or terrified children waiting for the next saviour.
The passing of the 22 (officially 21) came hard on the heels of another democratic victory. The Supreme Court effectively killed the deadly Rehabilitation Act. If President Wickremesinghe or the Rajapaksas dreamed of using the Act to punish past dissent and discourage future protests, that dream is now dead.
The two wins demonstrate that however flawed or even dysfunctional the Sri Lankan political system might be it’s not broken. It can be built on, improved. The better kind of system change, the sort that harms less, roots deep, lasts long.
By 2014, the Rajapaksas had disembowelled every single democratic institution in the country from the highest court to the lowliest Pradesheeya Sabha. Only periodic elections remained, a heads-we-win-tails-you-lose game the family believed it had mastered. Wrongly. Mahinda Rajapaksa lost the presidency and democracy made a comeback. The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration removed the executive’s mailed fist from the collective back of the judiciary and paved the way for more institution-building than any previous administration via the 19th Amendment and the Right to Information Act.
Electoral defeat also revealed the ordinary clay in the Rajapaksa makeup, diminishing the shock and awe effect created by the war victory. High King Mahinda and Supreme General Gotabaya were downsized to normal size for a while. The memory of that reduction had faded by 2018 but not dead. In 2022, as normal life collapsed under the cumulative weight of shortages and queues, that memory would return. Without its liberating effect, the peaceful revolt of the middle class which constituted the first inspiring phase of the Aragalaya couldn’t have happened.
Thus the importance in the death of the 20th and the safe birth of 22nd, especially if system change is a real goal and not just a radical sounding slogan or an excuse to scuttle reforms. The next step is its speedy implementation. What was done to the democratising 17th Amendment by the PA and the UNP mustn’t become the fate of 22: death by non-implementation. Having taken the sensible step of backing the amendment, the SJB and the JVP should focus on getting the constitutional council and the national procurement commission up and running. That is of far greater democratic consequence than holding local government elections, an exercise which will cost billions and change little.
The composition of COPE, COPA and the People’s Council has caused much handwringing and derisive laughter. Deservingly. But almost all the undesirables nominated to those bodies were elected by the people in 2020; more worryingly many would be re-elected thanks to the preferential vote system. A new electoral system is as much of a democratic (and anti-corruption) necessity as abolishing the executive presidency.
President Wickremesinghe’s decision to set up a committee to map a new electoral system may or may not be a ruse to postpone elections. Either way, it opens up a path to a desirable and popular goal. If the proposal is a Wickremesinghe bluff, the opposition can surely call it by coming up with reform blueprints which combine the best features of the PR and first past the post system? Pertinently, what is the opposition’s stand on the Election Commission mandated campaign finance legislation awaiting cabinet nod? Surely enacting that piece of legislation should be as much of an oppositional priority as calling for elections?