The Sigiriya syndrome and the challenge to Lankan democracy

A new order is being rapidly constructed on the ground. Our armed forces are engaging in superb full-spectrum civic action interventions around the clock, but I’ve never seen civic action in peacetime, especially in a home country, undertaken by the military carrying automatic weapons. During this pandemic I have yet to see on TV, military men on motorbikes or in hazmat suits bearing assault rifles at the low-ready, anywhere else in the world. What’s with the guns? – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

Sri Lanka is headed for a classic political crisis: “the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born” (Gramsci). The old Parliament cannot be reconvened because the President and Commander-in-Chief has vetoed it and no judicial ruling commands the material power to enforce a reversal of that veto, while the President still seems willing to convene a new Parliament after an election but the Opposition objects to holding an election any time soon due to the corona crisis though it cannot guarantee an election any time later. 

It is precisely “in the interregnum” between the old and the new that “a variety of morbid symptoms appear” (said Gramsci). Such a morbid symptom is the Far-Right discourse deriding elections, Parliament and Democracy, and advocating instead a presidential-military-bureaucratic-corporate-priestly pyramid of power; a new power elite and ruling class hovering above the PM, Cabinet, the Courts and Parliament. Call it the Sigiriya (rock fortress) syndrome.

It’s not only the rules of the game but the name of the game that’s changing. There is a new mentality and a new order. Not everything new is bad nor is it axiomatically good. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike invited Sir Nicholas Kaldor and Joan Robinson to help formulate Ceylon’s first five-year plan. We could have sought advice and assistance from successful friends New Zealand, Vietnam, China, South Korea, Germany and Cuba in our anti-COVID campaign. But we don’t. It’s the new mentality. 

Nationalist hype of a world record in fighting COVID-19 are in meltdown while the curve climbs steeply and SL’s rate of spread of COVID-19 sharply accelerates. The GMOA and CCPSL as key professional stakeholders should have been front-and-centre in any Anti-Corona Presidential Task Force, but they aren’t. It’s the new model. 

New order

A new order is being rapidly constructed on the ground. Our armed forces are engaging in superb full-spectrum civic action interventions around the clock, but I’ve never seen civic action in peacetime, especially in a home country, undertaken by the military carrying automatic weapons. During this pandemic I have yet to see on TV, military men on motorbikes or in hazmat suits bearing assault rifles at the low-ready, anywhere else in the world. What’s with the guns? 

The victory of Jacinta Ardern’s New Zealand over community transmission of COVID-19 shows that there’s a social democratic governance model far superior to the taciturn tough guy approach, while Sri Lanka’s own successful inclusive democratic management by Prime Minister MR with the support of the JVP and the military, of the colossally shocking tsunami tragedy (Dec 2004) proves that a militaristic ‘command model’ is neither necessary nor optimal.

Further evidence of the new order lies in the composition of the all-important Presidential Task Force on Economic Revival and Poverty Eradication. Basil Rajapaksa heading it, given his high competence and efficiency, is no cause for concern. The Task Force has 30 members, six of whom (one-fifth) are from the armed forces (the Army Commander and five top retired officers), many others are reputed businessman and women, and several are key officials. There are no reputed economists or recognised specialists in poverty-alleviation among the 30 names. This is hardly the professional knowledge-and-expertise driven dispensation that was promised. 

President Premadasa who first introduced “poverty alleviation” onto the macro-policy agenda, handpicked as the head of both of his lead programs Janasaviya and the Housing Development authority, an Oxford and Harvard educated (attended Kissinger’s Harvard seminar) star of the old elite civil service, former leftist revolutionary and political prisoner, editor of the literary magazine Mawatha—namely, Susil Siriwardana. Simon Navagattegama was head of public communication and artistic-cultural outreach. That was then, this is now.

Lankan liberal democrats must think analytically and strategically, not declaim exegetically off legal and constitutional texts—or else President GR, though no progressive or radical-democrat like Cromwell, may do a Cromwell on the Parliament

The report of the panel on the same subject, constituted by a reputed think-tank headed by a close friend and ideological supporter of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa—the Pathfinder Foundation headed by Milinda Moragoda, a long-standing associate of the US Republican Right—with a configuration that was exactly the sort that it should be, was to be ready by 30 April and immediately presented to the President. Not only does the Presidential Task Force not contain any of the names on the Pathfinder panel, the President did not await the 30 April report before launch. 

A third manifestation of the new order was President GR’s invitation (as reported by the President’s Media Division) to a delegation of prominent Bhikkhus, to meet him on every third Friday of the month. The senior monks had met him to strongly denounce any idea of the reconvening of the dissolved Parliament. This grouping is neither multireligious nor contains the topmost hierarchy of the Buddhist clergy. Outside of an outright theocracy, I cannot recall any State in which the executive has programmed a regular meeting with religious figures on non-religious issues, however socio-culturally influential those figures are (e.g. Russia, Cambodia, Philippines). 

COVID-19 operations

This then is the new ethos. The downside cannot be pointed out because the Parliament is not functioning. The Parliament is not functioning because the President does not want a Parliament in which the balance of forces is adversarial, and in his mind, obsolete, questioning the new order that is busily “creating facts on the ground”. 

The Parliament is also not functioning because the Opposition has not clinched an election, in marked contrast to the old democratic fighting spirit, where Government and Opposition heroically ran the gauntlet of terror, assassination and slaughter at the hands of the JVP and LTTE, to participate in elections in 1988 (Provincial Councils and Presidential), 1989 (Parliamentary), 1994 (PCs, Presidential, Parliamentary) and 1999 (Presidential), with bodies piling up (and hospitals shut down in 1988-’89) so that democracy could revive and survive. 

Let the 23 April 2020 edition of The Economist (London), once described by Karl Marx as the most intelligent defender of capitalism, put things in a larger global and contemporary historical context.  In a ‘leader’ entitled ‘A Pandemic of Power Grabs’ The Economist says: 

“…Rulers everywhere have realised that now is the perfect time to do outrageous things, safe in the knowledge that the rest of the world will barely notice. Many are taking advantage of the pandemic to grab more power for themselves…All around the world, autocrats and would-be autocrats spy an unprecedented opportunity. COVID-19 is an emergency like no other.

“…Everywhere people are scared. Many wish to be led to safety. Wannabe strongmen are grabbing coercive tools they have always craved—in order, they say, to protect public health...The pandemic gives a reason to postpone elections, as in Bolivia, or to press ahead with a vote while the opposition cannot campaign, as in Guinea. 

“…Judging by what has already been reported, power grabbers on every continent are exploiting Covid-19 to entrench themselves…Unscrupulous autocrats are exploiting the pandemic to do what they always do: grab power at the expense of the people they govern.” (https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/23/autocrats-see-opportunity-in-disaster?)

In the USA, the global epicentre of the coronavirus with a million infected and 56,000 deaths, the Democrats are sounding the alarm against a possible Presidential attempt to postpone elections on account of COVID-19 and plan to petition the Courts to prevent postponement. “Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden predicts US President Donald Trump will try to postpone the country’s November election in an attempt to stay in power. Biden suggested on Thursday that Trump could use the coronavirus pandemic to justify such a move. ‘This President, mark my words, I think he’s going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with a rationale why it can’t be held’ he added.” (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/biden-predicts-trump-postpone-election-200424101025576.html)

Real obstacle to reconvening 

From wartime appeasement of the LTTE (the CFA) through the Bond scam to Geneva 2015, the non-unitary/“orumittanadu” constitutional draft, and the Easter Sunday massacre, Lankan neoliberal democracy is seen as having weakened the state, the economy, national security, national sovereignty and the interests of the national majority. Apart from the CFA, the other issues were all clustered in the Ranil-Karu Parliament which deprived MR and the JO/SLPP of the leadership/status of the Opposition. 

The delegitimisation of Lankan liberal democracy is not only in the eyes of crucial social forces such as the war-winning Sri Lankan military (serving and retired), which is President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s bedrock constituency and preferred agency/vehicle, but also the majority of the Sinhala majority. Until early 2019 the previous Parliament deprived the Sinhala majority of its proportionate and legitimate political space; politically marginalised the majority while surrealistically installing the minority as Opposition. The Sri Lankan military fought and won a long war, not to see that historic victory and its results politically up-ended in peacetime. 

All this explains why President GR regards that old Parliament with deep distrust and detestation and why MR’s and BR’s SLPP base would also resist the call to reconvene.

The high point of Lankan constitutional-liberalism was the overturning of the 52-day tenure of Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed PM by President Sirisena. Hundreds of innocents paid an unimaginably horrific price for that neoliberal restoration, setting the stage for its downfall. Who believes that had Mahinda Rajapaksa remained Prime Minister under President Sirisena, instead of Ranil returning, the multiple intelligence warnings from India about the jihadist attack would have been ignored or fallen through the cracks? 

Of course, this is only half the story, the other half being that according all the investigations and public testimony there was no sign of Islamic fundamentalism, a ghastly growth in Sri Lanka, having turned in the direction of terrorism, before the anti-Muslim BBS surge of 2012 and more specifically the lethal Islamophobic violence of 2014. The Sinhala nationalist Establishment which permitted the religious ultranationalists to march on Muslim business establishments and townships played its part in the radicalisation that resulted in the jihadi terror on Easter. 

Pre-empt, don’t provoke, a Cromwell 

My answer to the critical question “Who decides?” is “he/she who can enforce decisions”. Lankan liberal democrats must think analytically and strategically, not declaim exegetically off legal and constitutional texts—or else President GR, though no progressive or radical-democrat like Cromwell, may do a Cromwell on the Parliament.

Liberal values and the liberal legal-constitutional order can be preserved solely by democracy. In the fight for liberal democracy, the Archimedean point, the fulcrum, is democracy, not liberalism—the noun, not the adjective. Constitutional law provides a tactical perspective while the strategic perspective must be political. 

What the hawks in the President’s camp aim for is a unipolar political order and unilateral political and policy practices. Therefore, democrats should adopt a defensive strategy of containment while striving to preserve and maximise the elements of multipolarity and political-institutional multilateralism. This can only take place in and through Parliament.

It would not be in the interests of the ultranationalists to either reconvene the old parliament or to elect a new one, because a functioning Parliament with an elected Prime Minister (almost certainly Mahinda Rajapaksa) will be a balancing factor and therefore a constraint on accelerated implementation of the irrational radical-Right agenda. 

On the other hand, it is in the interest of the PM and most of his SLPP-led coalition, to be legitimised and empowered by an election. 

It is in the interest of the Opposition parties to take their places in a new Parliament. 

A new Parliament will hold the advantage of not bearing the baggage of recent history which is toxic to the majority, and therefore its legitimacy would be re-booted. 

Holding a fresh election would also be in the interests of the GR project because it holds out the prospect of a two-thirds majority. However, an election yielding such a majority would not be in the interests of Mahinda Rajapaksa because the repeal of the 19th Amendment would reduce the status and role of the Prime Ministership to that which Ranasinghe Premadasa famously castigated as having had “the powers of a peon”.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s uncle and father were members of our first Legislature elected on the basis of universal franchise, and over several decades his extended family has had greater representation in the Legislature than any other political family in Sri Lanka. The dynasty’s political origin and power-base has been the Legislature. Its greatest strength has been elections—the vote—not the military or even the clergy. One hopes that with this rich legislative lineage and heritage, President GR would like to leave an undamaged, uninterrupted relationship with the Legislature as political legacy, rather than shift to the Sigiriya syndrome, shut Parliament down, narrow his base and delegitimise his administration internationally. 

It is in the President’s strategic interest to retain the political foundation, fortification and fallback that Parliament provides any state, government and leadership, and rely on the vastly-experienced Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa as re-empowered by an electoral mandate, together with BR’s SLPP, rather than today’s derivative mandate. They have a more durable socio-political base/network than even the military, and certainly a much broader one than the ultranationalist hawks. The military, a TV station and a putative/embryonic youth militia modelled on the Shiv Sena or Golden Dawn cannot be a political substitute for a deep-rooted, organic, mass-democratic political formation, and cannot flexibly intervene in and inclusively manage broad-spectrum, complex, variable, national and international politics—or even the accelerating COVID-19 pandemic.

It is in the interest of the democratic forces not to drive the President in the anti-parliamentary/extra-parliamentary direction that the Far-Right is trying to manoeuvre him, of lockdown of the Legislature by Executive fiat and/or Referendum.  

Thanks to the institutional rearguard ‘guerrilla’ action waged by Mahinda Deshapriya and the EC, democratic hope still noses ahead of the attempt to suffocate and supplant parliamentary electoral democracy—but time is running out. 

A Realist strategy would build the broadest political convergence and consensus on nailing down fresh elections and pre-empting a referendum, among all Parliamentary parties, Government and Opposition, through an All-Parties Conference which should become a regular Roundtable where modalities, methods and safeguards ensuring a reasonable degree of safety and fair-play at an election must be negotiated and the date(s) collectively committed to. 

Rehabilitating liberal democracy

The problem was never with liberal democracy as such, only with Chandrika-Ranil-Mangala (neo)liberal democracy, because Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton and Obama have shown how one can and must combine liberal democratic values with the determined use of military force. 

In his pro-Biden video, Obama intervened to shift the agenda from Hillary Clinton’s neoliberal legacy and “tinkering around the edges”, to a truly progressive Democrat agenda, burnishing Joe Biden’s blue-collar centrist-populist appeal while paying extended tribute to left-populist Bernie Sanders. Liberal-democracy must assimilate left-populism.

A nationally popular, mainstream liberal-democracy was last emblematised in Lankan politics by Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, who was opposed by ‘The Church of the Latter-day Liberals’ because their liberalism was one of appeasement of the Tigers and worship at the shrine of the Berghof Foundation in the chapel of the Co-Chairs. While an ethnic Tamil and a Balliol man, Kadirgamar’s was hardly a West-dependent minoritarian liberalism. A future for Lankan liberal democracy requires the triangulation of progressive liberalism, moderate patriotism and populist social-democracy.