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Scapegoat for political survival
Victor Ivan
The Sunday Times
While the Alliance for a Free and Fair Election was getting people to wear a yellow band, the President published an advertisement of her own in which the yellow bands are replaced by bands of various bright colours. What the two campaigns are actually asking for is not the same
A tribute to M.H.M. Ashraff, whom Ivan calls the most colourful Muslim leader since independence. He links Ashraff's stand on Muslim identity to the concentrated farming Muslim community of the east, and recounts how in 1988 Badiudin Mahmud persuaded Sirimavo Bandaranaike to drop him from an opposition pact, driving him
The editorial warns that if the parliamentary election is not free and fair, people will lose faith in the political system and the result will be anarchy. It rejects the government's claim that six elections under it were fair, citing more than 100 armed booth captures in the 1997 local
The future of democracy in Sri Lanka appears to hang on one question: whether the Commissioner of Elections can hold the coming parliamentary election in a free and fair manner, if not entirely then substantially.
Ivan argues that Chandrika Kumaratunga reached power by chance, as Vijaya Kumaratunga, Lalith Athulathmudali, Ranasinghe Premadasa and Gamini Dissanayake left the scene and Anura Bandaranaike quit the SLFP. Lacking experience, she sidelined seasoned figures such as Dharmasiri Senanayake and Mahinda Rajapaksa in favour of S.B. Dissanayake and Mangala Samaraweera. He
After a complaint showed that polling cards identical to those secretly printed at the Government Press were being produced outside, the Elections Commissioner had security stickers printed privately. The CID seized the stickers and the government moved to remove him for bypassing the Government Press. The editorial defends his decision,
Unlike Jayewardene and Premadasa, President Kumaratunga did not come to power after long effort and sacrifice; she came to it by fortunate circumstance. What she did come to power on was a democratic political discourse — and this column measures her against it.
The editorial condemns the People's Alliance's use of criminal defamation against critical editors, first Sinha Ratnatunga of the Sunday Times and now Lasantha Wickrematunge of the Sunday Leader, both given suspended sentences that leave them one conviction from prison. The government promised to repeal the law; the R.K.W. Goonesekera committee
Ivan explains how electoral fraud became institutionalised after the 1978 executive presidency made power hard to change and bent the public service and police to the executive, from the 1981 Jaffna poll to the North Western election of 1999 and the subtler rigging of the presidential poll. He announces the
Ivan describes S.B. Dissanayake as the man now steering the People's Alliance, whose hints foretold the dropping of Lakshman Jayakody and possibly Richard Pathirana, and who shaped the national list. He recounts the sidelining of Dharmasiri Senanayake, S.B.'s ambitions for the media ministry and premiership, and alarm within the alliance
Administration by representatives the people elect is an inherent feature of a democratic system. If the elections are not free and fair, the administration they produce cannot be called democratic — which is why a campaign to get a million people to band together against election violence matters.
The editorial analyses the likely shape of the new Parliament. The People's Alliance held about 129 seats through the Muslim Congress, Ceylon Workers' Congress and EPDP, but splits in the first two and the EPDP's weak prospects in Jaffna threaten that base, while the JVP may win eight to ten
The Mahanayake Theras of the three Nikayas have urged monks to work actively for a free and fair election, and the National Sangha Council is to meet on 5 September. Ivan welcomes this, urges other religious leaders to join, and traces organised electoral fraud from the 1981 Jaffna DDC poll
What will the new parliament look like? Will the PA improve its slender majority or find itself on the opposition benches? A seat-by-seat reading written a fortnight before the October 2000 general election.
The editorial condemns the removal from Kandy of Deputy Inspector General Sirisena Herath after he clashed with General Anuruddha Ratwatte's son during a violent, corrupt election in the district, followed by the transfer of a superintendent and six officers of his special unit to operational areas. It says police across
Ivan praises the UNP parliamentary group's decision on duty-free vehicles for MPs, a practice the UNP itself began. It proposes either vehicles on a depreciation basis or a pool of vehicles not owned by MPs, as the JVP suggested, and says MPs completing ten years will forgo a third duty-free
The government's greatest hope was to change the electoral system somehow, introduce a new one, and win the coming parliamentary election on it. That hope has gone, and the path left is a difficult one: lose the majority and the presidential system itself goes into crisis.
The editorial accuses the Judicial Service Commission of leniency towards judges found guilty of serious misconduct, including Upali Abeyratne, who handled the case against Sarath N. Silva, and Lenin Ratnayake, while dismissing some 21 others, many without charge sheets or inquiries and apparently for political reasons. It notes the commission's
Ivan calls the President's constitution a scheme to keep power under the banner of an ethnic solution, as her father used Sinhala grievances in 1956. Tied to a new electoral system, it provoked the JVP, Sihala Urumaya and UNP, alarmed her own MPs, and she attacked rather than persuaded the
If Tamil and Muslim people saw the President's attempt at a new constitution as a genuine effort to settle the ethnic question, its failure must pain them. And if she had succeeded, it might have brought not a solution but bloodshed between communities — because the thing missing was never
