A clichéd phrase that still makes sense and nonsense, too

By N Sathiya Moorthy

Ring out the old year, ring in the New Year. The clichéd phrase still makes great sense for present-day Sri Lanka. Of course, the immediate reference is to the presidential election and possible parliamentary polls as incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe is on record that he was toying with the idea of causing the latter a year ahead of schedule. The Constitution empowers him to do it, but it does not empower him to delay the presidential polls without a specific decision by Parliament.

The question is if the ‘ruling’ SLPP would toy with the idea of delaying the presidential polls, citing the ongoing IMF negotiations and the government’s efforts at setting the country’s economy in some order. Of course, the initiative should come from the incumbent, who too may be tempted to consider it, though the popular resentment over the current state of the economy may just dissuade both from going beyond that stage. If that should still happen, the current crop of parliamentarians can still enjoy their full five-year term.

Accidental President

It does not mean that there won’t be any presidential election, or even parliamentary polls. Nor is there any guarantee, as claimed in some circles, that the incumbent won’t be able to win a nation-wide election after failing once in 2005.  That is what a section of the media and social media believes and also wants the nation to believe.

Of course, most, if not all, trade unions that were the most identifiable group that lent leadership to the Aragalaya protests that led to the ‘democratic’ (?) exit of incumbent Gotabaya Rajapaksa but without elections, also seem wanting, in the face of unchecked prices, tariffs and taxes.

They are all peeved also at huge concessions purportedly going to the ‘investor class’ as predecessor Gota too had done, post-Covid. This time round, they are packaged as investment-initiatives for job-creation and revenue-generation. The end result is the same.

But outside of urban Colombo, and fast urbanising cities like Galle and Kandy, Jaffna and Trincomalee but without similar, if not same infrastructure, there is a constituency that comprises the ‘silent majority’, who too suffer the ‘Ranil reforms’ even more without whatever compensation that the former might still be able to squeeze out of the government in an election year. The former had earlier fed them with the version that Gota was Satan incarnate and anyone else in his place would be god himself.

Ranil, yes, was an ‘Accidental President’, so to say, as he was not even Prime Minister entitled to step in under the Constitution when the post fell vacant. By a quirk of fate, he became Prime Minister first, and President, next. A year and more down the line, he remains the ‘Accidental President’ as he was/is. He will remain so until fresh elections.

If elected, he would be there in his own steam even if electoral allies would pull him in all directions, up and down included. The pull could be more frequent and would be more vigorous, if the Rajapaksas-led SLPP is still around as his ally, more so the main support-base.

Democrat-at-heart

However, speculation and also speculation-centred analyses are putting JVP’s Anura Kumara Dissanayake on the top of the heap in the presidential poll. Be it as it may, such a course and such a course alone would do justice, at least in linguistic terms, to the clichéd phrase.

Barring a JVP nominee on his own, every other political party and leaders representing those ideologies have been Executive President since JRJ created the post for himself, in the name of democracy and through the Second Republican Constitution, 1978. Of course, the JVP backed CBK and MR in their times, but gave up on the centre-left SLFP when they discovered that the latter was too smart for them, and had already eaten into their base.

MR began by sweeping his first local government elections in 2006, months after he had won the presidency with the JVP’s support. Under his leadership, the SLFP swept the whole of southern Sinhala Sri Lanka. The JVP ally from the past year that sought to contest on its own just to prove a point, could not win even a single local body, big or small, urban or rural.

Now you know where the basic flaw of the Executive Presidency is. It was person-centric, personality-centric at birth. It was not certainly institution-centric, and even more so, nation-centric. So democracy under a succession of Executive Presidents depended on the personality of the incumbent at any given time. Unfortunately for the nation, no democrat-at-heart has become Executive President thus far.

Disbelief, distrust

The ironical part of the JVP’s ‘systems change’ demand, proposal or promise this time is that neither AKD, nor his spokespersons have explained as to what they have in mind. Or, if they are talking about political changes or economic changes or social changes, or any one or two of them, or all three put together. Whatever it is, how they intend doing it under the present Constitution should be at the core of their modus unlike it hints at an anarchy more organised and even more deliberate and persistent than Aragalaya.

Interestingly, through the past one-and-half years of post-Aragalaya politics and political administration, no political party or leader has talked about abolishing the Executive Presidency as used to be their wont pre-Aragalaya.  Maybe, they are all convinced in the people’s disbelief and distrust in all such promises of the kind. Or, maybe, the Aragalaya struggle also swept it away from people’s memories.

Yet, there is no knowing what kind of political economy that any of the prospective presidential candidates have to promise the nation. All of them are keeping their eyes and ears centred on IMF loans and conditionalities. Even their support and criticism for this government is centred on the IMF these past months, not about other elements that are inherent to a traditional economy as Sri Lanka’s.

Unless the JVP especially comes up with a new and open vision for the economy – others seem incapable of having anything new to tell the nation – and convince the voters that there is a road-map, going beyond sweeping generalities, the ‘old’ will remain ‘new’ and the ‘new’, ‘old’.

For the nation and the people however, the old and new are one and the same, and are inter-changeable. Rather, the new is only a continuation of the old, nothing more, nothing less!

(The writer is a Policy Analyst & Political Commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)