A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, June 16, 2017
Buddhism & Good Governance: The Case For A Sangha Rebellion – Part II
Continued from yesterday….
The
constitution of 1978 helped accelerate and broaden one of the most
damaging developments in the political culture of contemporary Sri
Lanka. This is the replacement of the first-past-the-post system with
“proportional representation” in electing representatives to Parliament.
It perverted the principle of representation on the one hand and
promoted a culture of corruption on the other. In the
first-past-the-post system, an elected representative represented an
electorate or a “seat”, which was of manageable extent. In contrast, in
the system of “proportional representation” introduced by the 1978
constitution, the electorate was replaced by a “district” of much larger
extent that needed to be represented by a plurality of
parliamentarians. These were elected in a system of “preferential votes”
with the voters marking their candidates in order of preference. Since
the district was a much larger territory than the electorate, the
electoral campaigns of the candidates needed to be cast much wider,
involving massive amounts in campaign money. This encouraged the growth
of a class of illicit financiers willing to foot these campaign bills,
and parliamentarians willing to use the power of their office to amass
the wealth to pay back these “entrepreneurs”, while taking care not to
forget themselves. And these “entrepreneurs” often had ties to the mafia
as did some of the MPs themselves. After four decades of this system,
corruption in elected officers has become the hallmark of politics, and
the practice has been swiftly generalized to the lower echelons of both
the political and administrative hierarchies. The abolition of the
first-past-the-post system also had the adverse effect of the electorate
and its MP loosing the close relation they had with each other,
diminishing the democratic process of constant communication between the
MP and his/her grassroots.
The
constitutional changes of 1978 also involved a change from the
Westminster model of government to a presidential model, with
unprecedented concentration of power in the President. The Westminster
model has been the island’s preferred (and inherited) parliamentary
framework since well before independence, and had served the country
well by making a signal contribution to the fostering of parliamentary
democracy. While President J.R. Jayewardene (1906-1996) who led this
constitutional change does not seem to have embraced the Sinhala
Buddhist worldview, he does seem to have believed in a pre-eminent
position for the majority as did many of his parliamentary colleagues.
This is an inference we might make from his turning a blind eye to the
1983 violence on Tamil civilians by Sinhala mobs for days before action
was taken, a telling instance of both the breakdown of law and order and
compromising of the society’s value system.
Just
as he reformed the constitution, President Jayewardene also reformed
the existing largely state-controlled economy by introducing an “open
economy”. This brought about mixed results. On the one hand it
liberalized the economy, attracting significant foreign capital, but in
its unabashed promotion of limitless consumerism it has been blamed for
seriously compromising the country’s value system (see E.R.
Sarachchandra, Dharmista Samajaya,
1982). Under President Jayewardene’s successor Ranasinghe Premadasa
(1924-1993), the open economy continued and thrived. So did the
negatives — black money, the
mafia, corruption and the suppression of dissent –portraying vividly
the crisis in law and order and the value foundations of the society. It
is widely believed that it was the government that abducted and killed
the actor and playwright Richard de Zoysa (1958-1990) and dumped his
body in the sea. The president himself was killed violently by a suicide
bomber as he was participating in the May Day parade of 1993.