Remembering Colvin And Abolishing The Executive Presidency

By Jayampathy Wickramaratne -February 27, 2014

Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne PC

This week we remember Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, on the 25th anniversary of his death on 27 February 1989. The country lost a brilliant lawyer, a fine orator and an exemplary parliamentarian. Hardly a week passes without a newspaper article lamenting the absence of leaders of his ilk.

It was the Left that spearheaded the campaign against the introduction of the executive presidency in 1978 and today we remember Colvin when the country is feeling the full force of the executive presidency, strengthened to the utmost by the Eighteenth Amendment.

If there is one statement that epitomizes the Sri Lankan Left’s unswerving opposition to the executive presidency and its preference for the parliamentary form of government, it is one made by Dr. de Silva in the Constituent Assembly in 1971: “There is undoubtedly one virtue in this system of Parliament … and that is that the chief executive of the day in answerable directly to the representatives of the people continuously by reason of the fact that the Prime Minister can remain Prime Minister only so long as he can command the confidence of that assembly. …We do not want either Presidents or Prime Ministers who can ride roughshod over the people and, therefore, first of all, over the people’s representatives. There is no virtue in having a strong man against the people.” He was responding to a proposal by J.R. Jayewardene that the country should have an executive presidency. He explained: “We want an evolving society, and therefore we want a constitutional system that permits the evolution, that facilitates the evolution, that propels the evolution, and that itself evolves with the evolution. Nothing less would do.”

Read More