Of Babies & Bathwater

By Emil van der Poorten –June 26, 2015

Emil van der Poorten

Most, if not all, those reading the title of this piece will be aware of the old chestnut about throwing the baby out with the bathwater or throwing something of significant value out with the material that was contaminated in the very act of cleansing the infant.

What has provoked this reference is the fact that there has been, for a considerable time now, a great hue and cry about the need to throw out most, if not all, of the current system of proportional representation (P.R.) in an effort to cure the electoral process of this country of what is consistently pointed out are the terminal maladies afflicting it – bribery, corruption and every other affliction known to democracy – replacing it with its predecessor in post-colonial Sri Lanka, the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system.

Personally, I have to admit to a bias in the debate of PR vs FPTP because I was once actively involved in an effort to have the province in which I lived change from the latter to the former and my colleagues in that effort investigated and researched the subject more thoroughly than I thought possible and proved, if proof were needed, that a PR system (practiced in most of the established democracies, incidentally) served the purposes of electoral democracy infinitely better than the FPTP model.

I have had several discussions with my unilingual Sinhala-speaking neighbours and they don’t appear to have too strong feelings one way or another in the matter of P.R. vs FPTP. However, the never-ending cascade of propaganda claiming that PR is the sole cause of monumental corruption in the body politic seems to have taken its toll on rational thought and many people seem to be veering towards support of abolition of P.R. and the return of FPTP.

The attempts to raise this issue with my neighbours faced another hurdle in that their world-view was, essentially, somewhat limited by their not having experienced or not being familiar with different political and voting systems elsewhere. That said, it was fairly apparent that the matter of PR vs FPTP is really not No. 1 in the public’s list of concerns, unless it is identified as the sole reason for what ails us in the matter of corruption. However, if one were to push the envelope of discussion, one’s interlocutors will readily admit that it is the symptoms of corruption that are being identified as the problem while it is corruption and the abuse of power upto and inclusive of absolute impunity which really are. The concern is with deliberate and untrammeled corruption, abuse of all the rules with impunity that has resulted in bribery and violence ruling supreme. As long as this was seen as “someone else’s problem” the majority did not connect the dots of theft to their primary source– the pockets of Citizens Banda and Bisomenike. They were prepared to overlook the fact that there really was something rotten in the State of Sri Lanka. Recently, however, the implications of the wholesale misappropriation of what belongs to the people of this country has begun to dawn on my neighbours and they are no longer happy campers! However, the demagogues and charlatans, like the leaders of all good vigilante groups, have hung up the piñata of PR for the citizenry to whale on and that public, a noisy part of it anyway, has taken up the cry, demanding the return of FPTP, in modified if not pristine form, and certainly the reduction, if not total abandonment, of PR.

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