Experience and experiment in politics-a false dichotomy

February 16th, 2008

by Rajan Philips

Fourth of February, Mahinda Rajapakse brought forth a new argument to justify his flat out rejection of the real APRC proposals and the dubious adoption of its ad-hoc recommendation to implement the Provincial Councils system under the Thirteenth Amendment. “We cannot offer solutions that are experiments”, he said, but only a solution “which can be implemented and about which we have experience.” The President’s speech writer is entitled to some self-satisfaction, but not much, for that person should know that experience and experiment are not mutually exclusive. One without the other will not be of much use. As the old Chinese saying goes-experience is like the comb one gets after going bald.

In 1931, the British colonial rulers began the biggest of all political experiments in modern Sri Lanka-the introduction of universal voting rights. Every one of the established leaders at that time, Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher, opposed the white man’s experiment based on their native or caste experience. Should we have spurned that experiment then, as President Rajapakse is spurning all experiments in devolution now?

The post-independence experience of voting rights has not been without blemishes. The Tamil plantation workers were deprived of their franchise by a UNP government soon after independence. Just two years ago, the Tamil people of the North and East were barred by the LTTE from voting in the last presidential election to ensure Ranil Wickremasinghe’s defeat and Rajapakse’s victory. In between, the whole country was put through the farcical experience of a referendum in place of the real experience of a parliamentary election. That was also J.R. Jayewardena’s too clever by half experiment which set up the catastrophe of 1983.

Six years ago, Sri Lanka tried a different experiment in signing the ceasefire agreement to end the ‘beggarly fighting’ (to paraphrase Yeats) that began after the catastrophe, and has since involved four presidential regimes and the LTTE. True to form, President Rajapakse, the fifth in line, has now abrogated the ceasefire experiment and opted for-what is to both the military and the LTTE-the proven experience of war. True to form too, the LTTE has restarted its suicide attacks in the South.

Those who are taking moral exceptions to the LTTE’s suicide-tactics have learnt nothing about the LTTE and forgotten everything. They have forgotten that there were no suicide killings for nearly two years after the ceasefire agreement was signed. There is more than one way to skin the political tiger, and the ceasefire experiment presented the least costly of all options, not just financially but in terms of human lives. Instead, President Rajapakse went ahead and abrogated the agreement because the LTTE has been violating it daily. Talk about bringing down the leaky roof in the midst of a rainstorm!

[Sen. Barack Obama, at a recent campaign rally]

In the farrago of American presidential primaries, Barack Obama, last week’s underdog and upstart, is the new frontrunner in the contest for the Democratic Party nomination, representing a bold new experiment and movement for change. Hillary Clinton, the hitherto favoured former first lady representing experience and record, not to mention gender, is being pummeled in state after state. Interestingly, they are both competing to put an end to America’s eight year experience under President Bush. They both want to end the war in Iraq, with Obama going further and promising to end not just the war but the mindset that led America into Iraq.

The ceasefire agreement in Sri Lanka was its first opportunity to change the mindset of war in twenty years. The assault on this mindset had begun in 1994 in the first and the better term of the Kumaratunga presidency although its material outcome came later in the constitutional proposals of 2000. Ranil Wickremasinghe and his UNP literally burnt them, while the LTTE contributed to their collapse with its own antics. Without a ceasefire the constitutional proposals could not go far enough towards acceptance and implementation. The mindset of war could not be changed.

The 2002 ceseafire agreement put an end to the fighting but left the political question open. It is a lie to suggest that the agreement lacked political legitimacy because RW had won a comprehensive parliamentary election in late 2001 after campaigning on the issue of peace and before signing the agreement in February 2002. I say comprehensive because RW’s coalition came first in over 90% the electorates but the actual number of seats won was reduced by the PR system. CBK had achieved a similar victory at the presidential election of 1994. Put another way, CBK’s constitutional initiative and RW’s ceasefire agreement had abundance of political legitimacy.

Those who cite the recent polling results in support of the war effort conveniently forget that not long ago public opinion was favouring the other side, the right side, and overwhelmingly so. What was tragic was that the political leadership failed to build on this strong political capital and achieve both peace and political solution, often for the most puerile of reasons. It is necessary to single out Chandrika Kumaratunga, Ranil Wickremasinghe and Lakshman Kadirgamar for this debacle, if only because much power was given to them, and much was expected of them. The lack of strong and united political leadership gave rise to corruption in government and to the laissez faire politics of the NGOs. Despite the sincere commitment of the many individuals involved in NGO enterprises, the NGOS ultimately contributed to public misgivings about the peace process. The people yearned for peace but smelled several rats in the peace process.

The biggest stink of course came from the LTTE. Its intentions in signing the ceasefire agreement were questionable at best and dishonourable at worst. But the ceasefire agreement for the first time gave the State of Sri Lanka a political instrument with international oversight to deal with the LTTE. The abrogation of the agreement has let the LTTE politically and internationally off the hook, and is symptomatic of the government’s entrenchment in the mindset of war rather than liberation from it.

In political terms, the abrogation of the ceasefire agreement is akin to the constitutional stipulation of Sri Lanka as a unitary state that began with the 1972 Constitution. This rigidly limiting provision has made the resolution of the Tamil question virtually impossible. In contrast, finding a solution under the Soulbury Constitution (1947-1972) was considerably easier because, even though the Soulbury Constitution was technically unitary, it did not declare itself to be unitary. Analogously, even though the ceasefire agreement was technically in tatters, keeping it on paper would have signaled the government’s willingness to find a political solution even while returning LTTE’s fire with fire. Abrogating it has sent the opposite signal, confirming the government’s intent to pursue a military solution at all costs.

Given this intent, the commitment to implementing the Thirteenth Amendment, anymore than what has been tried so far, lacks credibility. Much has been said about the inadequacy of the Thirteenth Amendment, but the real question is whether there is the will and the willingness to implement it in full and in the spirit of the Indo-Lanka Agreement. The genius of the American Constitution, as Hillary Clinton pointed out in one of her recent stump speeches, has been its flexibility to expand as much as the Americans were ready to expand their hearts to be more inclusive. With expansive hearts, Sri Lanka could have managed with the Soulbury Constitution. Without a change of heart, no constitution will be good enough in the future.

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