overcoming the post-war malaise why sri lanka needs a reform ministry and what it should do

8/12/2019 Overcoming the Post-war Malaise Why Sri Lanka Needs a Reform Ministry and What It Should Do

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OVERCOMING THE POST-WAR MALAISE:

WHY SRI LANKA NEEDS A REFORM

MINISTRY AND WHAT IT SHOULD DO

by Asanga Welikala

- on 05/27/2014

The High Priests of Liberal Conservatism: Edmund Burke and D.S. Senanayake arethe paradigms of thought and action for the Reform Ministry

[Photo credit: The Empire Youth Annual, 1952]For centuries the Sinhalese and the Tamils have lived together in peace and amity.We have been governed by their kings and they by ours I put this question bluntlyto my Tamil friends. Do you want to be governed by London or do you want, asCeylonese, to help govern Ceylon? Shall the most ancient of our civilisations sink intothe level of a dull and dreary negation? We all know and admire their special qualities.They are essential to the welfare of this Island, and I ask them to come over and helpus.
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Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

***There are those on each side of the Sinhala-Tamil ethnic divide for whom whathappened last week five years ago is either an unadulterated triumph or anunmitigated disaster. For more thoughtful Sri Lankans, however, I suspect thedominant feeling today is of an overpowering sense of malaise, that something is veryseriously wrong about our post-war condition, that we are storing up problems for thefuture through hubris, myopia, spite and folly, and that we may not have seen the last

of conflict and division in our country. At its heart, I would encapsulate this sense ofmalaise in the following question: why are we doing things that guarantee, if notanother war in a future generation, then at least a fundamentally unjust and chronicallyunstable, and therefore perpetually unhappy country?

But it is also broader than that. How and why is it that in post-colonial Sri Lanka, everyconstitutional moment that calls for reform and renewal instead brings forth reactionand regression? How is it that politics today is not the study and practice of a field ofactivity in which we strive to find answers to our temporal problems through reasonedagreement and reasonable disagreement, but an arena for an unwelcome, but

inescapable and endless, orgy of violence, venality and vapidity? How and why is itthat the model of political leadership and culture that our democracy produces fromTemple Trees to the Hambantota mayoralty is, to use the Sinhala idiom, a grotesquecombination of the gam chandiya , kasippu mudal li andpansal h muduruvo rolledinto one, when we would not usually treat these as role models elsewhere in our publicand private life?

How is it that those who have spent their entire sorry lives arguing that there was noethnic problem in Sri Lanka, and therefore that the war was about defeating Tiger
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terrorism, are now treating the entire Tamil community as losers? Why are theMuslims, a minority that has never been anything less than wholly loyal to Sri Lanka,being treated as the new enemy? Is there no end to the bloodlust and sadism ofethno-religious supremacists? Is there no way to conceive of politics other than as anunending minority bashing exercise? If nothing else, do we never get bored of it all?If politics is understood as the application of universal principles of good government

adhered to by the community of democratic nations to our own historical and culturalconditions, based on our own political and economic needs, then why is it that weseem congenitally incapable of politics? Especially when in other fields of humanendeavour, we are not only comfortable with each other and the rest of the world, butconsistently produce a level of confident competence, and very often brilliance, that isfar above our punching weight as a small Asian island? For example, why can we notdo politics the way we play international cricket, where we seem entirely able tooperate within the universal rules and spirit of the game, while reflecting our societalpluralism and giving full vent to our unique identity and national genius? There is noreason, except for the provincialism and loutishness of those who currently run its

government, that Sri Lankas place in the world can easily be what Scyld Berryrecently said, admiringly, of Sri Lankan cricket.

There is no doubt that the regime is the major cause and generator of this malaise.The Rajapaksas have coarsened our political discourse, made ignorance andxenophobia public virtues, eviscerated our institutions, decimated the Supreme Court,destroyed any semblance of constitutional government, fed and watered a newgeneration of clerical fascists, brutalised our minorities, infantalised our electorate,putrefied our political system, abused our friends, cheapened our history, affronted ourhopes, insulted our intelligence, and violated our dignity. In short, they have utterly

diminished our country, and made it into a doppelganger of their own nasty and brutishselves. This is an extortionate price to pay for a few motorways and a beautifiedColombo, and we have to ask ourselves even more starkly the question that RonaldDworkin asked in the context of the American culture wars: is democracy possiblehere?But what is even more worrying about this state of malaise and this is my realconcern in this essay is the seeming lack of political imagination and democraticalternatives, at the level of both ideas and action, in finding our way out of this awfulmorass. In particular, two traditions within the reformist strain of Sri Lankanconstitutional politics with which I am particularly concerned political liberalism and

minoritarian nationalism seem to require a major dose of intellectual rejuvenation ifthey are to meet and prevail over the electoral juggernaut that is post-war Sinhala-Buddhist ethnocracy. At the moment, perplexed by reality and humiliated by rejection,liberals have largely been reduced to lachrymose outpourings of petulance anddistress, or in the case of some Tamil nationalists, to reckless bravado, which far fromshowing courage actually suggests the pervasive absence of ideas and critical self-reflection within this worldview. These totally inadequate and self-defeating responsesto the serious ideological, electoral and existential challenges posed by the nature ofthe post-war state, only strengthens the regime and the ideology that liberals and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/srilanka/10845924/Sri-Lanka-emerge-as-rivals-to-resurgent-Australia-as-leaders-in-world-cricket-albeit-belatedly.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/srilanka/10845924/Sri-Lanka-emerge-as-rivals-to-resurgent-Australia-as-leaders-in-world-cricket-albeit-belatedly.html


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Tamil nationalists despise.

Liberalism, if it is to have a future in Sri Lanka, should not become a euphemism forhandwringing ineffectuality, and it certainly should not become a refuge for rootlesscosmopolitanism or self-pitying defeatism. It should be the sanctuary of constitutionalpatriots in the tradition of the Ceylon National Congress, firmly grounded in our

national past and our plural society, not a badge and bolthole for itinerant ideologicalshysters peddling passing fads and fancies of the international NGO universe.Liberalism is of course defined by its broad catholicity, and rightly so, but when everybleeding heart in town seems to think that it means the same thing as the possessionof ordinary human capacities for kindness and empathy, charity and compassion,decency and tolerance, then it surely means that at the very least, it has a problem ofdefinition as a philosophical disposition, a body of political principles, and as acategory of constitutional thought. If the serious problem of ethnocratic state-buildingis to be stopped in its tracks as it must be, and if liberalisms central concerns ofpluralism, civil and political rights, and constitutional democracy are to be taken more

seriously than pious discourses with which to savage the regime in Geneva,Washington, New Delhi and London, then what is required is not the intellectualindolence and mawkish emotionalism that we see among liberals and Tamilnationalists today, but a recommitment to doing some really hard work, first and mostcritically at the level of ideas, then and thereafter at the level of political action.The Sri Lankan electorate gave reformism two great chances in the general electionsof August 1994 and December 2001, but what ought to have been the magnificentpinnacle of Sri Lankan reformism the decade between 1994 and 2004 instead wasan abject and comprehensive failure. This epochal and anticlimactic flop, a case ofsnatching defeat from the jaws of victory that mirrors the tragedy of our first post-

independence decade, calls for critical self-reflection of a sort that I do not seehappening among liberals, echoing the way in which post-defeat Tamil nationalistsseem to prefer amnesia to reflection with regard to the Tigers.If we are to ensure the survival of the reformist tradition, however, I contend that fourfundamental problems that have always afflicted liberalism and (moderate, federalist)Tamil nationalism needs to be addressed immediately and purposefully. Firstly, bothtraditions pay inadequate attention to context and reality in the way political andconstitutional problems are analysed and understood. Without a realistic appreciationof conditions, they also, secondly, have a tendency to seek quick fix solutions, via theinternational community or electoral adventurism, to age-old problems that require a

patient, long-duration approach, and painstaking, very hard intellectual and politicalwork. Thirdly, because of the absence of analytical realism and a disinterest, if not aparadoxical disdain, for localism in practice, they also tend to place an over-relianceon comparative experiences to provide lessons for Sri Lanka. This is problematic notbecause these experiences are irrelevant, but because of the inability, already noted,to contextualise useful experiences to the concrete historical, political and culturalcontext of Sri Lanka. The net result of these methodological and conceptualweaknesses is that both traditions place their idealised visions of political ends at theforefront, and determine their political means on the basis of these a priori goals,


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meaning that most reformist arguments involve exhortations to emulate this or thatcountry, or best practice gobbledegook, without making a meaningful case as to whySri Lanka could be doing things better, differently. In a sceptical electorate, this placesan insurmountable burden of justification for reformist arguments, and from an internalpoint of view, it explains why at every turn reformism has failed in Sri Lanka.Finally, both traditions have placed inordinate focus on legal rights and institutions,

without understanding that institutions and rights, while important, are only onedimension of the way in which a democracy functions. As much or more important isthe political culture and it is here that they have been entirely without answers. Thusfor example, some think that the abolition of the executive presidency and itsreplacement with a parliamentary executive would answer most if not all of ourproblems with constitutional democracy. This is completely fallacious, as we shouldknow from the experience of 1970-77, and that as an institutional model, theWestminster executive is much more unconstrained than a presidential system basedon the separation of powers. We should remember the executive presidency is merelythe institutional form of populist authoritarianism. By far the most important factor here

is the personal relationship that the charismatic populist enjoys with the electorate (ora sufficiently large section of it). If reformists cannot sever that relationship bypersuading the electorate that there is a better way of doing and being, then there islittle point in trying to reform institutions (and in any case, there will be little opportunityof doing so because reformists would not obtain the necessary power).

Similarly, if what was introduced pursuant to the Indo-Lanka Accord was a fully federalconstitution and not mere devolution, I doubt if the reality of implementation would beany different to what we have now, because an institutional re-figuration of the statewithout a concomitant overhaul of its systemic culture does nothing to ensure

reformed institutions function in the way the reformers intend. Likewise, while theEighteenth Amendment should be unequivocally deplored, we seem to have forgottenabout what happened to the much-lamented Seventeenth Amendment, which wasnever properly implemented in its lifetime, moreover by a president who is now apotential figurehead for another reformist quick fix experiment in the next presidentialelection. Of course institutions are important, but in politically developing democracies,reformists need to remember that the animating culture of politics is where the realaction is, and the prospects for reform are directly proportionate to the ability ofreformists to address culture directly, in such a way as to ensure that their values andprinciples are to be practiced as a part of that culture. Institutional reforms alone will

achieve very little when they are against, or can be successfully portrayed by populistsand nativists as being against, the grain of the dominant culture.

My argument in this essay is that while Sri Lanka badly needs reform the inexorablecorollary of which is that the Rajapaksa regime must be electorally defeated and theirdisastrous influence on the Sri Lankan state removed root and branch the approachof reformists I have outlined above needs to be reversed if reformism is to have anychance of succeeding in Sri Lanka. Politics might be the art of the possible, but only ifthe artist knows what is politically possible in any specific conjuncture of time and


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space. The constraints on certain policies at certain times means that they must eitherbe postponed or refashioned, but the incentive to adhere to this functional realism as amethod of constitutional politics is the axiom that time and place always change, fromwhich we derive the understanding that, what is not possible now, may be more thanpossible in the future. The alternatives are either the a priori normative and ideologicalfundamentalism that is the hallmark of certain types of liberal or Tamil nationalist,

which is demonstrably doomed to failure, or the amoral, normless vacuum that isoccupied by most people in politics, notably the Foreign Minister, the Chief Justice, theCentral Bank Governor, and the leader of the Liberal Party, which is disgraceful.In the post-war context, and specifically in the light of the regimes reconfiguration ofthe relationship between the Sri Lankan state, majoritarian democracy, the Sinhala-Buddhist nation, and the military, my approach demands a new understanding of therelationship between functions and norms. Constitutional reform must be understoodas a category of political practice, in particular of Sri Lankan electoral democracy, andwe must refashion liberal norms in ways that ensure they make sense to those whofunction within this specific political system. This emphatically does not mean that the

essential integrity of pluralistic norms ought to be sacrificed in favour of majoritarianelectoral expediency. Rather, it means that by rearticulating those norms so that theyhave greater meaning to the majority nation within a pluralistic polity, the norms arethemselves better protected through wider subscription, and further, that incrementaland step-by-consolidating-step change over a longer historical period is to bepreferred as a more durable method of reform than attempting to administerrevolutionary or external shocks to an ancient polity. Normatively, Burke, not Paine,should guide us here, and methodologically, the Annales School, which insists on boththe broad focus of the longue dure and the complete study of historical problems.While the most visible consequence of the opposite approach described above has

been the electoral defeat of reformism time and again, the more serious consequenceis far worse. It has meant that reformism has come to be seen as culturallyinconsistent with the Sri Lankan, or what is the same thing in the ethnocratic context,the Sinhala-Buddhist, national ethos. This is not merely a tragedy but also a farce, inthat it is a criminal omission for patriotic reformists to allow the likes of GalagodaAththe Gnanasara to articulate what it means to be Sinhalese and Buddhist, as muchas it was, previously, to allow Velupillai Prabhakaran to do the same with the Tamilidentity. These two individuals (among many others) represent the worst possiblefacets of the respective nations and the key challenge for reformists is to ensure thatthe better facets of both nations, understood as societal cultures, are encouraged to

flourish, so that the full potential of the composite Sri Lankan civic nation that isconstituted by the islands two ethno-cultural nations and other communities can at lastbegin to be realised.

We need therefore a Reform Ministry to consolidate the peace and begin the long,intergenerational journey that will shape and reshape the Sri Lankan state in slow,deliberate, incremental reforms. Each step of this way will have to be rigorouslydebated and democratic consensus built around each new measure. This will be apainfully slow and frustrating process and no constituency will get all that it seeks. But


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this is the way the strongest democratic states have been built elsewhere, and it is notmerely a good lesson to learn but an imperative one. The key perspectives that informthis argument are as follows.

The first and most important point is that durable political change happens from withinthe state, not beyond it, and certainly not if imposed from outside. If this cardinal

premise is not understood and internalised, there is very little possibility of furtheringthe reformist agenda. Sri Lankas most valuable resource in this is its democracy. Theethnicised majoritarianism that we rightly critique in Sri Lankan democracy must neverblind reformists to the fact that democratic proceduralism is nevertheless anentrenched feature of Sri Lankas political culture. Before the post-war military-bureaucracy dismantles too much of it, the challenge is to fully utilise this establishedprocedure for political change in order to obtain the power and the space necessary tocorrect its substantive defects. The implication that flows from the recognition thatconstitutional reform (including reconciliation and accountability) are an intra-state andnot a supra-state enterprise is that the primary battleground for reformism is electoral

politics, and specifically electoral politics within the South, for there is little need toconvince the Tamils or even the Muslims that the state must be reformed.The next key perspective I rely on, consistently with my approach of placing equalemphasis on functions and norms and echoing the point previously made aboutpolitical culture, draws from a useful distinction in constitutional theory as between thelegal constitution and the political constitution. These two entities co-exist in everyconstitutional system, albeit that the precise relationship between the two is highlycontext-specific and dependent on the history, politics, culture and even economy ofeach country. It is a theoretical distinction that was first proposed by Carl Schmitt indeveloping his concept of the political and his critique of Hans Kelsens pure theory of

law, but is now widely accepted in liberal political and constitutional theory as a highlyrelevant tool of analytical and descriptive theory. In our own case, I want to onlyunderscore a couple of salient insights by its application that are relevant to thepresent discussion. We clearly have both a legal constitution (currently the text of the1978 Constitution) and a political constitution. I suggest that the substance of the latteris mainly provided by the ideological claims of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, derivedfrom the historiographical tropes of the vamsas, by the cognitive social memories ofthe ancient Asokan-style kingship and its rituals, and by the doctrinal principles ofBuddhism itself, such as theAgganna Sutta and the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta. Thereare other elements of the political constitution such as those arising from the

imperatives of political entrepreneurship, dynastic consolidation and clientelist politics,but I will set those aside for the moment.

There are two main implications of this for the present discussion. Focussing on thetext of the legal constitution and its institutions, as liberals and reformists traditionallydo, is misleading in that it provides only a partial account of how government works. Itis accordingly highly misleading to assume that textual amendments to the legalconstitution and institutional reforms will lead to the realisation of reformistexpectations, because the political constitution remains intact through legal reforms,


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and the reformed legal constitution continues to be implemented in exactly the sameor highly proximate way as before, according to the dictates of the political constitution(recall again the Thirteenth Amendment, or slightly differently, the SeventeenthAmendment). The other point is that the political constitution, so long as it enjoyslegitimacy and support among the members of the majority nation, will continue tosupersede the legal constitution, and the perceived illegitimacies of either the legal or

political constitutions from minoritarian or liberal-normative perspectives count for verylittle in ameliorating the adverse effects of their implementation on minorities. This is inshort the central logic of the type of state we have, the model known as ethnocracy(theorised most completely by Oren Yiftachel). If we understand the state and theconstitutional order in this way, it becomes clear that the pressing challenge forreformism lies not in amending the text of the legal constitution, but in changing theinarticulate and amorphous, but deeply resonant and legitimate, political constitution.In other words, the former is important, but it is the relatively easy task and should beundertaken only in conjunction with or in succession to the latter.

If the ideology of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism as the foundation of the politicalconstitution has been the cause of hyper-centralisation and a refusal to share power ina plural polity, then the national space within which it prospers is also where pluralistarguments must most forcefully and most persuasively be made. In undertaking thistask, the key conceptual distinction that must be made is that between the nation andnationalism, which means that Dharmapalian Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists must bechallenged and defeated within and not outside the discursive terrain of the Sinhala-Buddhist nation. There are absolutely no shortcuts, international or otherwise, fromthis difficult process. Through our commitment to a principled but open (as opposed toa parochial and insular) constitutional indigeneity, we have to bring the full force of

history to bear on the clerical and thespian charlatans who are today engaged in acultural industry of historical distortion in the service of the ethnocratic state-buildingproject. Comparably to other old nations, the Sinhala-Buddhist nation also has bothintolerant and inclusive dimensions, but ever since the nineteenth century anti-colonialrevival, it has been perpetuated entirely on the strength of its exclusionary aspect. Itspluralist potential has never been explored beyond anthropological textbooks, butthese are arguments about the inherent tolerance and pluralism of Buddhism andthe devolutionary and asymmetric character of the pre-colonial Sinhala state thatneed to be fully articulated within practical politics if the nation is to be salvaged fromthe nationalists.

A similar process of critical and self-correcting debate must take place within Tamilnationalism, proceeding from the premise that the purpose of this is to strengthen thegradual construction of a reformist consensus in the South and thereby to complementthe wider process of intra-state constitutional reform, not to pursue irresponsible andcompletely unrealistic and unrealisable ambitions of future secessionism. Some Tamilnationalists will no doubt feel affronted by this argument, on the ground that the rightsof the Tamil nation are not dependent on the goodwill of the Sinhalese. I cannot agreemore in theory, but in practice, it would represent a regrettable failure to learn the


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terrible lessons of the past. Sri Lankan Tamils do not need another generation of falseprophets to lead them to more death and destruction, and most importantly, they morethan others need the fundamental reforms to the state in order to ensure theconstitutional recognition, institutional representation and territorial autonomy theyhave the moral and legal right to expect of the state as a historic nation within theterritorial and historical space of the island. Again, however, it is important to reiterate

that the fullest measure of accommodation, including especially the recognition of asub-state national status, cannot be demanded as the starting point of the reformprocess. That would be to repeat the mistakes of the past and to reliably ensure thatno reform takes place at all. And serious problems that are almost inherent within theideology of Tamil nationalism, such as for example the contradictions within the notionof Tamil-speaking people or the weaknesses with the territorial claim in the East,need to be properly addressed, not ignored. This requires positive work, not the shrilldenunciations of the critics that have always been Tamil nationalisms way of dealingwith these issues.

I have used the term Reform Ministry to denote a new reformist government, ratherthan a reform movement, because even though the latter must precede the former andis indispensible to it, it follows from the point made above that reformists need toacquire control over the state in order to reform it. Consensus and coalition building isessential to ensuring the desired electoral result of defeating the regime of course, butactual reform happens on the site of state power, and getting there is the crucial firststep. I have borrowed the term reform ministry from British political history after thereforming Whig administrations of Earl Grey and Viscount Melbourne, which amongother measures enacted the Great Reform Act of 1832, one of the foundational planksof British constitutional modernity, and in the victorious aftermath of the Napoleonic

Wars, one of the series of reforms that reconstituted the political and social platformfor the national renaissance to follow in the Victorian Age. Our situation post-war issimilar inasmuch as in Britain in 1830, an era has ended and for the new one to bringout our fullest potential, we need to put in place the necessary reforms. The processwill be equally difficult in pitting the forces of reform against those of reaction, in thecontext of a multinational polity that requires the democratic consolidation of acohering, inclusive, stable, and above all, a united, single state. Such a state can onlybe built on a commitment to recognising the fundamental plurality of nations andcommunities that constitute its social foundations, not on the ethnic and religioussupremacism of the ethnocratic state, nor the conceptual procrusteanism of classical

modernist nation-state theory.

The Rajapaksa regime is not merely anti-reform and anti-modern, but also anti-national. There is no point in loudly bemoaning the fact, as liberals are wont thesedays to do, that a supposedly mature electorate with an experience of 83 years ofcompetitive party politics is so catastrophically unable to discover its own self-interestas to be blind to the collective self-destruction that the regime is leading them to. Lowcunning, belligerent nationalism and shameless populism can only go so far before theinevitable collapse through institutional decay and pervasive corruption occurs. But


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this is not a reason for smug complacency, for the collapse will be a collapse notmerely of the regime but also of the state, which means all of us. The more importantquestion therefore that needs to be asked is: what alternatives and options havereformism provided the electorate?

Liberals in civil society organisations have argued themselves out of the reckoning by

associating themselves closely with international intervention on the war crimes issue.While I admire the moral courage of those who remain true to their conscience andbeliefs in demanding international justice for these terrible crimes (although I do thinkmuch of this is largely beleaguered group-think rather than considered positions), thefact of the matter is that this is not a platform upon which reformism can win anelection in the South and therefore state-wide. In any case, we do not and have neverhad a civil society strong enough to materially affect political change. What severalgenerations of procedural democracy has entrenched however is a deeply politicisedsociety, which means that for the electoral endgame to work, there must be a strong,credible and attractive democratic opposition, led by a traditional, mainstream political

party that plays its logical role in a two-party dominant political system. In such apolitical system, there are no, and need not be, magic bullet solutions, such ascommon candidates and single-issue candidates. I am at a loss to understand howseemingly sane people are not only contemplating, but going to considerable lengthsto advocate, these risky, improbable, wild card options, when the answer is far moreprosaic.

To restate the blindingly obvious, what our political system and culture dictates is thatonly the United National Party (or a coalition built around it) can lead the electorate toa rejection of an SLFP-led coalition (and vice versa) at a state-wide election. That truth

is subject to two caveats in the present context. The first is that there has to be ahighly visible and demonstrable change of personnel in the leadership of the UNP. Thetime has passed for cosmetic internal reforms that have proved to be entirelymeaningless, and the most important change that is necessary to persuade theelectorate that things have genuinely changed is for Mr Ranil Wickremasinghe toresign from his various roles including that of party leader and Leader of theOpposition. With him must go his cabal of tired and pathologically unsuccessfulloyalists. Mr Wickremasinghe is a decent and literate man and a talented andmethodical administrator who would have made an excellent Permanent Secretary inthe Ceylon Civil Service, or a good Prime Minister to a more politically astute and

charismatic President, perhaps as a Michel Debr to a Charles de Gaulle. But I haveunfortunately to agree with his critics that he has lost too many elections and has noprospect whatever of winning another one for his position to be tenable, but unlikethem, I have no interest or desire to question his patriotism in engaging in the lastpeace process. It is deplorable that he is depicted as an appeaser of terrorism who,given half a chance, would happily have divided the country. Such allegations arenothing but contumacious personal attacks on a man who took difficult decisions in adifficult situation, with a democratic mandate in the general elections of December2001 to undertake negotiations with the Tigers. His role in public life as a senior


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statesman is not ended, but his role in the leadership of the UNP most definitely must.The party is bigger than him, and the health of Sri Lankan democracy even bigger.A dramatic change of UNP leadership should help check, but not stop, thehaemorrhage of electoral support, the loss of morale and residual scepticism thatconstitute the legacy of losing all bar one state-wide election for twenty years. There isa process of internal reform, reconstruction and renewal awaiting the UNP that is not

dissimilar to what must happen with the Sri Lankan state. This therefore means thatthe next leader and his team cannot realistically be expected to win the nextpresidential or general election, especially not against the tried and tested machine ofthe UPFA and its veteran candidate. The more realistic aim is to reconstruct the coreUNP vote base, which together with the rejuvenated JVP would ensure a respectableenough result for the opposition as to start returning to the winning habit. Mostimportantly of all, it would impart a fresh sense of hope and expectation in theelectorate that the Rajapaksas are not invincible, and that their Gadarene charge intothe abyss can be stopped.The second caveat is that, while the new UNP must be able to project a sufficiently

patriotic image to the Southern electorate as to be a credible alternative to the regime,this does not and must not mean that the only plausible UNP candidate should be aRajapaksa clone in a green shirt. This therefore is where the reformist component ofthe Reform Ministry becomes crucial. It is not sufficient here to rely on the goodwill of apolitical leader and Cakkavattic leader-centrism is in any case not an approach that isconsistent with the reformist political culture the new dispensation should instantiate.At the level of broad ideas and policy orientation, the Reform Ministrys task is toregister a break with the style and substance of the Rajapaksa regime. It needs toreintroduce constitutional government, restore the primacy of institutions overpersonalities, restore the confidence of minorities in law and order and start putting in

place the processes necessary to bringing them into the fold of the Sri Lankan stateand composite national identity, and decisively shed every vestige of orientaldespotism that currently characterises the Sri Lankan state. It needs to tackle thetricky issue of restoring civil-military relations to a more conventional balance.The Reform Ministry therefore must concretely articulate and reflect an initial reformconsensus, which in addition to the general considerations mentioned above, mustinclude more specific commitments with regard to both the legal and politicalconstitutions, so as to both build public confidence in its programme and to ensure theirreversibility of the reform agenda. These are of course matters to be evolved throughdiscussion, debate and coalition building negotiations, but I would suggest the

following issues as constituting the core of such an agenda.

On the legal constitution, unrealistic promises about dramatic or pervasiveconstitutional reforms must be carefully avoided. Three matters however can beundertaken immediately, viz., the abolition of the Eighteenth Amendment, therestoration of the scheme of the Seventeenth Amendment (with necessaryimprovements arising from past experience and consequential limitations onpresidential powers), and the full and faithful implementation of the ThirteenthAmendment (together with a series of statutory but not necessarily constitutional


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reforms, to ensure the devolution scheme works as well as it can). I have discussedthese matterselsewhere, although that is merely the tip of the iceberg of what ispossible. These changes require little or no public persuasion, but we have to and canlearn a lot from other experiences, from the United Kingdom (a formally unitary statewith what is in reality a federal system) to Ethiopia (a formally federal state with what isin reality a unitary system) to the ones in between, particularly India and South Africa.

Subject, of course, to the caveat that all if this must the related and contextualised forour own conditions.

Tamil nationalists rejected the Thirteenth Amendment on ideological grounds, althoughone cannot help but sympathise with a situation in which an entire approach on thepart of the central government was determined by the unbelievably stupidterminological misconception that for the state to remain whole, there could only beone government, and that the North-Eastern Provincial Council could not and shouldnot call itself a government for the two provinces. On such idiocies do states fail, andone of the first things we must do is to defang certain terms of the poisonous import

they have. For example, Tamil nationalists use self-determination in the same waythat Sinhala nationalists use sovereignty. The primary purpose of these usages,which assume a conceptual clarity about these words that no serious scholar wouldever give them, is to attack, or at the very least discomfit, the other side. But do werealise that the purpose of both is to make every other abstraction like the state andself-government worthwhile? Neither party has in fact thought much about what theterms and concepts actually mean and how they could help us mutually to obtainaccord. Have any of us really ever explored how the right to self-determination merelymeans a real and meaningful constitutional promise to be taken seriously and berespected? Surely that is what the people of the North have meant when they have

voted consistently in every election since 1956 to reaffirm the belief that they are anation having the right to self-determination? Or that sovereignty merely means that itis the political power and the legal authority that citizens have given the state,temporarily exercised by democratically elected and democratically rejectedgovernments, to enforce coercive power in the best interests of all, and that all itsnormative meaning is lost if it is used on behalf one group against another in a pluralpolity? Sovereignty does not belong exclusively to either the state or the people, but isthe product of a continuing relationship between the two, and in a multi-demoi polity,this also means that that both sovereignty and constituted power have multipleconstituent sources.

I think there is a better way. There is a system in place strangely for a unitary state,one that is modelled on a federal state that holds massive promise if the legalconstitution is matched by a commitment to devolution in the political constitution. Ihave never been less than impressed by the people who are in charge of devolutionsdaily implementation at both the centre and the provinces, and never felt anythingother than chagrin that they are not allowed to do their job. We must get the politicalconstitution out of the way of the implementation of the legal constitution, and refocusour attention on how and why the political constitution can in fact be the devolutionary
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and asymmetric one that is more consonant with our our past, rather than the unitarylogic that is merely a colonial product. We have had the unitary state only since theBenthamite reforms of Charles Hay Cameron in 1833, whereas we have had a diffuseand asymmetric galactic polity for thousands of years before that. In short, the historythat is advanced by Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists in support of their arguments for theethnocratic state does not support their claims about the centralised nature of the state

but the exact opposite. Again, however, it must be reiterated that this calls for a patientprocess of dialogue and debate within the Sinhala-Buddhist nation, and it will take timefor it bear fruit.

Having a realistic, and therefore restricted, programme of constitutional reform,however, emphatically does not mean the end of constitutional reform, because it isessentially a short-term strategic concession in order to realise a deeper commitmentto long-term reform. Our long-term telos is of Sri Lanka as a plurinational democracy,but that does not dictate a teleological method, for that would be to repeat theconfusion over functions and norms that has been the enduring mistake of reformism

in the past. Let us take another cue from cricket. Recall that the last time we changedthe rules of the game when Dav Whatmore put Romesh Kaluwitharana and SanathJayasuriya to open the batting order, and not when Arjuna Ranatunga led the team offthe field in response to injustice we literally changed the world. Just like how ourapproach in cricket is built upon the classicism of Marvan Atapattu, MahelaJayewardene and Kumar Sangakkara together with the brilliant freaks of nature thatare Muttiah Muralidaran, Lasith Malinga, and Ajantha Mendis, our approach to politicsmust be governed by the overarching understanding that we are part of the worldwhile having our own identity. It must be about confident engagement, not paranoidparochialism, and the realisation that we have within us the historical and cultural

resources for reform, although we seem so far only to have used our resources forreaction. Thus starting with the implementation of devolution in the legal constitutionwhile concurrently moving the political constitution in a more pluralistic direction is howthe space and opportunity is created, when the time is right, for further reforms to thelegal constitution and to further build upon devolution.

Therefore, a comprehensive process drawing upon, but not dependant on,international best practice must be designed to undertake a complete review of theconstitution(s), in order to address issues of democracy and pluralism and post-warreconciliation. The Northern Provincial Council needs to enjoy a parity of esteem (not

to be confused with an equality of status) in this process, reflecting the special natureof the Tamil claim to autonomy. This should work throughout the life of the nextParliament (i.e., six years) and be ready to report for the government to includerecommendations in the legislative programme for the following Parliament. The exactnature of the process will depend on whether the Reform Ministry is in governmentafter the next state-wide elections, but if not, there are other ways in which a non-governmental process can be undertaken. The changes to the political constitution areeven more important. It would be relatively uncontroversial to introducecomprehensive codes of practice on restoring principles of democratic governance,


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professionalism and integrity to the way government functions. The least difficult issuehere will be in disciplining the feral pack of monkish thugs that has been unleashedand succoured by the Rajapaksas. They will have to be dealt with carefully but firmlyand sent back to their temples or to prison as appropriate. But the more serious workwith regard to the political constitution in the ways outlined above must begin.

This will just be the start, but if it forms the basis for defeating the regime within thenext two rounds of state-wide elections, then it promises a brighter and moredeserving political future for all of us to whom that island is home. We are all of usmuch better, and have the potential for much better, than what the Rajapaksas havemade of us.

overcoming the post-war malaise why sri lanka needs a reform ministry and what it should do

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