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How much life is left in the 13th Amendment?

15 Mar 2021

By Rajpal Abeynayake   The Core Group that supports the resolution that Sri Lanka is still steadfastly opposing at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva wants the provincial councils (PCs) to be operative under provisions of the 13th Amendment. Furthermore, India, our most important neighbour, wants the same for this country and asks for the 13th Amendment, essentially fathered by India, to be implemented.  The Amendment therefore has the quality of prescribed medicine, often resented by the patient complaining of the bitter taste it leaves in the mouth. If it isn’t the bitter taste, it’s the side effects and complications. For example, the previous United National Party (UNP) Government, though never having a stated aversion to the 13th Amendment, also didn’t implement it, and it’s generally suspected it was because of the fear of facing PC elections. At least, that’s what the then Opposition accused the UNP Government of. But the 13th Amendment has “antecedents”. It’s essentially considered a radical departure from the long-held political fealty towards centralised government. The Amendment was a direct result of the Indo-Lanka accord, whose midwife was J.R. Jayewardene, the late strongman President. He was, among other things, at least at the time of his presidency, a closet Indophile. He is known to have, early in his political life, advocated that this country be drawn into the Indian Union as an added State.  But he lived this down, became President, and then told the Hindus after the Indo-Lanka accord was signed, that his country was “forced” into signing the pact. But the liberals in his Government were very much in favour of it — and among them was the late Gamini Dissanayake, who at that time was reading for a doctorate at Cambridge, or so we were told — all in the best liberal traditions of his generation.  All this is not to traduce any of these erstwhile leaders, but to put the accord in context. It was essentially born at a time the UNP had been in power for 10 years, and national pride as we know it today stemming from the fact that Sri Lankan forces defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was non-existent. The Sinhala elite of that time, particularly from among the fraternity of the Buddhist monkhood, were frantically looking for alternate leadership, because in J.R. Jayawardene and the UNP, they saw an aloof cabal, that despite the accord and the devolution that it brought about, was paradoxically very Colombo centred, and seen to be far too Anglophile in its outlook. Fast forward 34 years to 2021, and it’s arguable that it is still the remnants of the liberal elite of that era who want the 13th Amendment in its original form to be implemented — and among this crowd can be counted the civil society backers of the accord from that time, such as the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) opinion-makers such as Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, etc. Strangely, overt political championing of the 13th Amendment is, today, almost non-existent.  Is Ranil Wickremesinghe, the UNP Leader, championing the accord? Not that we know of. Is the breakaway Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), or at least a rump group from it, overtly championing the 13th Amendment? Not that we know of. Not even the essentially English-speaking crowd who were brought up in the British public school tradition — read Royal College — such as MPs Eran Wickramaratne or Dr. Harsha de Silva, are known to be great adherents of devolution of power, PCs, and the 13th Amendment.  That means that the intellectual oxygen for the 13th Amendment, as that was present in 1987 and thereabouts, is largely absent today, and that has to be counted as among the political realities of our time. Therefore, it has become the lot of those largely non-political elements that are politically committed to the Amendment to vocalise the need for the Amendment to live on, and to be implemented. Who are these people? They may be counted from among the very few that may be supporting the Geneva Core Group Resolution in its original form, and among these may be the campaigners for the Resolution who have a vicarious interest in Sri Lanka from abroad.  Then there are the few 13th Amendment diehards, and Dayan Jayatilleka comes to mind. That’s not much to go by, at least in terms of numbers, in sizing up those who voice active vocal support for the 13th Amendment and the constitutional scheme of devolution that it introduced.  So, am I then suggesting that the 13th Amendment has lost most of its political capital? Not by a long shot. But the nature of the political capital that it enjoys has undergone a marked transformation since it was introduced in a shotgun arrangement in 1987. These days, the Amendment enjoys an alternate form of political capital as a result of being so much a part of the constitutional framework of this country that has come to be recognised, particularly, by Sri Lanka watchers abroad.  That’s formidable, for the simple reason that the way Sri Lanka is perceived in Western liberal circles, is the way the country is perceived by the mercantile elite who run a large part of the economy, and the opinion-making elite both here and abroad, who still form a formidable counterweight to the politicians who take their cues essentially from the electorate.  Then, of course, there is India, and needless to say, the political establishment would have to listen up when the Indians speak — and there is no need to labour the point. At the current UNHRC sessions, the Indian input has been unequivocal — Sri Lanka has been urged by the regional power to implement the 13th Amendment.  So that is as things stand. From all that’s stated above, what would be the seasoned political analyst’s bets on the survivability chances of the Amendment, the PCs and the scheme of devolution that was introduced as a result of the Indo-Lanka accord?  Perhaps, the only way a suitable answer can be arrived at is to feed all of the data as stated above into a computer, and let the machine dispassionately decide. Any human reading of events, particularly in this country, is bound to be coloured by strong emotions for or against the 13th Amendment, depending on the political location of each individual interlocutor that tries to grapple with this question of the short-to-long-term survivability of the 13th Amendment.  But what’s also significant in this context is the fact that the survivability issue has become a question at all. That became a reality particularly after statements made by Minister Sarath Weerasekara, who is primarily a Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointee. He offended the 13th Amendment diehards such as Dayan Jayatilleka, and then the latter took the bait and entered into a public debate with Weerasekara, which further brought the survivability question with regard to the 13th Amendment closer to the present-day political crosshairs.  That the Rajapaksa Government is impaled on the horns of a dilemma with regard to the 13th Amendment is a probably a grand understatement. If the Government sticks to the Amendment through the political and constitutional reform process that it is advocating, its electoral base would see it as having gone against its grain, but if the Amendment is repudiated through this process, that will be a radical departure from the scheme of things that India wants, all the Western interlocutors want, and therefore forms the political rubicon that’s not easily crossed. Even today, the majority of so-called sober analysts seem to feel that the 13th Amendment is here to stay, and that PC elections will be held after all. But the PCs have been non-functional long enough now to be essentially viewed as a dysfunctional institution by the public. There are various actors, both political and apolitical, that want to replace the PCs with a system of alternate devolution, and they think perhaps the concurrence of the Indians could be obtained for change. Not that devolution of power is a dead letter — but the fate of the 13th Amendment seems to be up in the air, at least in the public discourse, though what happens in the inner sanctums of decision-making away from the public eye, is still anybody’s guess.    (The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of three national English language publications and a practicing Attorney-at-Law. He is an Editors’ Guild award-winning columnist, and contributing writer and columnist for the Nikkei Asian Review and South China Morning Post, while his editorials have been published in The Australian)

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