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| Sunday, 25 August 2002 |
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Editor, Sunday Observer. E-mail: [email protected] Snail mail : Sunday Observer, 35, D.R.Wijewardana Mawatha, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Telephone : 94 1 429239 / 331181 Fax : 94 1 429230 Political stability The political co-habitation between the People's Alliance-controlled Presidency and the United National Front-dominated Parliament that emerged after last December's general election is something new to the Sri Lankan polity and has thrust new challenges on our national leadership even as it also affords new opportunities. But successful governance requires a modicum of stability in the institutions of governance. The danger of the overthrow of either of the political parties that control each of the two principal institutions of governance - the Presidency and the Government - only signifies a troublesome uncertainty over that much-needed political stability. No Government can proceed on the basis of deliberate strategy and policy if its future is uncertain. The vagaries of J.R. Jayewardene's Second Republican Constitution are such as to guarantee such uncertainty. The President has the absolute power to dissolve Parliament after the completion of its first year of tenure thereby un-seating the party in Government. That President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga has already used this power at the very first opportunity and, indeed, did so despite her own public assurance not to, is now history. Today, the new UNF Government lives under that very same threat of dissolution. No Government would wish to live and govern in such a situation. It simply does not provide for any kind of systematic governance on the basis of proper policy and strategy. The inability to look beyond the certainty of a mere twelve months deprives the governing political party of its political capacity to implement policy while emasculating its reservoir of political motivation. That this debilitating institutional condition is a result of a constitution they too helped install during the United National Party-led regime under Prime Minister J.R. Jayewardene is an irony many in today's Cabinet of Ministers must surely appreciate. But the further irony that the very same party that ushered it in now seeks to reverse that constitutional trend, must not cloud the urgent need for that reversal. All political parties that seek the continuity of the current Sri Lankan political ethos of Western-style parliamentary democracy must not hesitate in collaborating in constitutional reform for this purpose. It is only the dilution of existing presidential powers over the legislature that will provide an aura of stability in governance, especially in a governance shared by two political parties. At the same time, however, the two political parties that share the powers of governance need to guarantee to the people that parliamentary stability will indeed facilitate a constructive collaboration between these two parties. A sharing of power in the institutions of governance between two political parties cannot be successful as long as either one or both parties are intent solely on politically undermining each other. The political co-habitation between the People's Alliance-controlled Presidency and the United National Front-dominated Parliament was originally hailed as a harbinger of that long-sought consensus between the two main national political parties on a policy and strategy platform for negotiations on a final settlement of the ethnic conflict. It was thought that these two parties, representing the bulk of the Sri Lankan electorate, would at last be compelled to collaborate on the key issue of solving the ethnic conflict; that decades of political rivalry on this very issue would now cease to be an obstacle to peace. . The past nine months of co-habitation, however, have shown only the most minimal collaboration on this most urgent and vital national issue. The concrete challenge before both parties is to reverse their confrontation on the issue of continuity of power into a collaboration. While the PA is obliged to extend its fullest co-operation in the dilution of presidential powers over Parliament's tenure, the UNF needs to find ways of concretely reassuring the people that the Presidency itself is provided with a similar guarantee of political continuity in accordance with the wishes of the national electorate. |
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