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Southern consensus

President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly declared his intention to take a novel approach to the National Question. He qualified his approach by saying that his first task would be to forge a southern consensus. He is just doing that.

Already he has held a series of discussions with southern parties both separately and in groups. An all party conference is scheduled for next Thursday. He has also held discussions with the TNA and is expected to meet the SLMC too. Another round of discussions would follow the all p arty conference.

A southern consensus would take the National Question outside the sphere of partisan political rivalry. Thus it would ensure the implementation of any future agreement with the LTTE based on that consensus.

Post-independence Sri Lankan history is replete with instances when an agreement signed by one party in office was opposed by another in Opposition. We have the famous example of the Bandaranaike - Chelvanayagam Pact or the B-C Pact in short which was torn by the signatory S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike himself following articulate opposition from the Buddhist clergy and political foes.

The same fate befell the Dudley Senanayake - Chelvanayagam Agreement. In a way a southern consensus would be a guarantee against a repetition of these earlier catastrophes. In fact LTTE Leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in his one and only press conference in April 2002 alluded to the lack of a southern consensus for his lack of faith in an early solution to the ethnic problem.

A southern consensus by itself would not be effective unless it is taken as a point of origin or departure for negotiations between any two parties require a spirit of give and take if they are to be successful. Hence the consensus should include a degree of flexibility too.

There are several factors that must also be taken into consideration. The southern consensus would have to accommodate whatever legal provisions were made earlier with a view to solving the National Question.

For example, it cannot go back on the Indo-Lanka Accord of June 1987. (Though this Accord was given legal form by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, several provisions like the establishment of Provincial Police Commissions have not been implemented at all.) Nor could it be a return to the B-C Pact. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then.

There is a genuine fear among many sections of the southern polity that devolution of power would be a stepping stone for separation or division of the country. These fears have to be allayed and institutional mechanisms sought to prevent such developments. Devolution by itself gives rise to centrifugal forces.

Hence there is a paramount need to combine devolution of power to the periphery with power sharing at the centre. It is only the latter that would give the presently estranged communities a feeling that they are on equal terms with other communities and that they also have a stake in the development of Sri Lanka.

There is also the need to be conscious of the actual ground reality in relation to the form of state contemplated. While federalism is anathema to certain sections of the Sinhala community, most Tamils consider a unitary state as incompatible with their aspirations.

Therefore the need has arisen for us to set aside these concepts and work out a state structure that would be consistent with the aspirations of all communities. In doing so we could keep in mind that there are no pure unitary or pure federal states in the modern world. It is a hybrid state containing features of both systems that we should aspire to.

That is why we should not look forward to copying the model of any given country whether federal or unitary. There is much talk of copying the Indian model. One should, however, keep in mind that it was established in 1947 and since then there has been much agitation in India demanding the revision of some of its provisions, for example the provision to declare President's rule in states.

It is better to study all models but the task is to carve out a Sri Lankan model.

One last thing that we would like to emphasise is the relevance of our foreign policy to the solution of the National Question. The foreign and domestic policies of a nation are organically inseparable. In a way, the foreign policy is an extension of the domestic policy outside the borders of one's own country.

At present we have a guarantee from the international community to ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka. This is based on their conviction that the solution to the National Question should satisfy all communities inhabiting the land. Ignoring this qualification would put us in peril.

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