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The Elephant in the room

By Rajan Philips

Although the two negotiating teams are avoiding it for now, the elephant in the room is the question of devolution. Like D.H. Lawrence's Elephant in the Kandy perahara, the devolution elephant is now "passive with patience', but can turn into "rage" without much warning.

Ceasefire and humanitarian issues deserve the utmost priority, but the two sides will have to deal with the beast sometime in the future, assuming that the talks will purposefully continue towards some finality. Even if the current rounds of talks were to break down, the devolution issue will be the central issue in any further attempt to find a political solution to Sri Lanka's national question.

Much of the so called discourse on devolution in the recent past has been influenced by the 'grand language' of sovereignty and self-determination. Grand language by its very nature shuts out the nuts and bolts, or the anatomy, of devolution. There is a need to address the practical questions about the status of the existing legislative and administrative institutions and the changes required to implement a program of devolution. There will be implications for judicial institutions as well, but they will not be critical to implementing a program of devolution.

Put another way, the experience of the Provincial Councils, the Administrative Districts now mostly under Central control and the plethora of Local Government bodies will have to be assessed and their future roles defined in a new devolution program.

A brief discussion along these lines took place last September, in Colombo, when some friends of Rev. Paul Caspersz, the Jesuit of Kandy whose half-a-century of priestly vocation has been a suffusion of the spiritual and the secular, usurped the occasion of his eightieth birthday for some secular political brainstorming. One of the ideas that came up was about the recent devolutionary changes in the British polity and their applicability to Sri Lanka.

This was before the presidential election. After the election, and perhaps trying to reconcile his agreement with the JVP/JHU and the inevitability of devolution, President Rajapakse has alluded to the possibility of using the British model to implement maximum devolution within a unitary state. The cynic will say, 'What's in a name? That which is unitary could by some other name be as devolved as federal!' Be that as it may. Let us look at Britain, the colonial source of all our political institutions but not all our political troubles.

The British model

Within the last decade Britain has created three devolved units in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, each shaped by its own specific historical circumstances as well as political, social and economic priorities. First came the 1998 Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland, followed by the Scotland Act of the same year and the election of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, and finally the creation of the Welsh National Assembly also in 1999. Northern Ireland and Scotland have full legislative and executive powers over most domestic political and policy issues, while Wales has secondary legislative and full executive power over a smaller range of subjects.

Remarkably, the 'English nation' along with the central institutions of the British state has been left alone. Little has changed since devolution in either the government machinery in Whitehall or in the mother of all parliaments at Westminster. There has been no political devolution within England but a layer of 'regional governments' has been introduced over England's well established local government base. The 'Greater London Authority' is England's first regional government. Tony Blair's Labour government has also established eight Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) without elected assemblies for the purpose of addressing persistent regional inequality.

The government's plan to create elected assemblies in these regions was soundly rebuffed by the voters in the November 2004 referendums held in three (North-East, North-West and Merseyside and Yorkshire/Humberside) regions where support for elected assemblies seemed most favourable. The government has indefinitely postponed the idea of elected regional assemblies. So the RDAs will continue with their 12-member boards drawn from local councils and private businesses, and 100-member staff complements drawn from existing government functionaries. The money allocated to RDAs will thus be spent on new programs rather than new payrolls.

Sri Lankan possibilities

What is in all of this for Sri Lanka? First, the British model indicates some possibilities for the Sinhala nation in the South. Anecdotally it is known that one of J. R. Jayewardene's reasons for creating Provincial Councils in the South was to dispel criticisms that special institutions were being created only in the North and East. However, there has been no great public enthusiasm for the Provincial Councils in the South. On the contrary, there is a great deal of public cynicism about the Provincial Councils that they are all new outlets for more waste, corruption and expenditure without any benefit in return.

The political parties use the Provincial Councils for periodical arm wrestling, but do little between elections to enhance their image and powers. The People's Alliance used the Southern Provincial Council and then the Western Provincial Council as its launching pads to dislodge the UNP out of its 17-year hold on power, but once in power the PA did nothing to improve the PC system.

Both the Kumaratunga and the Wickremesinghe governments had their knuckles rapped by the Supreme Court for encroaching on Provincial jurisdiction. And this was while they were dialoguing even greater devolution with the LTTE. So it is pertinent to ask the question, are Provincial Councils needed in the South?

The government and political parties in the South should address this question independent of their discussions with the LTTE and other Tamil and Muslim organizations regarding devolution in the North and East. The British model shows that unit or units of devolution can be created in the North and East only and leave the South alone. The British model also shows what can be done in the South through administrative decentralization to address the persistent and growing economic disparities between the Western Provinces and the other five provinces in the South.

Sri Lanka can also learn a lot from the British local government system, which is comparable to the Lander system in Federal Germany even though the British state, at least in constitutional theory, is generally viewed as unitary and highly centralized.

Whitehall, for instance, has no field offices or department branches in most policy areas but heavily relies on local government, quasi NGOs ('quangos'), interest groups and professional bodies to implement central programs.

What a positive difference, one might ask, such a system would have made to the tsunami relief and reconstruction efforts in Sri Lanka? Sri Lanka has local bodies but they are left powerless and ineffective by the central government departments who are everywhere.

In addition, Colombo's stifling growth and mounting challenges, in housing, transport, garbage and other services, call for a separate metropolitan administration to deal with them.

I would suggest that the Greater London Authority provides a useful model for a new metropolitan administration in Colombo. Colombo would also do well to have a Mayor like the mercurial London Mayor 'red' Ken (Livingstone)!

The British experience also offers possibilities for the creation of devolved units in the North and East, but I will limit myself only to a few broad comments here. One cannot fail to note the remarkable absence of opposition from the English nation to the creation of the devolved units.

The English are more concerned about being subsumed in a European union than about ceding control to a Scottish Parliament over a third of the British territory with only a tenth of its population.

The main and perhaps the only opposition is the Ulster's Protestant minority who, according to Tom Nairn, happen to be the last repository of " the most backward looking core of Britishism - Monarchy, imperial sovereignty and a kind of spiritual racism". But their opposition could not stop the Good Friday Agreement from laying the foundation for a British-Irish Council of the Isles, yet again an instance of the British state ceding part of its own sovereignty by allowing the Irish Republic a say in Northern Ireland.

Even though Northern Ireland remains the singularly dispiriting part of the British experience of devolution, there is no question that stability in Northern Ireland cannot be realized except by moving forward the agenda of devolution.

Lastly, democracy was not shut out at the creation of any of the three devolved units in Britain. Democracy was present at the creation of all of them, and so it should be if and when devolved units come into being in Sri Lanka's North and East.

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