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| Aditi Phadnis: The appearance of democracy |
| Aditi Phadnis / New Delhi Feb 06, 2010, 00:50 IST |
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In Sri Lanka, the president can do exactly as he likes.
Examine the national flag of Sri Lanka and you would get a clue to the tensions and secret anxieties in the tiny island’s politics and society. The lion motif (lions became extinct in Sri Lanka 38,000 years ago, so it is pretty much symbolic) was used in a standard by Vijaya, Sri Lanka’s first king, when he arrived at the island in 486 BC.
Three hundred years later, when the legendary Sinhala king, Dutugemunu, embarked on a campaign to defeat Tamil king Elara (the two communities have been scrapping ever since) he, too, used the lion motif but added a sword to it. On February 5, 1948, when Sri Lanka got its independence, this was adopted as the national flag with some modifications: Four banyan leaves to illustrate the dominant religion, Buddhism; two vertical stripes to denote the minority communities — Tamil and Muslim. But the dominant feature of the flag remains the lion holding the sword.
Many lions with swords are prowling the island these days: The recently re-elected President, Mahinda Rajapaksa (till February 2017, if he doesn’t disband the executive presidency by then) and his family. Rajapaksa owes much to the sword: He gave his full backing to a military victory over minority Tamils, led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in the north and east provinces of the island. Having vanquished the minority, he turned to consolidate his hold on the rest of the country — by calling for presidential elections nearly two years ahead of schedule. His rival was former Chief of Army Staff Sarath Fonseka, himself a victim of an LTTE assassination bid and the man who led the campaign to military victory. Fonseka became the presidential nominee of a combined opposition that included such diverse elements as the Tamil National Alliance and the Sinhala-Buddhist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna. Not exactly an innocent himself, now defeated, he too fears the swords carried by the Lanka lions — Rajapaksa and his brothers, Basil and Defence Secretary Gothabaya.
LTTE chief Prabhakaran’s death and the victory of the armed forces had a dramatic effect on the island’s economy. People realised that now that the war was over, Rajapaksa could actually carry out his promise to spend $4 billion, or almost 10 per cent of Sri Lanka’s gross domestic product, on building roads, railways and power plants in the north. The 26-year-long conflict with LTTE and the high government expenditure contributed to Sri Lanka’s high public debt load (86 per cent of GDP in 2007). In the past 10 years, investment levels have averaged around 25 per cent of GDP.
But after the war was won, Central Bank of Sri Lanka Governor Nivard Cabraal predicted a 7 per cent growth rate in 2010, the fastest in four years. Interest rates are already at a five-year low and taking advantage of cheap credit, tourism, banks, diversified groups and construction-related firms were likely to get active, analysts said. Just before the elections, the International Monetary Fund graduated Sri Lanka from the list of Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT)-eligible countries, offering it a new respectability in international markets and among financial institutions.
With all this giddy enthusiasm surrounding him, Fonseka can be forgiven for thinking he was the hero of the war. The 10 or so per cent of the Tamils who came out to vote in the northern and eastern provinces on January 26 did, in fact, vote for him. So did a swathe of urban voters around Colombo who’ve had just about enough of the extended Rajapaksa clan’s heavy-handed methods. But it was Rajapaksa all the way in the deep south and west, in agrarian communities. Rajapaksa’s economic policies are put together in a body of thought called “Mahinda Chintana” encompassing what we call inclusive growth: Focus on poverty alleviation and steering investment to disadvantaged areas; developing the small and medium enterprise sector; promotion of agriculture, rejecting privatisation (he re-nationalised Sri Lanka’s national airline) and rural infrastructure-building. This paid off.
But the issue is: What is Rajapaksa going to do now about the treatment of ethnic minorities; and how is he going to curb the creeping power of the Sri Lankan state? After defeating LTTE, the decision to not devolve power to the Tamils earned President Rajapaksa the landslide Sinhalese vote. He can’t afford to betray his voters.
Emergency laws will stay on the grounds that LTTE could resurrect itself. The mayor of Batticaloa has gone into hiding as she supported Fonseka. When the election was on, Election Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake was heard exhorting political parties that state institutions should not be subverted. No one paid heed to him, and now he has said he will continue in office. The disappearance of journalists is widespread. This is not going to change.
In the past, especially under President JR Jayewardene, Sri Lanka developed a unique talent: Appear to be a democracy but with carefully erected constitutional caveats that permit the president to do exactly as he likes. Under Rajapaksa, things are not likely to be any different.
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