As the campaigning closed for the Central and North Western Provincial Council elections, both sides were predicting victory. The government was confident of sweeping the polls in both provinces. Even though the UNP was not rash enough to predict victory in the Wayamba, the word used to describe the UNP’s prospects in the NWP was, ‘good’. By this what was probably meant was that they may not win the Wayamba PC, but will be able to put up a better showing than was expected in the circumstances. With regard to the Central Province, UNP activists were boldly predicting victory, no less. The UNP believed that they could win the Kandy and Nuwara Eliya districts but would lose the Matale district.

To be sure the UNP candidate S.B.Dissanayake and his band of followers did put their best foot forward in the campaign and being able to predict victory is in itself a victory in the present circumstances, even if it does not become a reality. The predictions of victory were based mainly on the turnout at UNP meetings and the enthusiasm with which SB was greeted wherever he went. If SB was greeted with enthusiasm, the reasons for that are quite plain. He is the only real political celebrity in the fray and he is a celebrity to both the SLFP and the UNP. He is the UNP’s chief ministerial candidate and main platform speaker.

For the SLFP, he was their former general secretary and one of the three key figures in the SLFP led government of 1994-2001. As such even an SLFPer would like to talk to SBD. SB’s rabble rousing speeches managed to get the traditional UNP voters out of their shells. But the fact is that even though the UNP won the Kandy district and the Central Province as a whole at the 2001 & 2004 parliamentary elections and also at the 2005 presidential elections, the UNP has not won a provincial election in the Central Province for the past ten years. The reason being that provincial council elections were always held when the PA or UPFA was in power and, generally speaking, the second tier of government tends to fall into the lap of the incumbent government.

 SB’s show

 Given all the surrounding circumstances including the military victories over the LTTE, the present provincial election cannot but follow the usual pattern. Readers will know for whom the bell tolls by the time they get to read this newspaper. The present writer would expect SB to score the highest number of preference votes he ever did in his political career, getting anything between 100,000 to 150,000, but it’s extremely doubtful that he would be able to win the council. These days, one cannot make any assumptions based on the numbers turning up for UNP rallies. In 2007, when the UNP held a series of futile rallies all over the country, they were always well attended. These are just the party faithful turning up for anything that may offer hope. The UNP has millions of votes, but never enough, to get them over the crest. There are three heroes in this election, SB in Kandy, Mano Ganesan in Nuwara Eliya and Karu Jayasuriya in Wayamba. All three did their best in the campaign.

Win or lose, they did their part. Karu Jayasuriya has been able through his contribution to this campaign to work off some of the opprobrium attaching to him for having abandoned the UNP and joined the government for a while. In the villages of Wayamba, in the absence of the likes of Ranil Wickremesinghe, Mangala Samaraweera, Lakshman Kiriella and others representing a certain line of thinking within the UNP, Jayasuriya has been making patriotic speeches, welcoming the military victories in order to strike the correct chord among the people and also partly to explain and justify his own past conduct. Jayasuriya has managed to work his way back into the hearts and minds of UNPers because of this campaign. The fact that he was in the campaign from the beginning to the end is what stands him in good stead especially when compared to the party leader who began addressing meetings only with less than two weeks to go. Last week, Jayasuriya went to the residence of the late President D.B.Wijetunga in Kandy in order to pay a courtesy call on his daughter. Jayasuriya has the knack of making these gestures which go a long way in politics.

Last week, as if to make amends for his previous lack of interest in the campaign, the UNP leader addressed meetings in Laggala, Galewela, Matale town, Walapane, Nuwara Eliya town, Maskeliya, Ibbagamuwa, Galgamuwa, Kuliyapitiya, Yapahuwa, Puttalam, Chilaw, and the two final rallies in Kandy town and in Kurunegala. If after the votes are counted today, the government has won, it has to be said that never was a victory more richly deserved, given the effort that the government put into winning these two elections. This time the government, and particularly the president, campaigned as if they were going to lose. If the UNP loses, then never was a defeat more richly deserved. Too many party men including the leader were apparently indifferent to the outcome. As the old saying goes, you get what you deserve.

JVP’s confusion

Last week, opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe had met minister Arumugam Thondaman at the wedding of former minister Velayuthan’s daughter and in the course of the conversation had asked Thondaman whether contesting with the government will reduce the number of votes he gets. The fact is that the synergies generated when Thondaman contests with the UNP is not the same as when he contests together with the PA. The plantation Tamils have bonded well with the UNP because of the long standing relationship that was built up under J.R.Jayewardene, R.Premadasa, and D.B.Wijetunga, and the votes received by the CWC would be higher if they contested with the UNP. But the fact is that if they don’t contest with the government, they will lose access to government patronage which will also affect their voter base in an even more deleterious manner. So the CWC is caught up in a ``damned if they do, damned if they don’t’’ situation. One of the interesting things to watch in this election will be how these synergies help Mano Ganesan’s candidates who are contesting on the UNP list and how it affects the vote base of the CWC.

It would appear that the JVP has not yet decided whether they were in the ruling UPFA or out of it. When the JVP politburo met last week, what they discussed was what one would expect to hear at a government parliamentary group meeting. Somawansa Amarasinghe said that the ordinary civilians have begun to come over to the government controlled area after escaping the clutches of the LTTE and that everyone had to be grateful to the armed forces for saving these people from the clutches of Fascists. He stated that the suicide bombing and the shooting of civilians leaving the LTTE held area was an indication of the desperation of the Tigers. Vijitha Herath stated that those escaping LTTE clutches should be provided with adequate protection and that they should be afforded every opportunity to rebuild their lives. He further stated that instead of stopping at the elimination of terrorism, the government should explore ways and means of weaning the people away from separatism.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake said that the international pressures on the government had increased tremendously and that the government should marshal all its forces to face this and they should launch an international propaganda war to meet this situation. He further stated that the foreign ministry and the Sri Lankan missions overseas had to be geared to meet the situation but there was no sign that the government was making systematic arrangements in this direction and that the government was preoccupied with the provincial council elections. Party Secretary Tilvin Silva said that international imperialist forces at first wanted the war stopped and they were at that time directly involved in an attempt to save the LTTE. But now with the triumph of the armed forces, they have changed tack and their objective now is to rob the resources of the cleared areas. He stated that there was a move to sell the Pulmoddai mineral sands and to cede a huge piece of land equal in size to the Colombo district from the Trincomalee district to India. One thing that becomes apparent from the JVP’s discussion is that they are still within the government’s political agenda, expressing solicitude for the government’s ability to meet international pressures and so on. The JVP’s predicament trying to map out an independent path for itself between the UPFA and the UNP, highlights the fact that there is no room for a third player within the two party system.

 Prbhakaran’s bubble

 Speaking at last week’s politburo meeting K.D.Lal Kantha said that the country was in the throes of a huge economic crisis and that more than 30 large scale garment factoroes had closed down, and others were retrenching workers. He stated that about 30,000 had lost their jobs in the last three months, and that the details of some 16,000 workers were with the JVP trade unions. He stated that the construction industry was also in a state of collapse and that not just masons and carpenters but even engineers were losing their jobs and that if things go on at this rate, there’ll be hundreds of thousands unemployed. He said that the central bank thinks it can meet the situation with palliatives like devaluing the rupee against the dollar to make our exports cheaper and other measures like that.

Because of the military victories and the elections, the people of this country have forgotten that the present government is faced with the most unfavourable international economic situation ever experienced by a post-independence government. Everybody including members of the business community in this country has been lulled into a sense of complacency. Over the past couple of weeks, the present writer has heard several private sector individuals expressing on TV words to the effect that the moment Prabhakaran is killed, the stock market is going to go through the roof. Making such statements is the height of irresponsibility. Prabhakaran’s death, when it does happen, will be a non-economic event. On what grounds can economic confidence suddenly go up if he is killed? It is true that terrorism retarded the economic development of this country and the death of Prabhakaran will remove a major impediment and with the opening up of the LTTE controlled areas for reconstruction there will be some economic spinoffs.

But in the present gloomy global economic outlook, whatever spin-offs that are expected, will be slow to clear. Tourists will not come in their numbers because of the depression in the west. Prabhakaran’s death will not increase production or exports in the short term. One thing that the government should seek to prevent is a speculative frenzy in the wake of Prabahakaran’s death. Now that the LTTE held area has been shrinking dramatically on a daily basis, the chance of a stray shell or bomb hitting Prabhakaran is that much greater and in death he may wreak greater destruction on Sri Lanka than he was able to do while alive. If people begin throwing money into the stock market the moment he dies and then a matter of weeks or months later realizes that the death of a terrorist is not an economic event that can save us from the worldwide recession, the market will come crashing down thus sending Sri Lanka deeper into recession than she would otherwise have gone. If news of Prabhakaran’s death breaks, the government should suspend trading in the stock market until things cool off. There is also the possibility that certain quarters would try to create a speculative bubble in order to make some quick money and this is what should be thwarted.

 The unloved second tier

 Since we have been following the provincial council elections over the past few months, generally speaking it can be said that while the eastern province election was enthusiastically fought by all sides, the other PC elections were in contrast drab, uninteresting affairs. This has been the pattern from the time elections to these second tier governmental bodies began in 1981 with the introduction of the district development councils system. The first DDC elections were met with studied indifference in the Sinhala areas and polling was low. But in the northern and eastern provinces, there was more interest in the DDC elections. It is to the minorities, especially to those living in the northern and eastern provinces, that second tier of government matters. That brings us to another matter being increasingly discussed today – the contours of a post-Prabhakaran political settlement.

One of the main problems with the devolution debate that has been going on in this country during the post independence decades is that ‘bargaining’ has been its centerpiece while ‘professionalism’ has never had a place. In Sri Lanka devolution of power has always been discussed with a gun held at our heads at first metaphorically and later literally as well. Devolution in Sri Lanka has been a response to demands and threats and never due to considerations of practical good sense. But in neighbouring India, when the Indian constitution was promulgated, powers were devolved to regional units, based entirely on practical good sense and need. This is why the devolution of power has worked in India and failed in Sri Lanka. In India, devolution was a means of governing a huge and unwieldy country and making life livable for those in the central government.

In the view of the present writer, if we are discussing the devolution of power, the first thing that has to be done is to look at the administrative feasibility of doing so. The work of each ministry and the departments functioning under it have to be taken up for scrutiny on an individual basis and it has to be decided whether those functions CAN be devolved to the regional units and whether they SHOULD be devolved and whether the needs of the people were going to be better met if they were devolved or retained with the central government. The size of the country also should be taken into consideration in such deliberations. But no such study on the administrative system and the feasibility of devolving the powers of each ministry has ever been carried out in Sri Lanka. From the days of the Bandaranaike - Chelvanayakam pact in the 1950s and the Dudley – Chelvanayakam pact in the 1960s, it was a case of Tamil politicians demanding and the government of the day bargaining. Deals on high matters of state were struck like deals in the fish market.

This unprofessional approach was compounded by the fact that since the 1980s, this devolution debate took place in the context of a terrorist threat. Then it came to the situation where whatever powers that were devolved were not sufficient. The first attempt at creating a second tier of government to placate the minorities was when J.R.Jayewardene instituted the District Development Councils system in 1981. Today, any mention of the DDCs as a solution to the ethnic problem will be met with hoots of derision. But in the early 1980s, the DDCs were one of JRJ’s greatest political triumphs. Indeed, today, President Mahinda Rajapakse would gladly give an eyeball to have a political coup like that to his credit. What JRJ was able to achieve in 1981 with the DDCs was what both S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike and Dudley Senanayake had failed to achieve in the 1950s and 60s – to implement the agreements with the Tamil leader Chelvanayakam. JRJ, being made of different stuff to both Bandaranaike and Dudley, was able to push through a solution that had been on the agenda for nearly two and a half decades.

 Manning Market legislation

 Chelvanayakam was dead by the time JRJ got around to implementing the agreements entered into with him by both the UNP and the SLFP, but it finally became a reality nevertheless. When the powers of the DDCs were decided on, it was done in close consultation with the leaders of the TULF – who were the elected representatives of the Tamil people and were at that time still very much at the helm of Tamil affairs – the terrorist groups still being in a nascent stage. There was thus a consensus reached with the Tamil leadership – something that had not been reached before or since. The TULF in fact enthusiastically contested the DDC elections in 1981 and captured power in their districts and things may have settled down if the rise of terrorism did not drag the country in a different direction. Since terrorism came to stay, whatever was devolved was never enough.

The DDCs were deemed inadequate by the terrorists so they were given provincial councils with the Indians intervening in 1987. Many terrorist groups accepted the PCs but the LTTE refused to accept it. So the war continued and the devolution debate continued. They were offered the devolution package which went way beyond the PCs in 2000. That too was rejected by the LTTE as inadequate and the devolution debate has continued to date.

The way the APRC has being going about its business of formulating a political settlement is also wrong. It’s based on Manning Market style bargaining with one side demanding the other side refusing and the chairman trying to strike a compromise. The devolution of power is a matter that has to be first discussed by professionals and academics in the field of administration. There has to be a ministry by ministry and department by department study on what can be feasibly devolved and it is on the basis of such a study that politicians should try to strike a compromise on what was going to be devolved and what retained with the central government.

It is now over two decades since the provincial councils system was implemented and we still hear complaints that they have not been given the powers they are entitled to. This is because the provincial councils were hastily brought in without adequate reflection in order to respond to a situation. Sri Lanka has a sad history of ad hoc legislation, the 17th amendment being another case in point. The benefit of eliminating terrorism itself will be lost if at least in the future, the leaders of this country are unable to do away with knee-jerk legislation and introduce an element of professionalism into the discussion on the devolution of power.