When Mahinda Rajapaksa instructed his ministers to shut up about the Thirteenth Amendment, I bet that even he didn’t anticipate the deafening silence that would follow. That was July. Barely a word has been said about it since, and we are now in November. I’m not just talking about the UPFA either. The entire country seems to have lost its voice.

This was made only too clear at a public forum organised by the National Peace Council last week. They encouraged Sri Lankans to gather at the Kadirgamar Institute to discuss a political solution, as long as they weren’t interested in devolution.

I’m sure that some people will be delighted by this news. Udaya Gammanpila, one of the panel invited to speak on the topic ‘Non-Devolutionary Constitutional Reforms’, looked as though Christmas had come early. In fact, at one point in the exchange, he said something along the lines of ‘I think that this is the first time in my life that I am defending the National Peace Council’. He grinned and everybody laughed, although it wasn’t funny.

Jehan Perera explained that the Thirteenth Amendment had become controversial, so they had decided to give it a miss. They still believe in devolution, it seems, just very quietly. The concept paper for the event declared that they wanted to talk about a political solution in a ‘non-threatening manner’. I don’t recall anybody ever having found anything said by the National Peace Council to be even remotely intimidating, but I suppose that it’s good that they’re now worried about their image. It could certainly be better. Whatever the reason, exactly how they are going to persuade the Government to hurry up and implement the Thirteenth Amendment by talking about something else is quite beyond me.

I still have no idea why there is any opposition at all to such a limited idea. Apart from the fact that it was pushed on Sri Lanka by its ‘big brother’, I find it to be completely harmless.

The last time that I wrote about this subject, my good friend Malinda Seneviratne advised me in a piece in The Sunday Island to read a book called ‘Economic Consequences of the Devolution Package’ by Buddhadasa Hewavitarana, as if this offered conclusive proof of the dangers of the Thirteenth Amendment. After a detour via the rare books section of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies and various other musty cupboards, I found a copy at the Institute of Policy Studies, where the good professor is Chairman of the Board of Governors.

I suspect that I may be one of a rather small number of people that has actually read it, as opposed to the commentators who refer to what they imagine it says. This seems like as good a time as any to look a bit closer at the arguments it contains.

The problem with using the book as a reply to what I have argued on devolution is that it isn’t about the Thirteenth Amendment. It is a response to the proposals advanced by Chandrika Kumaratunga in her early efforts to do a deal with the Tigers. These went further than what is currently waiting to be implemented, so many of the specifics are irrelevant. The Provincial Councils have a comparatively narrow range of powers that can be further restricted by the authorities in Colombo where necessary.

I think that it is still worth looking at what Buddhadasa Hewavitarana has to say. Although opposition to the Thirteenth Amendment is not generally based on economics, the subject is often brought up in passing.

The main objection presented in ‘Economic Consequences of the Devolution Package’ is that introducing another layer of government simply provides more opportunities for politicians to make a mess of the country. The author further claims that there will be less capacity to resist such meddling the closer to the people the administration gets.

This conviction is strengthened by his belief that there is no debate about the policies that need to be followed. He sees them as already decided, so that the main job facing the Government is implementation. This may reflect the period in which the book was written, at the height of the structural adjustment wave, which struck Sri Lanka early and had made its way around much of the world by the time Chandrika Kumaratunga came to power. It was the era of ‘There is No Alternative’, as Margaret Thatcher said so frequently. This certainly doesn’t represent mainstream thinking today. Buddhadasa Hewavitarana appears to think that politicians are now surplus to requirements. They are only ever interested in power and money, it seems, whereas officials are always paragons of virtue. The country needs efficient administrators and nothing more.

I imagine that many people will have at least some sympathy for this argument, given recent experience with politicians. It is however rather short-sighted. Just because there are problems doesn’t mean that democracy should be abandoned altogether. Taken to its logical conclusion, we might as well get rid of Parliament and officially turn Sri Lanka into a one man show. Looking for ways to reform the system and improve safeguards would be rather more productive, I suggest.

The book also falls into the trap of claiming that devolution necessarily means increasing the size of the bureaucracy. It says that this makes it more expensive.

While it certainly costs money to get a system going, the rest is only true if the Government allows it to happen. Studies in other countries have shown that the same work can be done with fewer people and less expenditure under devolution. The diseconomies of organisation quickly overcome economies of scale. It may be difficult to imagine anything other than a growth in staff and salaries in Sri Lanka, but that isn’t how it has to be.

Then there is the other common refrain of the campaigners against the Thirteenth Amendment that Sri Lanka is too small for devolution. I wouldn’t compare the political contexts here and in the UK, but the fact is that the population of Northern Ireland was less than 1.7 million at the last census, while its landmass covers around 5,000 square miles. The Eastern Province contains nearly 4,000 square miles and the Department of Census and Statistics estimated that there were some 1.5 million people there in 2007. Figures for the Northern Province show a population of 1.3 million in almost 3,500 square miles, and that was before the end of the fighting. Northern Ireland has rather more power than is proposed for any of the Provincial Councils, and it is doing fine.

Buddhadasa Hewavitarana says that devolution is an impediment to growth. He also makes the claim that this is what is needed to stave off future uprisings.

I am reminded here of what a former colleague of the good professor wrote to me in an email after my last comments on the subject, while also urging me to read ‘Economic Consequences of the Devolution Package’. Again using the example of the UK, they argued that what was needed was not devolution to Scotland and Wales, but assistance for its people to move away, on the basis that the UK has developed a comparative advantage in financial services around London, so we should all be heading for the city. That might well increase growth, but I simply can’t imagine a less popular idea.

If this is the best that campaigners against the Thirteenth Amendment can do, I will be sticking with my original inclination, that there is nothing to fear. I might even be tempted to say that there is everything to gain, if Sri Lanka is willing to make a bit of an effort.

One consequence of the absence of debate is that flaws in implementation to date have not been properly identified and remedies looked into. Apart from the occasional and generally very brief article, there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of serious analysis of how things have been going in practice since the legislation was introduced more than two decades ago. A comprehensive review would certainly be timely, as would greater attention to the more recent developments in the East. More than a year into the administration of Chief Minister S. Chandrakanthan, otherwise known as Pillayan, there is plenty to be said about how devolution is working in the area for which it was originally put forward.

The National Peace Council might find it all a bit risqué, but it’d be rather more useful than yet another seminar in Colombo at which people like Rohan Edirisinha of the Centre for Policy Alternatives explain how the phrases ‘The official language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala’ and ‘Tamil shall also be an official language’ that appear in the Constitution as it stands now could be amalgamated into a single and rather more grammatically correct sentence. They’ll be cheering that reform from Dondra Head to Point Pedro, I’m sure.

One of the best points of the afternoon was made by R. Sampanthan. This makes a pleasant change, of course. He said that the fact that as much as fifty percent of the Tamil speaking population of Sri Lanka lives outside the North and East is nowhere near as significant as some people would like us to believe when discussing a political solution. Those areas have been at the heart of the conflict for several decades. He argued that many people will come back once normalcy returns, and on that if not much else he may well be quite right.

He also pointed out that Mahinda Rajapaksa is on record in favour of not only the Thirteenth Amendment but a good deal more. It just remains to be seen whether the President will remember this at the appropriate moment, and current indications are that he will ask voters to return him to office for another term before finding out. The less said about it in the meantime, I imagine, the more likely it is that the whole idea will be dropped.