Debasing our political culture
By Neville de Silva
Those who observed last week's Sri Lankan election
both from near and far, would have been struck by one phenomenon. That
is, the extent to which the country's political culture has been debased
under the seven year rule of the People's Alliance.
The Bandaranaike political legacy is hard to match anywhere in the world.
SWRD Bandaranaike and his wife Sirima were the first husband and wife duo
to be elected prime ministers in any country. Sirima Bandaranaike was the
first woman prime minister in the world. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga
was the first elected leader of a country that had her parents as prime
ministers. Her mother and she were the first mother and daughter to be
president and prime minister at the same time.
No country in the democratic world has such a record.
Let us not forget that Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, has enjoyed universal
franchise since 1931. Japan was the only country in Asia to have the right
to vote before Ceylon and that only the previous year.
For 70 years we have proudly flaunted our achievement before the world.
Initially it was indeed an achievement to be proud of, for the adults had
the right to vote at the same time, unlike in many other countries where
the franchise was only gradually extended.
If my memory is correct the women of Switzerland were granted universal
suffrage only in 1975, whereas our own had by then voted for almost 45
years and had already produced the world's first woman prime minister.
When Ceylon was granted independence in 1948, it was considered a political
model for other developing countries to follow. Several countries in Asia
and many in Africa were still under the colonial yoke and decolonisation
was still a long way off.
The country had an efficient and impartial civil service, a small armed
services more for ceremonial purposes than defending Ceylon's sovereignty,
a neutral police and most of all, a highly regarded and unbiased judiciary.
These were the pillars on which the country's democratic structure was
to rest for such strict impartiality was intrinsic to the proper functioning
of a democratic polity.
In fact Ceylon, as the island was known until the 1972 republican constitution
returned it to the ancient name by which it was known, was the envy of
colonial territories still aspiring for independence in Asia and Africa.
Independent Malaysia and Singapore looked up to Colombo as the epitome
of the development model, as the exemplar for newly independent states.
Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew who was to lead the small nation state with
an iron fist but set it on a course of national integration and economic
achievement, would admire this small island and draw on its strengths in
modelling his nation.
Many years later, when Ceylon started its downward slide to political
degradation, and economic ruin, its once impartial institutions increasingly
politicised and sinking in the morass of corruption, Lee Kuan Yew would
look back wistfully at the history of a country he greatly admired.
"Your country," he would say, "went this way because of too much politics.
If we did what you did, Singapore would have been a ruin". These might
not be his exact words but they definitely convey his sentiments which
I had heard from him more than once.
If present and future generations of Sri Lankan of every ethnic hue
curse most politicians that have sat in our legislature, it is not necessarily
because they were perceived as corrupt, incompetent and power hungry. It
is because they did not have the courage, the backbone to stop their leaders
from following the inevitable road to national ruin.
Unlike most of them who entered parliament in the early years of independence
or even pre-independence with the intention of serving his/her immediate
constituency, if not the country, some of those who entered later did so
with the intention of fattening themselves on the resources of the country.
The past 25 years or so has not only seen the disgusting devaluation
of political office to the extent that people began to associate such office
with highway robbery, but even that valued token of an individual's political
power- the vote- has been debased.
Whereas in many countries that were under the jackboots of dictatorship
and their people had to sacrifice their lives to win the right to vote,
our politicians treated it with such disdain and disrespect that people
began to treat those elected by that vote with contempt.
As the one weapon that they had with which to throw out governments
every four or five years, people valued and respected their vote. In the
early history of independence, our voter actually did throw out every incumbent
government having waited patiently and silently for that sacred opportunity.
But increasingly power hungry politicians, desperate to cling to office
to fatten themselves and their kith and kin because no sane person would
ever give them a job, have reduced that sacred vote to a mockery.
At first it began by impersonating genuine voters or casting the vote
for the dead and departed. Then it turned to highway robbery when polling
cards were stolen and officials intimidated into accepting false votes.
Next came the mass stuffing of ballot boxes, sometimes making use of servicemen
or police to actually supervise such stuffing, or waylaying official vehicles
carrying ballot boxes and rigging them.
The fact is that all major parties have been guilty of such corrupt
and illegal practices.
But no government has made corruption, fraud, thuggery, politicisation
of the armed services, police and to an extent the judiciary such an art.
Sri Lanka's karma cannot be so bad that worse is to follow.