A bill of intentions

A CONSTITUTIONAL REVISION has long been the favoured agenda of the courageous Sri Lankan President, Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunga, for a resolution of her country's prolonged crisis of polity. Easy to blame indeed but difficult to reverse has been the tangled history of broken promises and ferocious backlash. Several salient pledges were not honoured by the leaders from the majority Sinhala community over time - a phenomenon that only outraged Sri Lanka's minority Tamils. A violent strategy of reprisal was first triggered by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the name of the victims of discrimination but it was later sustained in terroristic ways that would just not foster their considered collective interest. In many ways, the skewed Sri Lankan system, as it evolved through choice and chance, has so far represented a certain degree of majoritarian supremacy without much evidence of a sustainable sub-system of minority-friendly safeguards. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ms. Kumaratunga, presenting the latest Constitution Bill to the Parliament on August 3, sought to mollify the Sinhala-Buddhist majority by affirming that she, as one from the same spectrum, would simply not barter away its primacy while seeking to render justice to the minorities. Wanting to translate the ``reasonable rights'' of the Sri Lankan Tamils and others into enforceable statutory privileges, she expressed the hope, too, that the passage and implementation of this Bill would isolate the LTTE leader, Mr. Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Constitutional engineering is not a novel event in post-colonial Sri Lanka. In Ms. Kumaratunga's calculus, the latest Bill, the product of a broad `bipartisan' consensus between the ruling People's Alliance and the opposition United National Party, is in this chequered context an embodiment of intentions of unprecedented goodwill towards the minorities. In one sense, the document reflects the invariably meticulous and often creative efforts of the now-slain Neelan Thiruchelvam and the indefatigable Sri Lankan Minister, Prof. G. L. Peiris. Yet, in the end, as the UNP leader, Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe, and his supporters decided to cold shoulder Ms. Kumaratunga as she commended the Bill to Parliament, it became clear that competitive mistrust, a hallmark of the mainly-Sinhala politics of the mainstream parties, could not be wished away. The draft Bill had, at one stage, been substantially agreed to by the President and the Leader of the Opposition. In the event, though, their sharp clash over the proposed provisions for a transition from the existing near-Gaullist dispensation to a possible new constitutional order proved to be so divisive as to cast doubts on the fate of the Bill itself. It remains to be seen whether both sides could still muster accommodative statesmanship before the vote is taken.

It will be a pity if the qualitative work on this Bill is to be sacrificed at the altar of a political numbers game, especially so after a consensus had been announced before its introduction in Parliament. In spite of its current status as just an article of intentions, the Bill is noteworthy on five counts - the move to transform a unitary State into a matrix of the Centre and regions, the recognition of the need for a composite Sri Lankan identity, the plans for a measure of power devolution to the regions, the proposed experimental merger of the northern and eastern `regions' of prime interest to the Sri Lankan Tamils as also an `interim' council thereof, besides a formula to address the lingering statelessness of many Indian-origin inhabitants. While most of these subjects can still evoke some controversy, the target groups for Ms. Kumaratunga's last-ditch hard-sell include the Buddhist clergy, the Janata Vimukti Peramuna and of course the LTTE. While she is firm in wanting to deny the LTTE any virtual veto over this package, a thorough reality check must span such aspects as the Pol Potist group's apparent preference for war as a perpetual end-means proposition and the lull over Norway's `facilitatory' diplomacy.

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