THE VISION THING: WHAT KIND OF

COUNTRY ARE WE VOTING FOR?

Photo AP Photo/Sujeewa Kumar via The Guardian

by Asanga Welikala - on 08/05/2015

The phrase regime-change is often used to describe the dramatic result of

the presidential election on 8th January 2015, both in the sense of a
democratic change of government, as well as at a deeper level, to denote
the electorates expression of a choice between two competing conceptions
of the Sri Lankan state. The country rejected the Rajapaksa model and
endorsed the common oppositions promise of a radically different vision of
Sri Lanka. With the main part of the common oppositions promised reforms
enacted in the form of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in
April, the electorate will be asked to endorse those changes and the
promise of more, or to reject both, in the parliamentary elections in two
weeks time.
While this might have been expected to be a contest between the UNP and
a post-Rajapaksa SLFP, the former Presidents refusal to go gracefully into

political retirement has meant that, for the second time this year, the public
will be faced with a similar choice as in January with regard to expressing its
will as to what kind of entity the Sri Lankan state should be, and in what
directions it ought to constitutionally evolve in the future. This is therefore
not merely a question, as in a routine general election, of which party and
which set of competing health, education, development, and economic
policies the electorate prefers. It is certainly deeper than the question of
whom as between Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapaksa is more
popular as a prospective Prime Minister.
As with the remarkable societal conversation that occurred during the
presidential election campaign, this time too there is evidence that,
beneath the inevitable partisanship and heated competition, there is a
certain seriousness underlying the public discourse about the future of the
country. Sri Lankans realise that this is an election that will decide the very
nature of the state and its path of political and economic development for
the foreseeable future. It is important therefore for us to be clear about
what exactly are the two main competing visions that are on offer. There
are of course more than two, including most importantly, the federal vision
offered by the TNA. These minoritarian constitutional perspectives raise
more fundamental questions for the state than armed secessionism ever
did, and therefore it is a set of questions that deserves separate treatment
another day.
I think that the approaches of the UNP and its allies on the one hand, and
that of the UPFA on the other, can be characterised in terms of two
theoretical models: the former a republican re-articulation of Sri Lankan
statehood; the latter offering what can be called an ethnocratic state which
reaffirms the cultural and political primacy of the majority community. In
other words, the choice in terms of the models of state on offer is between
a republic and an ethnocracy. In what follows I would like set out what I
mean by these two models, in the hope of providing some illumination to

the way we conceive our choices on 17th August.

Mahinda Chinthanaya as Ethnocracy
There is nothing in the UPFA manifesto, or the views expressed by its
political leaders and intellectual exegetists, to suggest that what it offers for
the future is any different to what went before under the Rajapaksa regime.
In fact the entire UPFA campaign is built on the restoration of Mahinda
Rajapaksa and his cabal of fellow-travellers to power, and thereby the
reinstatement of the authoritarian state and the political discourse of
confrontational nationalism that characterised that regime. More deeply,
what the UPFA stands for is the re-establishment of the ethnocracy that it
was building when it was rudely pushed out of power by the Sri Lankan
electorate.
An ethnocracy is a type of state that combines the practice of majoritarian
democracy with the ethnicisation of politics. It arises in plural polities in
which one dominant ethnic group, which asserts a primacy within the
historical and territorial space of the polity (and therefore claims to the
ownership of the state), seeks to enforce a hierarchy of ethnic relations as
the very basis of the constitutional order. Ethnocratic regimes appropriate
the state and use its resources for the advancement of the dominant group,
which necessarily involves the subordination and sometimes the violent
suppression of minority groups. The resulting resistance by minorities may
perversely take an ethnocratic form itself (of which the LTTE was an
archetypical example). The cultural resources of ethnicity provide the
animating values of politics in ethnocracies, not secular values of
constitutional democracy. They may vary in the level of oppression used
against minorities, but they usually allow some forms of political
representation and rights to minorities, while denying the most
fundamental of the minorities rights claims. They are not unelected
dictatorships, but ethnocratic states legitimise their authoritarian control
over the plural polity by recourse to ethno-cultural populism and

democratic majoritarianism. Due to the fundamental injustice upon which

the constitutional order is built, ethnocracies denude their own control aims
by being chronically unstable and conflict-ridden.
The Rajapaksa regime displayed all these ethnocratic characteristics. Its
main basis of political mobilisation and regime legitimation was a
chauvinistic version of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. The political, cultural,
and historical claims of the majority nation supplanted the civic conception
of an inclusive Sri Lankan nation. Secular law was increasingly replaced
with ethnic politics, including monarchical traditions of political power, in
the way state authority was organised and exercised. The nation-state
defined this way was constructed unambiguously against minority claims to
equality and autonomy. The resulting tension and conflict-potential were
addressed via increasing control and militarisation. A political constitution
derived from the mytho-historical worldview of Sinhala-Buddhist nativism
constantly superseded the surviving remnants of legal modernity as
reflected in the text of the legal constitution. Monarchical motifs from
Sinhala-Buddhist historiography were widely used to rearticulate the nature
and purpose of presidential power.
The regime also went further than nationalism in its sheer extractive
appetite. Clientelism and corruption were pervasive, facilitated by the
breakdown of the rule of law and the arbitrariness of family rule. In short,
the Sri Lankan state, which despite its many limitations including most
importantly its congenital incapacity to accommodate minority claims had
maintained a formally constitutional and democratic character, was
transmogrified into an organised cartel for the furtherance of the economic
interests of the ruling family and its wide network of clients. If the
ethnocratic aspect of the regime provided it with populist legitimacy, it was
this latter dimension that eroded its electoral support even within its core
constituency. It is the factor of corruption and excess that mainly explains
how a nationalist and populist President dissipated a majority of nearly two

million votes within four years of his last election in 2010.

The Nineteenth Amendment may have curtailed the powers of the
presidency, but those changes would make little difference consequent to a
return of the UPFA under Rajapaksa, because legality and constitutionalism
have little role to play in the political style and notion of state authority that
it and he represent. The legal constitution would always be subordinated to
the political constitution derived from authoritarian instincts and
majoritarian nationalism, and in this way, the Sri Lankan state would revert
to what it was under the Rajapaksa regime, notwithstanding the
democratising legal changes introduced by the Nineteenth Amendment.
The common political and civic oppositions programme was sufficiently
attractive for a substantial segment of Rajapaksas core constituency to
desert him in the last presidential election. This illustrates the limitations of
populism and nationalism as mobilising strategies and ideologies, but what
it also demonstrates is that there is something about the ideals of republic
democracy that is quite deeply rooted in the Sri Lankan polity. Rajapaksastyle strongmen might enjoy their moments of glory, but unlike in other
parts of the global south, our polity is too politically developed for this
model to take root, especially when the strongman in question does not
have the capacity to understand that even in an authoritarian state, regime
stability and continuation depends on a judicious mix of coercion and
compromise.
The alternative vision of the country offered by the common opposition won
the day in January, and in the forthcoming election, the UNP and its political
and civil society allies seek a mandate to consolidate and build upon the
changes they have introduced since the last presidential election. Although
they have not argued their vision in these terms, I contend that the model
offered by this coalition of forces represents a strongly republican model of
democratic state.
Yaha Paalanaya as Republicanism

Republicanism is a set of ideas and practices concerned with the common

good, which is opposed to political tyranny and corruption, and which
foregrounds the concept of civic virtue as the defining feature of a wellgoverned polity. There are three principal elements to the ideal republican
state. These are: anti-monarchism and popular sovereignty; the notion of
non-domination as the basis of freedom; and the value of accountability
and its institutional design. Understood in this way, what is important is not
the formal constitutional self-description of the state, but how its
substantive political institutions function in actual practice. Thus, for
example, monarchical presidential states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
may make much of the fact that they are formally republics, but in fact they
are normatively less republican than formal constitutional monarchies such
as the United Kingdom.
A republic is of course the binary opposite to a monarchy as a type of state.
But more normatively, republicanism represents the view that the ultimate
power and authority to govern a polity sovereignty emanates from the
people (therefore, popular sovereignty) and that it is created, exercised,
and reproduced in an on-going political relationship between the people and
their governing institutions. It rejects the view that sovereignty vests in a
hereditary office, or originates in some metaphysical source.
Second, the idea of non-domination is a complex and multifaceted concept,
but for present purposes what it means is the rejection of all forms of
arbitrary government, the corollary of which is the assurance of
accountability of government to the people. The scope for arbitrariness is
reduced in a republic by the provision of robust mechanisms to ensure
limits on the extent of governmental power, procedures to confine and
structure its exercise, and most importantly, the space for citizens to
continuously have a say in the process of government. The principle of nondomination thus carries three consequences: (a) open government and
freedom of information, so that government in the public interest may be

ensured; (b) civic virtue, or a citizenry concerned with ensuring the

common good and assuming some personal responsibility towards realising
it; and (c) equality, which is again a complicated concept, but here
understood as the assurance of basic legal, political, and socio-economic
conditions in order that citizens can play the role expected of them by the
republican ideal. Finally, there is little value in merely declaring these
normative values and aims as desirable goods if there are no means by
which they can be actualised. Republicanism therefore pays serious
attention to how institutions might be designed so as to ensure
accountability of government.
Even though it has not been explicitly defended as such, it can plausibly be
argued that the common opposition manifesto for the presidential election
and the UNP manifesto for the parliamentary generally conform to the
requirements of this conceptualisation of the republican ideal. The 100-day
programme was entirely about institutional reforms that were aimed at
realising the republican norms outlined above, and equally important is the
deliberate change of leadership style. The new President has been at pains
to demonstrate the public service dimension of the institution, in contrast to
the ostentation and grandiloquence of his predecessor. Due largely to the
intransigence of Rajapaksas parliamentary majority, the Nineteenth
Amendment did not fully meet the abolitionist potential of the common
opposition manifesto, but its central premise was the rejection of the
monarchism associated with the presidential institution under the 1978
Constitution, exacerbated by Rajapaksas Eighteenth Amendment. The UNP
manifesto for the parliamentary election promises to implement further
reforms to the executive that would approximate to the abolition of
presidentialism, and together with other governance reforms, these
changes would take Sri Lanka closer towards the ideals of republican
democracy.
Substantively, what the pruning of presidentialism entails is the expansion

of democracy, through better checks and balances, lesser arbitrariness, and

more space for participation and consultation. Not only is the executive to
be reshaped, but Parliament is also to be strengthened, by improving its
scrutinising capacity through a reform of the committee system. The
Nineteenth Amendment aimed at both political and legal accountability by
removing the blanket legal immunity of the president and by making the
executive responsible to Parliament. It has already made the right to
information a fundamental constitutional right, and this will be enhanced in
the future by the enactment of freedom of information legislation.
The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration demonstrated an important
symbolic commitment to equality in its economic policy as reflected in the
interim budget of January and its cost of living reliefs. Some of the fiscal
measures introduced in that budget such as the one-off tax on certain
categories of businesses that were clear beneficiaries of Rajapaksa largesse
or the so-called mansion tax that targets the same group have been
controversial, but might be defended at least in principle on grounds of
republican equality. The central big idea underlying the UNP manifesto is
the notion of the social market economy. The principle underlying this
model of economic organisation is fundamentally republican, in seeking to
ensure the balance of economic interests between society and market, or in
other words, embracing both the wealth-creation of market capitalism as
well as reaffirming the quasi-communitarian republican commitments to
some form of social equity. This might prove a tough balance in practice,
but it is at least plausible in theory.
The government elected in January was also based on a commitment to
some form of political equality, which is important in two ways. Firstly, in
appealing to the notion of a political community that has the capacity for
constitutional renewal and to self-correct the democratic sanction for
authoritarianism, and secondly, in eschewing the ethnic hierarchy denoted
by the ethnocratic model, and appealing to the minorities to join the

common purpose of rebuilding the post-war nation on a basis of pluralism

and equality. The latter aspect will not satisfy indeed is wholly inadequate
as a policy response to the sub-state nationality claim asserted by the
Tamils, and the federal autonomy within a united Sri Lankan state as the
institutional form of its practical expression, that the TNA manifesto puts
before us. But it does denote that, at least symbolically, the post-Rajapaksa
state is at least minimally responsive to the claims of minorities, and that
contentious issues may be addressed through negotiation and discussion
rather than rejection and repression. In recognising the plural character of
the Sri Lankan polity, the new dispensation impliedly recognises the validity
and legitimacy of minority claims to accommodation. That is a promising
start, and a decisive renunciation of Rajapaksa ethnocracy.
The reference to maximum devolution within the unitary state in the UNP
manifesto has to be understood in this context, and while unfortunate from
the perspective of Tamil claims to accommodation in particular, we have to
understand it as a strategic bulwark against the Rajapaksa threat on a
vulnerable flank. I am hopeful that future constitutional discussions on
devolution and power-sharing will not be excessively hindered by a
fundamentalist conception of the unitary state, and that all parties will,
pragmatically and thoughtfully, focus more on substantive matters of selfrule and shared-rule rather than symbols and terminology.
In this way we can see how sharply differentiated was the choice between
the two models of polity and state that were offered by the respective
presidential candidates. It is therefore a matter of historic significance that
in January 2015 the electorate chose to regain the dignity and self-worth of
citizenship implied by the republican model, and reject the authoritarian
domination, the lack of accountability, and the political injustice of an
ethnocracy in a plural society represented by the Rajapaksa regime. For
reasons already mentioned, the same choice confronts us on 17th August.
And for the reasons canvassed in this essay, it ought to be a no-brainer.

Posted by Thavam