Ban on ethnic parties calls for reformednon-ethnic state

By Jehan Perera

(August 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The government has proposed to bring a new law that would ban political parties that have ethnic or religious labels in their names. The new law also targets new, small and regional parties. After the end of a 30-year separatist war there is a mood of optimism in government circles who feel themselves empowered by having done what previous governments failed to do. The government’s leadership has repeatedly expressed the intention of creating a united and unitary country in which there is but one people and a single nation. President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s victory speech called for the abolition of the term "minorities" from the country’s political vocabulary. He added that in future there would be only two groups, those who loved the country, and a small and treacherous group who did not.

The President’s speech was widely quoted in the government media as being a statesmanlike one. In the flush of military victory that caught virtually the whole of the world by surprise and nationalist exuberance that accompanied it, there were hardly any dissenting voices that dared to be heard. The President could just have easily decreed the abolition of the term "majority." Indeed, such a statement might have been made to assuage the fears of the ethnic minorities at a time when victorious Sinhalese nationalism was at its height. But as a sagacious politician, mindful of the need to preserve his voter base, the President chose to deal with the ethnic minority label, rather than with the ethnic majority one.

The recently concluded Uva and Northern election results have proved the President to be correct in his political assessment. In the poverty stricken Uva province, with its predominantly Sinhalese electorate, the government got an unprecedented 72 percent of the vote, although little has changed in terms of the economic conditions under which the people live. However, in the North, with its predominantly ethnic Tamil electorate, the opposite trend was visible. The northern elections showed that although the government had successfully reunited the country militarily, geographically and administratively, it had not succeeded in uniting the country under its political banner. It is in these circumstances that the government appears to have decided to employ the strategy of legally banning its ethnic opposition.

Not alone

The provision to ban the use of ethnic and religious labels has come up in a bill to amend the Parliamentary Elections Act and states that "a political party shall not be entitled to be treated as a recognised party, if its name signifies any religious, community or ethnic group." The proposed law will give power to the Elections Commissioner to deny legal recognition to such parties. According to media reports, the banning of minority parties has been the government’s own proposal as this proposal was not amongst the Election Commissioner’s recommendations, nor was it that of the Parliamentary Select Committee that deliberated about electoral reform for over two years.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa and the present government are not alone in believing that words and bans can perform the difficult task of political transformation. In July 1983, after the anti-Tamil pogrom that shocked the world, President J R Jayewardene and his government banned the propagation of "Tamil Eelam" and compelled all persons who held state office to take an oath that disavowed separatism. This law drove away Tamil parliamentarians who had been elected by voters. The democratically elected and non-violent Tamil leadership was replaced on the ground by unelected and violent youth who could operate underground.

On the other hand, President Rajapaksa and his government are correct in their assessment of the need to forge a Sri Lankan identity and that this is the best possible time to do so. What is necessary is to have a Sri Lankan identity that all sections of the population can take pride in, whether they are in Sri Lanka or abroad, confident that behind them is a state that seeks to empower and protect them to the maximum. The pre-requisite for a Sri Lankan identity is that every citizen, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or economic status, will believe that the government will treat them equally before the law and in which no ethnic community has special privileges or rights that others do not enjoy.

Ethnic tradition

From the time of Sri Lanka’s independence, and even before it, the question that has troubled the polity is how to share power equitably in a multi ethnic and multi religious society. But this problem has not yet been resolved. Protesting against the proposed law, Jaffna parliamentarian N. Srikantha is quoted in the media as having said that there were no national political parties in Sri Lanka as the so-called national parties were dominated by members of the ethnic majority with only token posts for minorities. The trouncing received by the main opposition party, the UNP, at the recent northern elections where it got less than 2 percent of the vote and the relatively poor showing of the government alliance are evidence that this type of thinking has resonance with the minority electorate.

The proposed electoral reform law is now before the Supreme Court where it has been challenged on a number of grounds by several political parties, including non-ethnic parties such as the UNP and LSSP, and ethnic parties such as the Tamil National Alliance and Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. They have stated that the proposed law would violate a number of internationally recognised Fundamental Rights, including the equal protection of the law, the freedoms of religion, association and expression, and the right to vote for parties of their choice. It is to be hoped that the checks and balances of the democratic system will work and the juggernaut of government will not impose its will upon the ethnic and religious parties. If ever a time comes to ban ethnic and religious parties it ought to be only when Sri Lanka has a state that ensures that all sections of the population feel themselves to be treated equally and no community is privileged above others.

The tradition in Sri Lanka has been to uphold and recognise religious and ethnic identity. The framers of both the post-independence constitutions in 1972 and 1978 gave the religion of the ethnic majority, the foremost place and the protection of the state. The unitary state enshrined in these two constitutions gives the 75 percent Sinhalese majority an unshakeable grip on political power even in those parts of the country where the Sinhalese are not the majority. At the same time the present Constitution blocks the devolution of power to regional governments that could be controlled by ethnic minorities. In this situation, it is inevitable that political parties should be formed to work for the benefit and advantage of minority communities. There needs to be consistency in governance, and the government needs to respect the position of political parties with an ethnic or religious label, at least until such time it fundamentally reforms itself and the Constitution.

-Sri Lanka Guardian