Scandalisation of democracy: Lankas gains and failures thru the democratic process 25th July 2014 – Ceylon Today Shiral Lakthilaka When democracy of a country is analyzed it is always better to discuss it in comparative terms. To understand the level of democracy in our country I opt to rely on the World Justice Project(WJP) / Rule of Law Indexes 2012-2013 and its ratings as a point of departure to understand the width and breadth of the issue in hand. The WJP Rule of Law Index is a quantitative assessment tool designed by the World Justice Project to offer a comprehensive picture of the extent to which countries adhere to the rule of law, not just in theory but particularly in practice and analyses how the deficit could affect daily lives of ordinary people. The Index provides nine dimensions of Rule of Law and a further 48 sub-factors under the said nine dimensions to understand the exact dynamics of Rule of Law in respective countries. The Report says that although many countries in the South Asian region have made efforts to strengthen governance, South Asia as a region is the weakest performer overall in most dimensions of the Rule of Law. These countries are characterized by high levels of corruption and lack of government accountability. According to the Report, Sri Lankas profile is defined in this manner; Sri Lanka outperforms its regional peers in all but two dimensions of the Rule of Law. The country also out paces most lower-middle income countries in several areas. Certainly this is an uplifting remark but as a country the ratings do not give an impressive picture of us as one of the oldest functioning democracies in Asia. The ratings suggest that we are partially defective in application of rule of law in all spheres except in one area. The badly performed area of governance is law & order and security. In this area, we have been showing our complete inability in maintaining such very important aspect of democratic governance. According to this Index, Sri Lanka ranks 47th in the area of limited government powers out of 97 countries and ranks 43rd in the absence of corruption. Under the sphere of order and security we are 89th out of 97 countries. We are 50th out of the 97 countries on fundamental rights protection. In open government regulatory enforcement we have come to the 43rd place. On civil and criminal justice we are placed at 55th and 33rd places respectively. Interestingly, various Scandinavian countries have come to the top in most of these categories except in law and order sector where Singapore is placed as no. 1 whereas Sri Lanka finds itself almost at the end. In the limited governance sector, Uzbekistan have been placed as the last country. In the category of absence of corruption, Cameroon is placed as the last while Jamaica and Belarus are placed at 42 and 44, thus sandwiching Sri Lanka at 43. In the sphere of human rights protection, Iran is placed at the bottom, while Georgia at 49 and Botswana at 51 keep company with us at 50. Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens participate equally—either directly or indirectly through elected representatives—in the proposal, development and creation of laws. Although we tend to speak of democracy along the lines of governance, essential value of democracy lies at how democracy can shape the attitudes of a person and then those of society. When we talk about autocracy of a state, it is directly related to the attitude of the rulers. When rulers of a representative democracy resort to a ‘winner takes all’ kind of attitude, it opens the path to autocracy and authoritarianism. This means they tend to believe that law derives from themselves and not from the people like the French King Louis XIV who said I am the State . In highly centralized governance models, law and order, human rights, open and limited government become just dreams. Famous French Enlightenment era writer and philosopher, Voltaire who is also known as the Father of Democracy has said that I do not agree with what you have to say, but Ill defend to the death your right to say it”. According to Voltaire this is what he meant as spirit and foundation of the democratic practice. This should be the essence of democracy that should be practiced in our societies also. If we deviate from this democratic value system then we are left with a mere skeleton of Democracy without a core in it. If that is the case, such a tendency should be called a scandalized democracy. In such a context, goals of representative democracy become obsolete. Voltaire, the Father of Democracy had also forewarned that this kind of ‘offset’ democracy may happen in the future world. He had also stated that Democracy would become Idiocy of the masses in certain contexts. If we look for a synonym for the word idiocy one can understand it through either stupidity, folly or futility. In the Sri Lankan context of representative democracy, one can argue that all these three synonyms of the word idiocy are associated with the outcome of our way of practicing democracy. It is due to the stupidity of the voters that our representatives have been able to inherit this kind of political life sans any checks and balances. It is due to the folly of our representatives that we are in such a mess in governance. It is due to the futility of practicing the democratic model that we have not been able to manage the changes from time to time as we desire. Although many political scholars critique the above statement of Voltaire, in the context of Sri Lanka, it seems that he was very prophetic. In this context it is important to understand how we inherited this kind of democracy. It is an obvious fact that the notion of representative democracy was an imported commodity for us. We inherited it from the British colonial masters. When we inherited it, we never bothered to understand the core values that were placed underneath it. Our colonial masters also never bothered to teach their successors how to utilize that notion in a context of multicultural democracy whereas in India, freedom fighters took almost one year in their National Assembly under the stewardship of Prof. Ambedkar to debate over this notion and adopt what we call atochnomous democratic decision-making model for independent India. In contrast to what happened in India, colonial masters in this country had just passed the system to our local representatives in the form of what Whitehall of England had drafted to cater to our political needs. But they initially cautioned us that we may be not matured and educated enough to sustain such a system. Perhaps this may have been another prophetic statement by our colonial masters. To convince the colonial masters of our maturity, D.S. Senanayake and other leaders of the Ceylon National Congress, as reported by historians, were supposed to have organized and staged dramas wherever Lord Soulbery visited to hold sessions of his Commission. As a result, Lord Soulbery happened to meet English-speaking peasants, blacksmiths, villagers etc wherever and whenever he visited various parts of the country and finally the good Lord was convinced about our maturity and recommended the grant of independence. So we got the dominion status without any question. But we never got enlightened on what we got even in a process of evolution. Since then we started passing the buck from one Parliament to another. Then at a certain stage the buck stopped at the Executive Presidency. The successive Presidents also passed the buck from one to the other until recently. Now what we see is that the buck has reached the incumbent President who has also got 18th Amendment powers. Now the process of passing the buck has reached a standstill as, hereafter, there is no likelihood of a democratic successor being elected by true popular mandate. As suggested by the WJP Report, our system seems to be like a ‘half ripe half rotten’ mango. This nature can be succinctly explained through our existing election system. We elect our representatives through a popular mandate. We often boast that we are one of the oldest functioning democracies in Asia. But we never bothered to analyze how the mandate is given and what the true popularity of the mandate is. Whether it is given due to ones policies or something else has never been questioned. It is an irrelevant discussion point in our democracy. Every year we find national or provincial or local elections. It apparently shows the so-called vibrancy of our democratic model. But no one bothers to ask who prepares the playing field and how the rules are designated to play the game in such a playing field. Although we have an umpire by the name of election commissioner, to give decisions on how the game was played on the turf after the elections, the manner of his appointment and his powers are non-issues in our discourse. Local and international monitoring missions often come forward to strengthen the mandate of the election commissioner. They may also issue a report relating to elections held and fade away from the radar screen thereafter. There is nobody to assert the facts and carry out a concerted campaign to say that this particular public official has no powers and that he is appointed by some of the players on the field themselves and move for a progressive change. Irrespective of these inherent structural short–comings, we tend to believe that whenever an election is declared as violence–free, then such an election is free and fair. If someone unnecessarily bothers himself to challenge the outcome of such an election in the courts, it would be an uphill task for him to prove that such election was not free and fair. Then the courts will finally give the necessary legitimacy to such structurally-flawed elections. Then we start living our lives happily without bothering about the past. So this the story of our representative democracy. It is we who created this system. We created this system unintentionally. We were unintentional because we were not bothered. Then what we get is not the true democratic model but a scandalized democratic model. This is the Sri Lankan legacy of democracy.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 08:04:02 +0000
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