Whither Sri Lanka’s Parliament?

by Rajan Philips-May 23, 2020, 4:37 pm


Last week the Sunday Island carried two contributions that are quite relevant to the current controversy about the status and the future of the institution of parliament in Sri Lanka. One was by Dr. Tissa Vitarana, commemorating the inauguration of the First Republic, on 22 May 1972, and based on a new constitution drafted by Dr. Colvin R de Silva that rendered Sri Lanka’s parliament the ‘supreme instrument of state power. The second contribution was by Nihal Seneviratne, former Secretary General of Parliament, to mark the anniversary of the opening of the new parliament in Diyawannawa, Kotte, on 29 April 1982. Mr. Seneviratne’s contribution reproduced President JRJ Jayewardene’s "historic speech" on that occasion. Neither contribution touched on the current controversy over parliament. It is appropriate to fill that void especially after a week of learned arguments before the Supreme Court on that very question.

President Jayewardene’s speech was ‘historic’ if only because it included a lot of history about the physical locations and buildings that had enshrined the institution of parliament in Sri Lanka from its inception in 1920, until its relocation from Colombo to Kotte in 1982. What is remarkable, however, is that there is not a single reference in the entire speech to the executive presidential system that Mr. Jayewardene had instituted in the country four years before the opening of the new parliament in Kotte, and to the implications it would have for the functioning of parliament in its new home that JRJJ had built with Geoffrey Bawa’s design and Japanese generosity. The speech had its flights of eloquence towards its end.

The President almost poetically recalled the Buddha’s advice to the King of Magadha, extolling the virtues and welfares of an ideal nation as worthy of emulation for the new home of Lanka’s parliament – frequent gatherings of peaceful and well-attended assemblies, concordance among members and conformance with the laws, showing respect for honour and esteem and venerating the elderly and the shrines. He called out to those assembled that "in this Temple of Democracy let us so conduct ourselves for the welfare of the many that generations yet unborn may say that within this Chamber our words and conduct represented our finest hours." And he heralded the birth of a "new era of Parliamentary Democracy in a Chamber worthy of an Elected and Sovereign Assembly."

Freudian Puzzle

Really? The question arises rhetorically in one’s mind, 38 years after President Jayewardene spoke and five times as many (190) days after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been in office. The Freudian puzzle is that why Mr. Jayewardene chose not to make any reference to the executive presidency in the course of his ceremonial address. Was it a deliberate omission, or slip of mind? Not the latter, because as Head of State JRJ spoke from a script. It is for MPs that speaking from notes was considered infra dig. Not anymore. Being barely able to read from someone else’s notes is now qualification enough to be an MP. Not only in the dissolved parliament, but also in the yet to be elected new parliament.

In fairness, President Jayewardene had spoken at length about the two - presidential and parliamentary – systems, and his inspired longing to marry the two to give birth to a new Dharmishta society in Sri Lanka. But in April 1982, while opening the new parliament, Mr. Jayewardene eschewed any reference to the presidential system. But he gave a very detailed account of the initiative that began in 1967 during the government of Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake, to build a new and more spacious parliament to accommodate the anticipated increase in the number of MPs exceeding 200.

Mr. Jayewardene recounted that on 4 April 1967, a gathering of leaders of all political parties in parliament, both government and opposition, unanimously decided to proceed with the construction of "a new building for the House of Representatives and to demarcate land close to the Galle Face Green by the side of the Beira lake parallel to the land where the building … (of the old parliament) stands." Mr. Jayewardene read out the list of leaders who attended the meeting. Mrs. Bandaranaike, then Leader of the Opposition, was not of them and the SLFP was represented by Maithripala Senanayake and M.P de Zoysa Siriwardene.

The process moved forward and continued after the 1970 change in government with Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike as Prime Minister. The leaders of political parties again confirmed the Beira Lake lands as the location for the new parliament and authorized the hiring of Geoffrey Bawa and his firm of Architects to prepare preliminary plans and feasibility reports. The cabinet granted approval for the project to proceed and for the allocation of Rs. 2.2 million for Stage 1.

Even a ground-breaking ceremony was scheduled for 17 May 1973 at 1.09 pm, "which was considered to be an exceptionally auspicious day and time," according to President Jayewardene. In a meeting of the political party leaders on 3 May 1973, and attended by the Prime Minister, then Speaker Stanley Tillekeratne invited Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike to "inaugurate the work on the new Parliament Building" on 17 May. "There was no response from the Prime Minister" recalled President Jayewardene. She had already suggested postponing the project and with her silent non-response to the Speaker’s invitation, said JRJ, "the progress of the New Parliament Building Project thus came to an inauspicious halt." The project was revived after 1977 by the new government of JR Jayewardene which decided to locate the new parliament not near the old parliament at Galle Face, but to a new site in Kotte.

This saga of relocation is interesting for several reasons. Mrs. Bandaranaike was already deprived of her civic rights, courtesy of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry, and she was not at the inauguration in Kotte, when President Jayewardene quite meticulously laid it out that but for Mrs. Bandaranaike’s snub of a non-response on 3 May 1973, Sri Lanka would have had a new parliament in Colombo’s Galle Face, across the narrow Beira Lake waters from the old parliament.

There has not been any news story, or even gossip, about the reasons why Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike nixed the project at that time. Nor was there any political buzz after JRJ’s revelatory recounting in Kotte. The only buzz was among UNP cheer leaders about the apparent oratorical feat that day by Anandatissa de Alwis, who certainly might have made good use of the absence of the old verbal gladiators like SWRD Bandaranaike, GG Ponnambalam, Colvin R de Silva, Dudley Senanayake and Pieter Keuneman, to stand tall among the plains of Kotte.

Costly Fallouts

What is equally significant is the decision, after 1977, by the new Jayewardene government not to continue with the original plan to build the new parliament near the old one in Colombo, but to relocate it to a new site in Kotte. It has proved to be a costly move with little benefit in return – not only from the political standpoint, but also from the physical standpoint of the urbanization of the City of Colombo and its greater environs. Politically, the relocation of parliament to Kotte is the second costly fallout from the seemingly inadvertent omissions of the United Front government (1970-1977) of Mrs. Bandaranaike.

The first, and the most, costly fallout is the executive presidential system that JR Jayewardene was effortlessly able to prise out of the 1972 Constitution. To my mind, a grave omission of the 1972 Constitution was to reduce the Head of State to be a mere appointee of the Prime Minister. Sri Lanka could have followed the Indian example, as it transitioned from being under a monarchy to becoming a republic, and provided for an electoral college system to elect the President, or election by parliament, i.e. the National State Assembly. Just nomination by a Prime Minister was not going to cut it and JRJ had it too easy to scupper the entire First Republican Constitution.

Alternatively, Mr. Jayewardene could have opted to modify the 1972 Constitution by providing for the parliament to elect the President, or Head of State, rather than replacing the time-tested parliamentary system by an untested presidential-parliamentary hybrid system predicated on an elected executive president. But he was acting to a different agenda. JR Jayewardene’s constitutional project had a grand face and a sinister side. After JRJ, the republic became more sinister with little grandeur. None of JRJ’s successors could be as grand as JRJ.

As well, JRJ was one of three PMs or Presidents that Sri Lanka has had, SWRD Bandaranaike and Dudley Senanayake being the other two, who could actually read a constitution and understand its applications. After JRJ, with the successors that Sri Lanka has had to variously suffer, it was inevitable that the sinister side of JRJ’s constitution would increasingly displace whatever grandness that was left in it. Now that degeneration has taken Sri Lanka to its political nadir, and manifesting itself in the current constitutional crisis.

Changing Faces

The country’s parliament that was constitutionally elevated to be the Supreme Instrument of State Power in 1972, is now struggling to be rescued by the Supreme Court from executive overreach. The shifts and slights that the institution of parliament in Sri Lanka has been going through over the years are well illustrated by the four images numbered and included on this page. They are annotatively described below.

(1) The Old Parliament: The building was opened in 1930 and it briefly housed the then Legislative Council. It became the State Council building in 1931, with the introduction of universal franchise and the election of the first State Council that year. In 1947, it became Sri Lanka’s first elected parliament and remained so until parliament’s relocation to Kotte in 1982. Located at the northern end of the Galle Face promenade, and built to the imperial neo-baroque architectural style of the 19th century, the imposing building nonetheless evolved to reflect the changing moods of a politically sensitized country as it transitioned from colonial rule, to dominion status and full independence. Its open lawns and low parapet walls were endearing to ordinary people, who would either sit on them or just hop over onto the terrain of power. The complex stood in stony silence as carnivals, festivities, political protests, marches, and rallies filled the air on the Galle Face green. It received people’s representatives chosen freely by voters in recognizable individual constituencies, and not opaque electoral districts. It enabled its MPs to sit in sessions, form committees, discuss and debate issues, raise and answer questions, hold governments accountable, approve expenditures, and enact legislation. Over forty-six years (1931-1977), it set up Sri Lanka’s vaunted welfare state. It could also exercise its muscle when needed to deal with emergencies or put down coups and insurrections. Most of all, it accommodated a collective instrument of state power, not a rubber stamp for an individual executive, and where every Minister was an ordinary MP first, and the Prime Minister was merely the first among equals and nothing more.

(2) Presidential Secretariat: After 1982, the old parliament became the new presidential secretariat. The parapets that people walked over became footings for spiked fences. Symbolically and substantively, people were separated from power. The same building was adapted to house power without parliament; to make decisions without deliberations; to rule without accountability; and to privilege direct electability over democracy.

(3) The House JRJ Built: President Jayewardene’s gift to Sri Lankan parliamentary democracy. The creation of Geoffrey Bawa, the island’s most renowned Architect, the ‘Parliament Complex’ is a blend of global modernism and local aesthetics. No one knows what Bawa would have created for a new parliament alongside the Galle Face promenade. Politically, the complex represents the subtraction of power from parliament. An opulent edifice for the trappings transferred from the old parliament while leaving the power behind at the presidential secretariat.

(4) Temple Trees Parliament: A sign of the times and of times to come. A makeshift assembly of old MPs, more than symbolically in masks, and convened as a surrogate for recalling the real parliament, which is dissolved but is not dead. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa refuses to recall the real parliament, and the Prime Minister convenes a mock parliament almost as convivial as an OBA gathering. There is a global pandemic, and there is national curfew, but the two do not make sufficient grounds to declare national emergency and recall parliament. That is the governing assessment. Even JRJ’s otherwise abominable constitution neatly provides all the prescriptions for the current situation. None are needed, says the government. While saying there is no emergency, the government is also insisting that there is necessity. The (doctrine of) necessity, that is, not to declare emergency, or recall parliament. Not the advice Buddha gave to the King of Magadha, which JR told his MPs in Kotte, but forgot to mention that he was their President.