From communal bartering to proportional

bickering:The antecedents and the

expectations of 20A

by Rajan Philips-June 13, 2015

I settled on the title for todays article before

hearing about the UNP-SLFPcabinet consensus on the total number of
seats the reformed parliament will have 237, a compromise between for
Champikas insistent 255 and Ranils take-it-or-leave-it 225. The title might
seem tad negative when a sigh of relief might be in order since another
amendment showdown seems to have been averted. But the seemingly
benign ending does not easily wash away the bitter taste our
parliamentarians leave on everything they touch. Truth be told, the
haggling over representational numbers is not something new to our
current crop of politicians. They are heirs to a tortuous a history of fights
over political seats, but they have taken it, down or up, to another level.
To briefly recount that history and to look ahead to what the 20th
Amendment may hold is my purpose today, and so I will stay with the title.
More than the title, are we jumping the gun writing that the 20th
Amendment is all good to go, barring the rites of the Supreme Court
passage? How much of the SLFP is behind the new 20A formula: 145 FPP
+ 55 DPR + 37 NL * 237 MPs? The SLFPers in Ranils cabinet speak for no

one, not especially for those MPs who flocked to Matara to register their
attendance at the pro-Mahinda rally, the first one to be graced by their
Masters presence. But the expectations are that President Sirisena will
again wave his magic stick and that it would be easier this time than it was
with 19A. The not so secret carrot he is said to be dangling is for the MPs
to pass 20A and he will give them an election under the current PR +
Preferential + NL system. The pseudo-purists and GL Peiris will cavil, but
most people would be happy to have some progress rather than no
progress. But how much of the new formula can actually reform a
parliament that has become almost irreparably deformed? There was a
flurry of no confidence motions that have gone nowhere, but the one no
confidence motion that is still not on the order paper is the no confidence
motion against the whole parliament, moved by the people.
True parliamentary reform is not going to be achieved by electoral reforms
only, although changes in the electoral system after 1978 account for
much of the current dysfunctionality of our parliament. There will have to
be other changes in the ethos and the attitudes of parliamentarians;
their electability criteria and representational effectiveness; in the system
of political parties, their internal organizations, and external alliance
formation; and in the balance of power between the executive president,
the cabinet of ministers, and the body of parliament itself. The haggling
over numbers among individual MPs and the political parties clearly
indicates that what is uppermost in their minds is not serious reform but
job security, salary, and of course pension. These are normal human
concerns, but what about the rest of the population?
Looking beyond the numbers
The numbers by themselves do not mean much. We cannot find a
meaningful correlation between the number of seats in parliament and
anything else by comparing the changes in our legislatures over time, or
by comparing them to parliamentary representations in other countries.
The number of seats in the Legislative Council kept increasing over a
century (1833-1931) to a maximum of 49 until the introduction of
universal franchise in 1931. The number 49 for 5.3 million people, in 1931,
is not too low or too high compared to the numbers that are being bandied
now. There were 61 seats in the State Council during late colonial period
(1931-47), and the population increased to 6.6 million in 1946. At
independence, we had 101 parliamentarians, 95 elected and six
nominated, and that number stayed until the 1970 election. After the 1971

census and electoral delimitation, the number of seats was raised by little
over 50% to 168, in time for the 1977 election, while the population nearly
doubled to 12.7 million. After ten years (1978-88) the number went up to
the present 225, but in a totally different political world differentiated by
the executive presidency smothering a weakened parliament; proportional
representation and party lists replacing the first-past-the-post MPs
representing mostly single-member constituencies; and the shift as
Sociologist Laksiri Jayasuriya has described, from being a welfare state to
a warfare state, albeit underpinned by an open economy. My point is
whether we go up or down from the current 225 seats, and how
contentiously we distribute them between FPPs, DPRs and NLs, is
immaterial unless we also pay attention to and deal with the political world
that has been weighing us down since 1978/1988.
So we will have 237 seats for over 20 million people, and hopefully we will
stay with it for a long time. There is no useful yardstick for cross-county
comparisons Australia has 150 MPs for 23 million people; Japan 480 for
126 million people; Nigeria 360 for 184 million; Indonesia 560 for 256
million; USA 435 for 323 million; and India 545, and China nearly 3,000,
for 1.3 billion people each. It is all over the map, literally. What matters is
the totality of political representation in a country, and not just the number
of MPs in the central parliament. A number of commentators (Kusal Perera
and Lacille de Silva, for example), have raised this concern that the
number of seats in parliament should have some bearing to political
representation at the provincial level that we have had since 1987. This is
an important consideration even though Dayan Jayatilleke per usual is
trying to stir up a political storm in a provincial tea cup, because somebody
has spoken of a Northern Provincial Government. What else would you call
it? Havent we heard of Local Government, even of the local state.
When we look at the totality of representation, there are 455 political
representatives in the nine Provincial Councils, which corresponds to the
current 196 elected MPs, excluding the 29 National List redundancies. The
ratio between the number of Councillors and the number of elected MPs in
each Province varies between 2.2 and 2.6, and the ratio is not going to
vary much whether we go to 237 or 255. What is more important is how
we will ever start working towards a more efficient system of sharing
power and distributing roles functions between the central parliament and
the provincial councils, and, yes, between the national government and the
provincial governments. That road has not been opened at all after
January 8, apart from a few significantly symbolic initiatives on the
northern front.

From the old 50-50 to a new 50-50

Historically, political representation has been at the core of the conflict
between the islands ethnic co-existences. GG Ponnambalam
characteristically sensationalized it with his 50-50 demand in 1946, a
representational formula giving 50% of the seats in the legislature to the
Sinhalese, and 50% to all the minorities combined not just Tamils alone,
as it is sometimes misunderstood. The formula was not technically
incompatible with constitutional thinking for interim arrangements in the
late colonial period, and more so when no one would have thought that
independence was just two years round the corner. And I know of three
scholars, a Sinhalese, a Tamil, and a Muslim, all born after the 50-50
demand had come and gone, who think that it is not a bad idea at all, then
or now! What sank the proposal were Ponnambalams less than honourable
motivations and his deliberately provocative articulation to "enthuse" his
own followers, as Prof. Ludowyk would later describe it. Minority demands
for representation are not headline news anymore. Prime Minister Ranil
Wickremasinghe after his first cut at a compromise number 225 seats *
115 FPPs + 75 DPRs + 35 NLs, which was more a provocation for
dissolving parliament than reaching a compromise, openly admitted that
his formula may not be acceptable to minority political parties and left it to
the President to deal with it! Talk about upward delegation!
The new 237-compromise would appear to be acceptable to the minority
parties. The fact of the matter is that whereas the earlier contestation over
representation was between the Sinhalese and the Ceylon Tamils, now the
Muslim and the Indian Tamil political organizations have entered the fray.
Since 1994, the representation of the two communities in parliament has
increased even as the earlier monopoly of Muslim politics by West-coast
Muslims and of Indian Tamil politics by the CWC has been irreversibly
broken. The establishment of Provincial Councils has added another, in my
view a more practical, dimension to Tamil and Muslim politics, although the
Provincial Council system has hardly passed its nascent stage despite the
nearly thirty years that have gone by. In the central parliament, apart from
the TNA, other minority political organizations have become an integral
part of amorphous alliance formations and have lost their political
specificity if not their ethnic identity.
Having said all this, I am inclined to conclude by using Ponnamabalms 5050 demand for a different provocative purpose. Why cannot there be 50-50

representation based on gender, not only in the national parliament but

also in the Provincial Councils? There is at present a measly 13 seats
occupied by women, in parliament, whereas women and men are equal in
number in the national population, and Sri Lankan women have become
equally competent as men in all areas of public life. The 20th Amendment
will not be worth the paper that it will be signed on if it does not address
the gross gender disparity in our political representation. Providing equal
numbers of seats in parliament to women and men by law would be an
indication that good governance has got one thing right.
Posted by Thavam