Election week, is as good a week as any to look at the role of, and expectations from, the Sri Lankan legislator. Legislators everywhere are the same — they ask you to vote, and then proceed to get blamed for the next few years for what they didn’t do, provided they win. There are only a few that are able to dodge that fate.
But Sri Lankan legislators are supposed to be sui generis i.e: of their own kind, and unique. Are they? In the eyes of Sri Lankans, they are. How close to the truth is this claim?
We are a democracy that is more party dependent and party-centred than most. It is fair to say that individual legislators rarely have that much of a say on the major decisions that are made at national level. At voting time, they toe the party line, which is not bad as long as the decisions made at the party leadership level are good, which is not always the case.
So legislators are often thought of as middle level panjandrums, who deal in patronage politics at the level of the individual constituency. They secure jobs, and are supposed to initiate projects and address petty problems even, sometimes, such as securing good schools for constituents. But at the level of national policy making, they are taken to be quaint extras who make up the numbers when it comes to crucial votes in parliament.
CHANGE
So it is surprising when so many campaigners, who are merely running for a seat in Parliament for the first time, paint themselves in their campaign promotions as system changers and other transformational figures.
A lot of them promise a ‘new kind of politics,’ or the politics of change.
Of course, speaking in a very general sense, very often, there is nothing to see there. Local level panjandrums may often see themselves as agents of change, but in reality there is no transformational change they can bring about.
But that has not stemmed any of the aspirations of the voters about their Parliamentarians as agents of change. Their representatives may barely be able to save a public culvert, but the voters continue to believe in them as potential saviours.
Even though this may stem from a misguided view of the role of the legislator, it still has something to do with our political culture from the past in which parliament was seen as a nurturing ground for more challenging leadership. So when novice aspirants advertise themselves as figures for change, they are in fact saying that they will if given a chance now, get there some day to a position of leadership from which they can affect change!
But the reality is that this system of professional politics is now changed, and that’s for the good. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, just to take the most recent example, has never been a legislator in Parliament his entire life, but is now President.
FLIP SIDE
Legislators in the mould of J.R. Jayewardene, are now a political anachronism, because nobody plots a career path for professional politicians because politics of today is subject to too many vicissitudes for that.
The flip side of all this is that when there are so many people that misunderstood their role in Parliament in this way and see for themselves a role of visionary and patronage politician — they do some disservice to the cause that they are in fact supposed to serve. They don’t seem to know much about their role as legislators.
When it comes to matters of national policy, they are often unaware about the need to take a principled stand, because they think they have been sent to Parliament primarily to make up the numbers and secure mostly unjust favors for their constituents.
A Cabinet of Ministers is picked from among MPs and at least to that extent the quality of the membership needs to be underscored as an important factor. No doubt it is. But to the average voter, what counts seems in the main to be the party affiliations and how various candidates performed for the party during crisis situations.
So those who can throw the most garrulous verbal punch that would roil those on the other side of the Parliamentary isle, are preferred.
So sometimes, the most venal are preferred, and this goes for various political parties and their supporters. Politicians who don’t necessarily nurture their constituencies and thrive on their image as national or provincial figures have always existed in politics, and that has never been an issue when such people were seen as achievers, and not mere attack dogs.
Politicians of that sort of stature, such as say Gamani Jayasuriya or Lakshman Kadirgamar, to take two random figures from both sides of the isle, are such a rare species today or are virtually non-existent. It’s true that Kadirgamar was a National List politician, but it didn’t matter; today is an era in which National List politicians are attack dogs too, which is why sometimes they are smuggled in after they have lost elections.
So it’s convenient to use the word political culture. The political culture has changed irrevocably, and now Parliamentarians are regarded as an expendable commodity that some of the voters think they can do without.
CULTURE
This trend will hopefully be reversed with this new Parliament to be elected. The emphasis on the ethical Parliamentarian has been great this time. But people want their legislators to bring about systemic change.
The Cabinet of Ministers is still chosen from among Parliamentarians, and if distinguished public personalities are to be made Members of the Cabinet they have to be inducted into the legislature as National List nominees.
These nominees thereafter are drawn into the same political culture of the enactment of petty party politics as a national spectacle. This is why there was a refrain among the public chattering classes particularly during the tenure of the last Parliament that all 225 should be ousted.
All this happened because the last Parliament lost its representative character very fast. After the governing party lost Local Government elections as result of the landslide win of newly emerging party in 2018, there should have been an opportunity for a realignment of political forces.
But the fixed term Parliament law saw to it that no such thing happened. Parliament sans its representative character fast becomes redundant — and is that any surprise?
The cry of all 225 being useless seems to have originated from a Government that became irrelevant. They couldn’t possibly say that only they are now irrelevant — so they brought the rest of their colleagues into the equation and created this made up catch-all phrase that all 225 are irrelevant.
The good thing is that there was no public mood for that. Though members of the public may have taken the ‘225 are useless’ mantra as some sort of glib slogan, they yearn for good solid representation which is why this 2020 election seems in people’s minds, to be the most delayed — or the most elusive.
All that was proved by the anomaly of unrepresentative 2015-20 Parliament was that the political culture, the more it changes, stays more the same. The people want their representatives to be at the constituency level, solving mundane day to day problems. They do not want their own representatives to be a part of a large national pantomime. They expect leadership from the Executive, and if that includes the Cabinet, they are often thinking in terms of the kitchen cabinet — the smallest coterie their elected leadership at the very top level trusts.
So Parliamentarians are in this context naturally disregarded and taken to be irrelevant folks in the big picture, which is why it has become easy to vilify them.
This is not necessary unhealthy; panjandrums should not be inflated. They must never be taken too seriously, but the best legislators should be chosen to fit the job-description.
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