Sleeping with the enemy: How the island country of Sri Lanka came to a boil

Political intrigue has forced the island nation into early elections

One unconstitutional step often paves the way for another. President Maithripala Sirisena’s unconstitutional removal of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and appointing Mahinda Rajapaksa in his place has finally led to the dissolution of Parliament. It is a controversial decision because Sri Lanka’s Constitution forbids the President from dissolving Parliament before it has completed four and half years of its five year term. 

Parliamentary elections which should have been held in August 2020 have now been scheduled for January next. 

The October 26 “coup without guns”, as Parliament Speaker Karu Jayasuriya described it, was long in the making. Personal and political differences had begun simmering between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe fairly early in the dispensation the two had put together.

It might be recalled that Maithripala Sirisena won the presidency after splitting from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and joining hands with the Opposition United National Party (UNP) in January 2014. He was the Health Minister in President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government and the general secretary of the SLFP.

The UNP chose him as the Opposition’s Presidential candidate because no candidate of its own would have been able to defeat Rajapaksa. Rajapaksa represented the majority hard-line Sinhala-Buddhist constituency. Sirisena split the SLFP and with the help of the UNP and the non-Buddhist minorities won the presidency.

Mahinda Rajapaksa | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Sirisena came to power on a platform of ending the executive presidency imposed by Rajapaksa, protecting the power of the judiciary and Parliament, furthering reconciliation with Tamils, fighting corruption and investigating war crimes. In return for UNP support he appointed its leader Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister. Initially he headed a minority government, but after the August 2015 parliamentary elections, Wickremesinghe was able to form a majority coalition government. 

Then why did Sirisena join hands with Rajapaksa, his bete noir, within just three years? Things stared to go wrong between him and Wickremesinghe immediately after the latter became prime minister. He did not consult Sirisena on major policy matters, including key economic decisions. 

Wickremesinghe ignored the president’s advice to refrain from appointing a foreign citizen as Central Bank Governor, when he chose Arjun Mahendran, a Singapore citizen of Sri Lankan origin for the job, for the remaining term of the outgoing Governor. He would have given Mahendran a fresh six-year term had the Central Bank Bond Scam not come to light. There were charges of insider trading against the Governor himself. The PM attempted to bury the scam through a parliamentary committee. 

However, Sirisena struck against him by appointing a Special Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the bond scam. In an unprecedented move the prime minister himself had to testify before the commission.

Sirisena also watched the fracturing of the Sinahala-Buddhist vote with some alarm as a pro-Rajapaksa “joint Opposition” in Parliament started gaining strength -- it grew from 40 MPs in 2015 to 70 MPs in 2018. The President suspected that Wickremesinghe was behind the Rajapaksa faction gaining strength while his own supporters in the SLFP were being targeted. Perhaps he saw these moves as attempts by Wickremesinghe’s to further his own ambition for the presidency. 

At the same time with growing price rise and economic mismanagement, an impression was gaining ground in the Sinhala-Buddhist constituency that Rajapaksa’s rule was less chaotic and more stable than Sirisena’s. In April this year, a vote of no confidence was moved against Wickremesinghe, allegedly at the instance of the President. 

Wickremesinghe survived the vote with 122 MPs supporting him in the 225-member parliament.The president’s party, the SLFP, was divided over the vote with only 16 of its 42 MPs voting for the prime minister, and the rest choosing to abstain. Having failed to oust the PM constitutionally, the President began to explore other means. 

Sirisena then began a dialogue with Rajapaksa, believing that he alone could muster the magic figure of 113 required for a majority in Parliament. Together they had 95 SLFP MPs. In addition, the president hoped for the support of about 20 MPs from the UNP and other parties, especially Muslim MPs, to cross the half-way mark. Once Rajapaksa’s numbers looked strong, it was expected that more MPs would drift towards him. 

This seems to have been the broad calculation behind Sirisena’s shock move of October 26. The immediate provocation for Sirisena, however, was that the prime minister had not taken rumours of an assassination plot against him by an Indian agency, seriously. 

However, Sirisena was taken aback by the political resistance to his unconstitutional act of dismissing Wickremesinghe. It also became clear that Rajapaksa would not be able to prove his majority in Parliament, although a floor test is not a constitutional requirement. The President can appoint any MP to the post who in his opinion "is most likely to command the confidence of Parliament ". 

Nevertheless it would be politically disastrous for Rajapaksa and his party to face a vote of confidence without the requisite numbers. He failed to woo the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) because he would not give them any written assurances. Once the TNA turned against him, Rajapaksa pushed for dissolution of Parliament in the hope of winning the ensuing elections. 

Sirisena’s options were also limited. As he could not reappoint Wickremesinghe prime minister, he too opted for dissolution. To do this he engineered a legal opinion from former Chief Jusitce Sarath Silva that the Constitution allowed the President to dissolve Parliament “in a critical situation”. This was akin to the “doctrine of necessity” argument used regularly for subverting democracy in Pakistan.

The local body elections held in February this year indicated that the Sinhala-Buddhist vote represented by Rajapaksa-Sirisena combine was about 52 per cent. Their assumption is that the UNP will face an uphill task against them. The question then is: Will the UNP and the Opposition be better off going to the polls as victims of Sirisena’s low-cunning rather than challenging the constitutionality of his move in the Supreme Court? No one knows which way the voters may swing after Sirisena has forced them into mid-term elections.

The writer is a journalist based in Delhi. He tweets @bharatitis.