PC polls: What the President
Rapprochement between SLFP and UNP on amendment Bill to hold provincial council elections on mixed system; thrilling efforts to get two-thirds majority Attorney Genera that two-thirds m sufficient to pass
Hopes of elections this year to three Provincial Councils – North Central, Sabaragamuwa and Eastern – were buoyed by last Tuesday’s announcement of the Supreme Court determination, but evaporated just hours later.
Ruling coalition leaders, not in favour of PC polls, adopted other counter measures that will now cause an indefinite delay. It came during a tense, behind-the-scenes political drama. Members of the Elections Commission threatened to resign. Even President Maithripala Sirisena, who was in New York to attend the 72nd sessions of the UN General Assembly kept himself busy from his hotel suite appealing for help from minority parties that backed his Government. It paid off.
This came after the SC determination, by majority 2-1 vote on the 20th Amendment to the Constitution became public last Tuesday. Contrary to expectations of coalition leaders, the Court held that the three clauses of 20A (i.e. 2, 3 and 4) were inconsistent with the Constitution. Hence, the Court held that it required not only a two thirds majority vote in Parliament but also the approval of the people at a referendum. In essence the ruling affected the entirety of 20A. Clause 1 only referred to “This Act may be cited as the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution.” Clause 4, the last one, contained the usual interpretative clause which said “In the event of any inconsistency between the Sinhala and Tamil texts of this Act, the Sinhala text shall prevail.”
If there was no timely action on their part this week, coalition leaders realised, that the Elections Commission would gazette the date for nominations for the three PC elections. They knew that the Commission would thereafter set a date in December this year for the polls. Conducting a referendum to thwart the move was a high risk they did not wish to take. Hence they embarked on other hurried measures.
What 20A sought was to introduce a provision to enable elections to all Provincial Councils to be held on the same date. For this, the Government wanted to empower Parliament to determine the date (which is also referred to as “specified date’) on which PCs shall stand dissolved. Another provision was to include the term of office of any Provincial Council ending prior to the specified date to be deemed, to be extended. The term of any PC which continues beyond the specified date to stand dissolved on a fresh specified date. The third and final amendment was to enable Parliament to exercise powers of a dissolved PC until the specified date is determined.
That the SC held that 20A was not consistent with the Constitution was bad news for the coalition leadership. The first indications of their course of action emerged from President Maithripala Sirisena’s side. He did not favour the idea of an early PC poll. As is customary, he was the recipient of a sealed copy of the SC determination sent to Parliament. Even before Speaker Karu Jayasuriya could formally announce the contents on Tuesday, they were on overdrive mode examining counter measures. That these would centre on a course of action in Parliament became clear when Sirisena decided that all MPs backing the Government should remain in Colombo. Even Foreign Minister Tilak Marapana, who was a last minute addition to his delegation had to stay put in Colombo. A group of MPs left for New York only on Thursday night after the vote.
Coalition leaders had by then decided on their course of action. Telephones hummed between Sirisena in New York and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in Colombo. They resurrected a three-page “Provincial Councils Elections (Amendment) Bill which was presented in Parliament on July 27 by Provincial Councils and Local Government Minister Faiszer Musthapa. The purpose of this Bill, which lay in limbo, was to “specify the number of female candidates to be included in a nomination paper” for PC elections. It sought to set out that of the candidates nominated for PC elections, not less than 30% should be females. It also made provision to reject any nomination paper which does not contain the specified number of female candidates. The three page bill had amendments that ran into some 30 pages. Speaker Karu Jayasuriya signed his assent on Friday night giving legal effect to the new laws passed by Parliament on Thursday.
Caught by surprise that they were not consulted, the Election Commission Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya rushed a letter to Speaker Jayasuriya. In that strong letter, he said, the Commissioners proposed to hold a news conference and later hand in their resignations. Speaker Jayasuriya was to extend his apologies at a meeting on Friday with Deshapriya, the Chairman of the Delimitation Commission Pavalingam Kanagaratnam, Local Government and Provincial Council Minister Faiszer Musthapa and his Ministry Secretary Kamal Pathmasiri. He sought an assurance from them that the Local Government elections would be held in January next year and the Provincial Councils before March, also next year.
As revealed later in these columns, some of the provisions in the new law would lead to a time consuming exercise thus obviating an early PC poll. One example is the appointment of a five member Delimitation Committee within two weeks of the Bill becoming law by the President to “divide each administrative district into such number of electorates as corresponds to 50% of the total number of members to be elected from such administrative district.” The President will appoint the Chairman and the five persons will represent the “pluralistic character of Sri Lankan society, including professional and social diversity” by an order published in the gazette.
The Committee shall assign names to each electorate in the division of the administrative districts. Where it appears to the Committee that there is, in any area of an administrative district, a substantial concentration of persons united by a community of interest, whether racial, religious or otherwise, but differing in one or more of respects from the majority of the inhabitants of the area, the Committee may make such division of the administrative districts into electorates. In making such division, the Committee has been asked to pay due regard to (a) the desirability of reducing to the minimum the disproportion in the number of persons resident in the several electorates of the administrative districts within the Province, and (2) the geographical and physical features of the electorates. The Committee has also been vested with powers to create constituencies which will be entitled to return more than one member.
The provision to have a new Delimitation Committee has also raised an issue. Speaker Jayasuriya, according to Parliament sources, met Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to urge him to give the task to the existing constitutionally empowered National Commission for Delimitation. These sources said Jayasuriya said it would be an “insult to the Constitution” if a separate Delimitation Committee is appointed. He had said that if there was a requirement, two more members could be added. The Premier had agreed to consider the matter, the sources added.
A ‘Joint Opposition’ delegation led by its parliamentary group leader Dinesh Gunawardena also met Premier Wickremesinghe to protest against the manner in which the amendments were being rushed. The Premier had replied that it was urgent Government business and had to be taken up. He quipped, perhaps in humour, that they now knew how to take up such urgent business.
Under the new law, the Delimitation Committee which has been legally tasked to “endeavour to arrive at a consensus in dealing with matters” is to be called upon to submit its report to the Minister within two weeks of the receipt of such report and table it in Parliament for its approval by not less than a two thirds majority. If there is no such approval within one month, the Speaker has been empowered to appoint a Review Committee of five persons headed by the Prime Minister. Such a Committee will have the power to cause any alteration to names, numbers and boundaries of any electorate. Thereafter, the President is empowered to issue a Proclamation publishing the new number of electorates.
Thus, with this new development, PC elections this year for the three councils could not be held as planned by the Election Commission. As a result there is uncertainty now over the time period. This is notwithstanding Speaker Jayasuriya’s plea to the Chairman of the Election Commission to conduct the local polls in January next year and the PC polls before March of the same year.
Issues over this also came to the fore when political party representatives met Speaker Jayasuriya last Tuesday to discuss parliamentary business for the week. When both the UNP and SLFP (pro Sirisena) representatives said they wanted to place on the Order Paper for Wednesday the Provincial Councils Elections