by AMEER ALI
Soon after the JR Constitution was introduced, when progressive forces within the majority Sinhalese and the Tamil minority began agitating to tear up that Constitution, Muslims, instead of joining that movement, took a suicidal path under Ashraf and formed an ethnic party of their own.
It appears, according to a news report that the leaders of SLMC, ACMC and DPF during a meeting with President Sirisena to discuss constitutional reforms have “reneged on their promise to back the ongoing efforts to abolish the executive presidency”. Unless these leaders prove the report wrong, their turncoat behaviour tantamount to a betrayal of historic proportion as far as the Muslim community is concerned.
Muslim politicians, with rare exceptions, are best known for their opportunistic behaviour. Yet, this act overtakes all previous ones in notoriety. One does not know what personal gains have been promised by the president to these guys. As far as the future of the community is concerned executive presidency will spell disaster when it falls into the hands of a madman or madwoman as warned by Dr. N.M. Perera, one of the most brilliant and farsighted political thinkers the country ever produced.
Do these parvenus, masquerading as leaders of Muslims, know why the executive presidency with proportional representation was introduced in the first place by JR, who, after elevating himself to that position, became the ‘midwife’ of not a revolution, as leftists used to predict, but an ethnic pogrom, which plunged the country into a civil war? The country is still reeling under the economic and human disasters ensued from this foolish war. JR disliked two outcomes in particular of the previous Westminster model. Firstly, a virtual stranglehold that left parties like LSSP and CP had in the Parliament because of their balancing power, and secondly, a decisive voting strength Muslims commanded in about 32 electorates, according to a study by Professor A. J. Wilson.
Through the executive presidency he wanted get rid of the power of leftists and with them any voice of sanity in the parliament, and with proportional representation he wanted to electorally disenfranchise the Muslims. JR was so audacious with his newly acquired constitutional power that in one instance, even asked the Muslim MPs in his government to resign and get out if they did not support his decision to invite Israel to open its embassy in Colombo.
Soon after the JR Constitution was introduced, when progressive forces within the majority Sinhalese and the Tamil minority began agitating to tear up that Constitution, Muslims, instead of joining that movement, took a suicidal path under Ashraf and formed an ethnic party of their own.
The tragic consequences of this move, which has worsened inter-ethnic relations between Muslims and Tamils on the one hand and Muslims and Sinhalese on the other, is now public knowledge. How corrupt, nepotistic and dictatorial that the executive presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa operated between 2009 and 2015 in particular, and how economically ruinous and politically scandalous that it became under Sirisena is now history. This is hard evidence strengthening the case for its abolition altogether.
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