Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

A federal state needs to have as its underpinning the widespread acceptance of the equality of the rights of the federating parties irrespective of their size. This is a concept little known to the Sinhala people and one that is hardest for them to swallow because they are the largest nation upon the island. No Sinhala leader has had the courage to explain this to his people and yet it is a principle on universal display in federations all over the world. Every one of the fifty states that form the USA sends two Senators to the national Congress. Huge states like Alaska or California have the same weight in the US Senate as small states such as Delaware or Vermont. That eliminates the possibility of majoritarian hegemony in federal states. Such a fundamental sea change in Sinhala thinking must accompany a transition to a federal form of government in Sri Lanka. It is the Sinhala people who are called upon now to make that huge conceptual leap from size-based hegemony to equality irrespective of size.

A constitution of any form, be it unitary or federal or confederal, is not a deus ex machina which can solve all our problems for us and so exempt us from rational effort. The spectacular failure of the unitary constitution in Sri Lanka is not a fault of the constitution, but of the people who operated it over the last fifty years. The constitution does not produce uprisings and wars; it is the manner of its operation that gave rise to the extremely bloody uprisings of Sinhala youths in 1971 and 1987/89 and the war of secession that raged from 1983 to 2001. If the people who have their hands on the levers of power retain the same views and assumptions as they have had so far, they will achieve the same bloody results, whether it be under a revised unitary constitution or a federal constitution. Constitutional forms do not exempt human beings from responsibility for the consequences of their type of governance. When we struggle with constitutional forms we use a wrong frame of reference and, by so doing, try to escape from the urgent necessity of considering our own personal responsibility both for what has happened in the last fifty years as well as for the future. It is the policies that have been adopted by our political parties and implemented during their various periods in power that have brought us to this pass. Those policies have had the support of the Sinhala people right through these fifty years, so the needed changes have to be not only among politicians, but also among the Sinhala public as an whole.

The concept that a stable state can only be founded upon the freely given consent of the governed in its broadest measure was, and still is, absent in Sinhala thinking. It is still current thinking that the security and unity of the state must needs be guaranteed by the military garrisoning of the areas of domicile of those who wish to secede in order to be free from the encroachments of a supremacist state. The Sinhala people and their leaders of all stripes cannot see the self-defeating consequences of that policy. We need to make the mental transition to the conviction that we must try to found a state based upon the freely given consent of all those who are to live under its governance because of the widely acceptable policies such a state and those who operate it will adopt.

Thanthai LuLa the ordinary Ponnaiya.

Thanthai