Liberal Ideals and Sri Lanka

Liberal ideals and the current Sri Lankan situation, February 2002

(Text of a talk given to the Mont Pelerin Society in Goa)

December 5th saw an election in Sri Lanka that brought a new government into office. Even though we have an Executive President, the system is twinned, as in France, with a government rooted in a legislative majority. So, though Chandrika Kumaratunga of the People’s Alliance continues as President, the Prime Minister, who now effectively wields power, comes from the United National Party.

This party has generally been considered comparatively right wing, whereas the PA is based on the Bandaranaikes’ Sri Lanka Freedom Party which was associated with the left. Indeed the PA is a coalition with a Trotskyist and a Communist party, Sri Lanka being I think the only place in the world where these two groups cooperate enthusiastically. To make up for this togetherness, we have a more radical Marxist group called the JVP, which has moved from 1 seat in 1994 to 10 in 2000 and now 16. This is not quite as dramatic a growth as the Indian BJP, but it is likely to do even better next time.

I am afraid this is inevitable, given the way our two major parties have behaved. I should say, first of all, that I am delighted by the change of government, since the PA had shown itself singularly inept. But having said that, I should point out that the UNP, in its first month, has shown that it too is wedded to the attitudes of the past that will continue to rouse discontent.

What do I mean by this? Am I not being premature in judging a government that, after all, inherited a difficult situation with an Executive President who is irredeemably hostile? Not so, I feel, because the very first act of the UNP was to make it clear that government was primarily about power and privilege.

In Sri Lanka, indeed, governments do not come into office, they come into power. And power means perks and privileges that have to be distributed as extravagantly as possible. So, whereas Mrs Kumaratunga had had over forty ministers and forty deputies, this government has 25 Cabinet Ministers, 28 other Ministers, some of whom share functions with Cabinet Ministers, and 7 other deputies. We therefore have 53 masters, for they all see themselves as such, with 7 more in positions of power.

But perhaps this is not too many, given the overwhelming power of government in Sri Lanka. For the simple fact is that, despite the changes in world attitudes, despite the advertised improvements in Sri Lanka, we are still a highly controlled statist country. And in this respect I am afraid the UNP, except for a very brief period, was no better than the SLFP. Indeed, the main problem in Sri Lanka is that neither party has any sense of political principle or an ideology that will govern their actions. Instead, we have ad hoc responses to everything, based only on the idea that any action has to benefit the party first.

So in this respect Sri Lanka too has, for most of the last 50 years, had consensus of the sort described in Britain as Butskellism. The main difference is that, where that version of social democracy was comparatively mild, in Sri Lanka it has been combined with a colonial mindset that cannot conceive of anything but an all powerful state. So the programme of nationalization that the first SLFP government began in the fifties and continued in the sixties was not reversed by the UNP government of 1965. And though the excesses of Mrs Bandarnaike’s 1970 government, dominated as it was by Marxists, prompted the UNP in 1977 to allow much more scope to the private sector, there was hardly any denationalization as was taking place say in Britain.

Privatization had indeed to wait till the Premadasa government of 1989, and regrettably his period in office was very short. By the time the PA finally won an election again, in 1994, its economic policies too had changed, in accordance with the emerging international consensus, and it paid lip service to privatization. But now this took the form, even more excessively than with the 1977-89 UNP government, of crony capitalism. Private sector monopolies, based generally on the favour of the President, took the place of state monopolies. Thus, under the UNP, there was only 1 licence for cell phones, and the licensees made a packet. Under the PA, Shell was given a monopoly on gas when this was acquired from the government.

Various reasons are adduced as to why Mrs Kumaratunga engaged in deals of this sort. None of them is flattering, ranging as they do from corruption to incompetence. But the fact remains that, despite its claim to have cleaned itself up, the UNP is still full of those who engaged in similar deals in their last stint in power. Indeed the Prime Minister, though generally thought incorrupt himself, has adopted a philosophy of privileging those who were in parliament in that period, ie those who were part of the 1977-89 authoritarian regime. And their political identity alas is based on asserting themselves with regard to the populace, by using the state as a gravy train from which their chosen supporters may feed.

Now all this is possible because Sri Lanka has I think the most statist approach, amongst the countries in our region, to all aspects of the nation. This springs in my view from a strange combination of socialist ideology with a colonial mindset. Thus the concept of the white father figure transmuted into the politician who would look after the citizen right through his life. There is an engaging story of a British Government Agent who decided after retirement to contest the 1931 State Council elections, the first held under universal franchise in all Asia I believe. He wandered around the district telling the citizens that, if they cast their ballots into a box of a particular colour (the system was pretty primitive), he would stay on in Ceylon. If not, he would have to go back to England. They voted for him overwhelmingly and at the next election, in 1936, he was not even contested. The man-bap concept beloved of the Raj could scarcely have gone deeper.

To make clear how this paternalism worked out in practice, in the new era of independence and politicians seeking power and popularity, I can do no better than quote from a seminal text about the Sri Lankan education system –

For the replacement of the multi-dimensional dualistic structure of education, with its institutionalization of discriminatory practices and its enthronement of an elitism that conferred unfair advantages on the socially and economically privileged, by a unitary structure that was fair, democratic and egalitarian certain changes of an important character were needed. They were, firstly, the elimination of the competitive and wasteful system of government and denominational schools and the substitution in their place of a system of schools rationally planned and organized under the management of the state which was after all financing the competitive denominational system: secondly, the dethronement of English from its position as the medium of instruction for a privileged few, and the substitution in its place of the national languages as the media of instruction; thirdly, the elimination of qualitative differences among schools purporting to serve the same age groups; and fourthly, the abolition of the requirement of fees for access to a quality education. (J E Jayasuriya, Educational Policies and Progress, Colombo (Undated), p 536 – my emphases)

What this meant in effect was that private sector education, or choice as to curriculum and medium of instruction, was done away with completely. And we all know that elimination of qualitative differences means reducing everything to a lowest common denominator. Conversely, even in communist countries discrimination in education was practised in order to promote excellence. But by converting the very laudable principle, that the state should provide opportunities for those who have none, to the dogma that no one else should provide anything, Sri Lanka succeeded in ensuring that politicians controlled everything about education. Appointments were based on political patronage, as were promotions within the system. The curriculum has been constantly revised, the revision each time being imposed on all children (or almost all), with no apologies when a few years later it was discovered that there was something irredeemably wrong and the whole thing had to be revised yet again. Hayek’s simple principle, that a monopoly entrenches mistakes, could have no better illustration than the Sri Lankan educational system.

But I should note that it was not universal. Ironically, the politicians generally liberated their own children from the system as soon as possible. With the abolition of English medium education there sprang up a system of what are termed International Schools, that are still technically illegal, but which made use of political patronage to survive initial attempts to suppress them. Both Sri Lankan presidents who have had children of school going age sent their children to these and subsequently abroad. The Minister of Education, who wanted to abolish 'Hello’ on the telephone on the grounds that it was a colonial hangover, was found to have sent his son too to an International School. Thus the consequences of a state monopoly are apparent to those who run it, and I hasten to add that not all of them are hypocritical. But certainly no one has had the courage to expand opportunities for choice. And of course the opportunities for patronage, to provide jobs and perks at state expense, are immense. Very few individuals can resist these, but the advent of institutional mechanisms to prevent these seems a pipe dream at present.

I have dwelt at length on education, but a close examination of other sectors would show similar blunders, all based on the assumption that the state must decide everything. The chaos we are in with regard to power for instance, though attributed to adverse weather, is directly connected with the incapacity to plan and develop a scheme for generating power that utilized private sector energies through competition. Again, the dire straits the transport sector is in could be alleviated with proper use of the great network of railways we possess, but that has been controlled to collapsing point by a government monolith.

Now all this has contributed to economic stagnation, and indeed decline (the growth rate last year went into minus figures). Successive governments however have claimed that their policies would have borne fruit, had it not been for the war. Yet what they fail to consider is that it is precisely those policies, of an all powerful all controlling state, that created the ethnic crisis in the first place.

To put it simply, when the state controlled the bulk of the economy, the vast majority of jobs were in the state sector. The state also prescribed an educational policy that forced mother tongue education on everyone. This was not intended to be discriminatory, since Sinhalese studied in Sinhalese and Tamils in Tamil. The target was in fact English medium education which was held to be elitist. But in practice the policy proved discriminatory, because it shut off Tamils from the vast majority of jobs in the state sector, which of course demanded knowledge of the main state language.

Meanwhile, to push egalitarianism still further, the state introduced a system of quotas to universities. This again was not intended to be discriminatory, and was supposed to benefit rural Tamil students as well as the rural Sinhalese. But whereas the latter were by far the largest group of beneficiaries, the largest proportion of victims were Tamil students from the Jaffna area. They, together with Colombo, had previously had the best schools in the country. Colombo students however had other alternatives, the rich going abroad, others finding private sector jobs. But, with hardly any private sector that offered high level jobs in Jaffna, with little chance of heading abroad, bright young Tamils became desperate. It is no coincidence that the terrorist movements burgeoned with the accession of large numbers of school leavers in the late seventies, when these policies began to have their impact.

And there was no investment to provide alternatives. In any case the state had discouraged private sector activity in the heyday of statist socialism. Though this was supposed to have changed after 1977, all decision making still took place in Colombo. The highly regulated system of licences and permits that prevailed, implemented by officials who believed they were there to control rather than serve the public, meant that entrepreneurs were few and far between, and rarely independent of government politicians.

It was this absence of alternatives that fuelled the resentments that burst out in violence. And the attempts at devolution that were made continued to be based on the principle that government politicians and their officials knew best. Thus in 1981 the District Development Councils were accompanied by a District Minister appointed by the President from amongst parliamentarians. The Provincial Councils in 1987 were saddled with what was termed a Concurrent List, the subjects in which were in effect controlled by the Central Government.

And in other areas too the principle of decentralization was traduced. To give an example of this from the field of education again, though schools were meant to be the responsibility of the Provinces, National Schools were exceptions. These however were not defined and, shortly after the division was introduced, one Minister took several under central Ministry control, including very small ones in his own area. He was thus able to give teaching appointments as he pleased (incidentally subverting the policy of the previous Minister, that teachers should not be appointed without prior training).

In such a context it was not surprising that Provincial Councils, exercising power without responsibility in many areas, also turned primarily into instruments of patronage, with perks for all. Some areas did see positive developments, but able people were then snatched up into the national parliament, perhaps on the Miltonic principle that it was better to serve in heaven than rule in hell. The periphery continued to be regarded as a sort of limbo, with no concerted plans to ensure infrastructural development and investment.

So naturally the minority areas felt they could do a much better job by themselves. The one exception to this steady decline in confidence occurred under Premadasa, when he began a programme of social development in the Eastern Province and those areas of the Northern Province that were under government control. The response was immediate, with refugees coming over to these territories from areas controlled by the terrorists. And in the election held in the east, which was generally considered fair, the government party did comparatively well.

But all that ceased with Premadasa’s death. His successor had a majoritarian outlook, and indeed claimed at one point that the Sinhalese were like a tree on which the minorities depended like vines. Mrs Kumaratunga, when she came into power, tried negotiations but rapidly moved towards military action. Her attempts at a peaceful solution were confined to constitutional changes, with no attempt to provide reasons for minorities to want to live in a united country.

In short, the idea that people should be permitted to construct the sort of country they prefer is not still part of our political agenda. And regrettably the present government shows no signs of abandoning the socio-colonial statist paternalism that has characterized us so distinctively. Thus, to accompany the enlarged band of ministers, we have permanent secretaries from the old Civil and Administrative Services, brought out of retirement. Many of them are competent, and the argument is that their experience is necessary when many of those who recently held positions of administrative seniority have been irredeemably politicized.

But these charming old men were indeed part of a heavily politicized service in the last couple of decades, and a service that laid emphasis on procedure rather than productivity, on traditions rather than service, on red tape rather than responsiveness. What should have been done must have been clear to the government, in that it brought in an outsider to be Secretary to the Treasury. But this was the Party Chairman and, though he is generally considered efficient, it is also believed that personal loyalty counted as much in this case as his undoubted energy and effectiveness. The fact that others like him were not sought out from the private sector suggests that the government is incapable of the lateral thinking necessary in a society that needs to break into the 21st century.

Unfortunately the UNP, though more professional in its approach than the SLFP, is still a traditional South Asian political party. Personalities are more important than ideology, and attaining power more important than knowing what to do with it. The idea that the role of government must be defined, that it should be fulfilled without unnecessary impositions on the people, that essentially people should be left to run their own lives, with support as necessary but not control, is still alien to the vast majority of our politicians. Certainly there are a few amongst those now in parliament who see the need for conceptualization and change on the lines suggested above. But their influence seems still to be minimal.

And meanwhile the JVP is waiting. Its support base in the government sector is increasing even more dramatically than elsewhere, as the postal votes in the last election indicated. This is understandable given the uncertainties as to the role of government now, in a context in which we still have, I believe, the largest proportion of the work force in the government sector of all SAARC countries. We need then to restructure radically, by introducing measures to provide alternative sources of employment, influence and productivity on a large scale. This may help our people to think more imaginatively, and develop themselves as well as the country at large. But unless we shift direction soon, I am afraid we will continue, in the words of the ‘Economist’ many years ago, to be an under-developed country that is still under-developing.

Rajiva Wijesinha