Speaker Karu Jayasuriya’s bull in the China-shop approach to interpreting parliamentary procedure was sagging so much at the seams, that it required family — his son-in-law Navin Dissanayake — to park himself by his side, when Jayasuriya completely lost the plot in parliament the other day.
Good Speakers don’t lose control under any circumstances, in the way that Speaker Karu did. But he lost it, and the sort of spectacle that unfolded would be remembered for a long time to come in the annals of parliamentary democracy in this country, particularly when history is written against the backdrop of the staggering transitions of 2018.
It required presidential intervention in the end, to unravel the mess that Karu Jayasuriya created. The President, a former Leader of the House, has a keen sense of the possible and the impossible within the parliamentary tradition.
On the other hand, it seems ex Premier and leader of the UNP, Ranil Wickremesinghe knows Erskine May, but unfortunately does not fathom that the same Erskine May who is considered to have written the most authoritative and influential work on parliamentary procedure, lay a premium on the proceedings in the House, in deciding the proper contours of power within parliament.
At the party leaders’ meeting on Sunday, the President trumped the Royal College and Law school educated politician who thinks he knows Erskine May, (probably because he has many friends in the British Conservative establishment?)
When Wickremesinghe said that the UNP has passed a no confidence motion against the Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, the President retorted that Wickremesinghe should produce the Hansard that testified to that effect, Ranil Wickremesinghe hemmed and hawed. There was no such Hansard, and no amount of Erskine May could help fill that yawning void. Whereupon, the President himself was able to provide the Hansard, which had no record whatsoever in any form, of any passage of a no-confidence vote on the prime minister.
RW GAVE UP
That exchange between the President and Wickremesinghe ended the grandstanding by the UNP. If the Hansard had no record of Wickremesinghe’s position that the Prime Minister had no support in the House, no amount of knowledge of the Westminster traditions of paramilitary democracy could save the UNP leader from having to face the nation as the chief cause of the instability and the bad press that resulted from the farcical parliamentary proceedings, over which Karu Jayasuriya presided over last week.
In the end, the President forced Wickremesinghe to square with reality, wind down the tempo of his protest, and agree to compromise.
In the entire contretemps, there is an inward lesson that is a metaphor of sorts, for how the country is faring.
The UNP has been out of control, and in turbulent political weather from the early stages of the administration, set up in January of 2015.
May be that’s not unusual for any political party that has been out of power for a while, and the UNP had not been in power for at least ten years before the 2015 election.
But, turbulence is not faced by throwing a fit inside the cockpit, and ignoring the flight crew, including the co-pilot and the flight engineer.
In the end the aircraft was so close to a spectacular crash, and it required the steadying hand of the president to save the vessel.
A BLUFF CALLED
This week, on Monday, with the Deputy Speaker in the Chair, the people saw parliamentary proceedings get back on an even keel, and the nation poised to get back on track.
Behind the President’s reference to the Hansard, is the exposure of the Speaker’s and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s wooly headed, mishmash of a plan to unseat Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister.
Earlier in the week, the last struts holding plan gave way. All of the UNP MPs along with the sidekicks in the JVP agreed that the first Clause to the no confidence motion that they had brought against Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa is invalid, and that they are agreeable to getting that Clause removed.
In that five minutes of Hansard recorded parliamentary proceedings, the UNP had admitted that Mahinda Rajapaksa is indeed the prime minister, no questions asked.
There is clarity now, that the UNP was bluffing. It was known to one and all involved in the siege of Temple Trees that the new Prime Minister was legally and constitutionally appointed. Despite this the UNP was willing to pursue a slash and burn policy in parliament, and lay siege to the Prime Minister’s chair as well.
All of the above indicates the gulf between those versed in Erskine May, and those who know parliamentary practice and statecraft by process of application. The President is of the latter category.
It was a similar outcome, when running the country. The Wickremesinghe UNP thought it had the expertise at its disposal to rev up and grow the economy.
Malik Samarawickrama was thought to bring in the businessmen’s acumen, and the foreign friends in the form of the lending agencies etc., were thought of as the virtual-drivers behind the Yahapalana economic juggernaut.
The whole thing fell into pieces, because there was nothing there.
It’s a pity that the President was deprived of the command position to bring the ship on an even keel at the time the Yahapalana economic plans were unraveling.
The point is that the president offered Wickremesinghe the courtesy of non interference. He stepped back, and didn’t quote market figures in opposition to Wickremesinghe’s citing of his neo liberal bullet points, the way he cited Hansard against the latter’s Erskine May this week.
THE VESSEL TANKED
What was clear from the way Ranil Wickremesinghe faced the All Party meeting with the president a few days back was his diffidence.
If he was a man in command of the situation, he would not have slinked in and stated sotto-voce that the president should accept what he claimed were ‘the multiple no confidence motions that have been passed against PM Mahinda Rajapaksa.’
On the 26th of last month, he had ceded command completely to the president. This was after nearly four years of having assumed that he had supreme untrammeled command, because he thought that he had outmanoeuvred the president within the Yahapalana regime.
The point is that Ranil Wickremesinghe in fact thought the president was irrelevant. He thought the President’s work was over, the day he was brought to power, and had him (RW) installed as Prime Minister.
In the end, closure to that tale came when the President, never mind Erskine May, had to teach Wickremesinghe this week that parliament cannot have an independent record, detached and separate from Hansard proceedings. If it was not in the Hansard, it did not happen, and that was as clear as Erskine May.
In retrospect, it appears that despite the bluster, all political parties protesting from TNA to UNP want the President’s guidance.
One reason for this is, having together steered the ship so close to the iceberg, they are now in a funk that the possible unmooring of the entire governing apparatus would be blamed on them, and rightly so.
So, it seems, they want to pull back from the brink, and to do that they have to pretend to attack the president, while hoping that he would somehow find a way to extricate them from the mess they have got themselves into.
There was no brinkmanship at all in Ranil Wickremesinghe’s sauntering into the All Party meeting with the President. This was apparent from the fact that he had no brief.
He had not come there to negotiate. He merely sought a way out. That’s why he sat there and meekly suggested that the so called no confidence motion that had been passed against Premier Rajapaksa be ‘honoured.’
In and of itself this was a ridiculous position to take. If a no confidence vote of that nature had been passed in reality, it would have been self evident, and there could have been no cause to go on pleading this fact with the president.
So, in essence, Wickremesinghe’s face to face meeting with the two other chief protagonists in the drama, the president and the prime minister, was a capitulation.
Yet, even though a capitulation it was, he had not thought of a modus operandi for ‘how to lose the game’.
It was basically a case of making some meek utterances at the meeting, so that the president could put him out of his misery.
Fortunately, the President was up to the task, and he was able to tell the former prime minister to go to hell in a manner that the latter may even look forward to the trip.
A simple tweet was sufficient to drive the point home that the Wickremesinghe resistance was more showboating than anything else.
‘I thank all the Party Leaders and Parliamentarians for adopting a peaceful and consensual course of action at the Parliament today, following my meeting with the Party Leaders last evening.’
That was the President’s tweet.
It brought clarity to a situation that developed so fast, that Wickremesinghe was struggling to understand it.
THE END GAME
His ‘resistance’ was now confined to the precincts of Temple Trees, that he had laid siege to, in order to compensate for the fact that all his other efforts to lay siege had failed.
He wanted to lay siege to Parliament. But parliament adjourned with an agreement to appoint committees to go ahead with the impending business.
He wanted to lay siege to Colombo. He succeeded instead in getting a few joggers to mount the soap-boxes at Independence Square. He wanted to lay siege to key installations and offices, but could not get within a yard of any of them. So he remains holed up at Temple Trees, by the good graces of his indulging opponents.
In all of this, the curious fact is that despite the outward stance of ‘protest’, the UNP has quite readily acknowledged that Mahinda Rajapaksa is Premier, and that there is nothing they could do about it.
Parliamentary house-keeping arrangements have meanwhile confirmed this fact to the whole country which has seen, on public television, the UNP occupying the opposition benches.
It does mean that the ‘protests’ are to keep up appearances, and the knee jerk, crestfallen showing by Wickremesinghe at the All Party meeting with the President, was if any was needed, confirmation of this reality.
There can be no real ‘protests’ anyway when there is an ambiguity in the position that is taken.
Either Wickremesinghe thinks that former President Rajapaksa is Premier, or he totally rejects the fact. But, he has been so undecided in this regard, that he thought nothing of removing the Clause 1 of the so called No Confidence Motion, while getting the UNP to agree in parliament no less, that Mahinda Rajapaksa is indeed the prime minister.
It’s now accepted as of record in Hansard. The Prime Minister is Mr. Rajapaksa.
The president has got the former prime minister to accept for the parliamentary record, that Mahinda Rajapaksa is the duly appointed premier of the country.
As it ought to be said, End of Story.
from daily news