Privilege, Perception or Propaganda Prop

By N Sathiya Moorthy

True, the crowds that reportedly gathered to see war-victor of a President in Mahinda Rajapaksa, when he left his official residence in Colombo’s Wijeyrama Mawatha to his family home in Tangallae in southern-most Hambantota district may not have been as big as the one that gathered after his poll-defeat in January 2015. Nor were long queues of sympathisers, especially rural women, who lined up at his Thangalle residence, for days together, as if to pledge their continued faith in his leadership.

That none of it was visible in the vote-behaviour in the post-Aragalaya presidential and parliamentary polls of last year carries an even bigger message for the political class. The high ‘Mahinda vote-bank’ that had rallied round brother Gotabaya in the presidential poll of 2019, especially after the ‘Easter serial blasts’ showed how even rural voters had their hearts and minds in the right places. That incumbent Mahinda had managed 48 per cent votes when he lost in 2015 against victor Maithripala Sirisena’s 51 per cent compared well with son Namal Rajapaksa’s less than three per cent vote-share in 2024 spoke volumes.

It’s in this background, too, you have to assess the purpose and impact of the incumbent Government’s fast-tracked drive to deny former Presidents their official residences, pensions, personal secretary and security and such other entitlements, through an Act of Parliament. That the Bill was passed 151-1 with most Opposition MPs staying away and the ruling JVP-NPP combine commanding the unflinching support of 159 alliance members speaks volumes. That this should have been one of the very few draft legislations to be cleared by the Supreme Court without striking down or recommending amendments is equally significant. That is not the matter, however.

Greater legitimacy

The nation now has five former Presidents, including the immediate predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe. Yes, critics of the system might question his greater legitimacy as he was elected by Parliament, as if it were an ad hoc arrangement, and not by the people, directly. But his election was sanctioned by the Constitution, which provided for such contingencies.

Nor for Sri Lanka the confusion and contradictions attending on Aragalaya-like street-protests in Bangladesh and now Nepal, but which were much more violent, targeting individuals on the streets. All of it owed to the in-built contingency clause which handed over post-Aragalaya constitutional initiatives in the hands of the political class, so restoration of political stability, followed by free and fair elections two years later, when due, all became possible.

Against this, in Bangladesh in particular, even after an interim care-taker in 85-year-old Mohamed Yunus had taken over, across the country, the so-called student protestors were not only burning down homes of discredited former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s supporters. Many of them were roasted alive along with family members. It is not without reason, Wickremesinghe has made a pointed reference to American social media for the short-fused street-protests in Nepal.

Living in honour

In any other country, especially those in the West, they would have cited the fact of five former Presidents among their midst as evidence to the success and achievement of electoral democracy. Not in Sri Lanka. Not in the past year has anyone hailed the unique record of our times. Nor has anyone condemned, whole-heartedly, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake Government’s determination to disinherit them all of honourable lives, or a life in honour in their old age.

It is nobody’s case that the Government should not proceed against individuals who had held such high elected or other public positions on charges of corruption and other unlawful activities while in power – before or after. Of the five retired Presidents in the country, only CBK has gone on record to point out that she was the only one among them not to be caught in any corruption controversy.

However, CBK too might have blotted her copy-book when she publicly sought freedom to occupy her current official residence by paying market rent to the Government, citing her twin episodes of cancer-affliction in 15 years and a more recent hip-replacement surgery after a fall. Yet, she has also promised to move out within two months, if the Government would not concede her request. CBK has been out-of-sight from almost the day she handed over power to Mahinda way back in 2005. Hence, she is also out of mind, not only for most Sri Lankans, but more so for Establishment Sri Lanka.

Empty pockets

It is not without reason that Governments and leaderships’ conferred such ‘entitlements’ to former Presidents and also Members of Parliament. It may not have happened in this country, where most politicos barring possibly the present-crop of ruling JVP-NPP parliamentarians and ministers, may have come from pedigreed families with a lot of fiscal fall-back. Where they did not, they earned the money, if not the honour and status, through corrupt practices spread over years and decades.

Yet, such entitlements were meant for that one rare politician who might have held a high post, might have been truly honest and incorruptible, and retired empty-handed. If his empty-pocket was also among the causes for his final-round electoral defeat may be a subject for case-by-case study.

Dying pauper

But at least in neighbouring India, there were cases of honest politicians from the freedom movement dying pauper despite holding high offices in elected Governments. Thus you had the late Gulzarilal Nanda, who was the nation’s Home Minister for long and was interim Prime Minister after the death of Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru (1964) and successor Lal Bahadur Shastri (1996).

Long after his retirement from Government and politics in the mid-sixties, Nanda lived on for a long life, until 99 years, and passed away in 1999. In between, there was this story of a passing journalist accidentally bumping into a remotely familiar face in the midst of a commotion caused by a land-lord forcibly throwing out his tenant for long over-due rent-arrears running for months and possibly years.

The old man had very little possession that had been piled up on the street after he had been forced out of a shabby-looking one-room tenement in the upper-floor of a dilapidated building in a shabby corner of the national capital, Delhi. Until the journalist came to the old man’s help, neither the landlord, nor the neighbours had known who he was, and what great positions he had held – and what kind of a Gandhian freedom-fighter he had been in his younger days.

Then, there was the case of P Kakkan, incidentally the Home Minister of then Madras State, now Tamil Nadu, whom later-day Chief Minister M G Ramachandran (MGR) found lying on a torn mat in a corner of the Government Hospital in the southern temple-town, Madurai, where he had gone to visit a party VIP who was convalescing after VIP medical care. MGR immediately did what needed to be done, to honour the man the way his old age and health condition demanded. Incidentally, most Tamil Nadu ministers of those days, barring a couple of them, who were born rich, died pauper.

Is this the kind of situation that the Sri Lankan State wants to see its former Presidents to die, in the future? After all, the institution of Presidents are written into the Constitution, not with one leader or one generation in mind. We already have the abominable ‘Executive Presidency’ that JRJ wrote into a new Constitution with himself alone in mind. He believed that he was the chosen man for the country, like Lee Kuan Yew was for modern Singapore. Neither was he a Lee, nor did any of his successors had such pretensions.

Yet, it was / is the Presidency that mattered and matters still. Has anyone in this Government visualised a future President dying without a penny, and the pulp media of the time hailing him for what he was, and not the State as to what and how it should have been?  

State spending

Yes, none of the former Presidents had openly contested the ‘repeal’ law, as it would have also been seen as unpopular. None of them needed the money, either, or so is the perception – at least as far as these five retired Presidents go.

But that’s not the case with former MPs, who do not see it at all as a privilege but a basic need. They have an Association and the Association has openly pleaded against the Government’s move to withdraw their pensions, too. In a long statement, Association Secretary, Pemasiri Manage, has listed out their plight, and how many of them would die pauper and without care if the pensions are withdrawn overnight.

Manage has put the number of pensioned parliamentarians at around 500. The Government has already put the sums spent on presidential pensions, for a relatively brief period from 2017 to 2025, at LKR 500 m. Another LKR 500 m is said to be the State-spending on pensions for parliamentarians.

If such is the case, the question arises why not withdraw pensions for public sector employees, whose pensions run into much larger sums, and who have an average 30-plus year career with periodic promotions and pay-hikes, to be able to plan and save for their post-retirement life. That, this Government may not take up, as it impacts its traditional support-base, now mostly its vote-bank, too. Against this, former Presidents and former parliamentarians are soft-targets, and cancelling their pensions is  an ideological  and/or propaganda prop for the ruling JVP.

Incidentally, Manage of the Retired Parliamentarians Association goes on to submit how the new generation would detest contesting high-cost parliamentary elections and entering Parliament, if they were to be discarded at the end of it all, with not a penny in the pocket. It goes without saying how their families too would have to suffer the humiliation and loss of opportunity, starting with food and academic admissions, if the man (or woman) of the house is going to return after five or ten years, and be an added burden on his or her children who would have had to fend for themselves, all those years.

Manage also points out how ruling JVP MPs in particular had always handed over their pays, perks and even car-import permits to the party, and called it unconstitutional and violated basic human rights. He has threatened to move the nation’s higher judiciary, the Human Rights Council in Geneva and a whole lot of other national and international organisations, if their pension is withdrawn.

And know what: Manage is a former JVP parliamentarian.

Amen!

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)