CHOGM BEARING DOWN ON RAJAPAKSA ADMINISTRATION

In both elections however, President Rajapaksa had only secured the Sinhala vote. This reality has several policy implications for the Administration. One option would have been to use their political capital to expand the support base further and actually make the governing coalitions which includes a whole host of ethnic minority parties, especially Muslim parties into an electoral coalition which would be unbeatable. However the Administration advisers have, possibly due to their ethnic Sinhala nationalistic ideology taken the opposite and more conservative lesson from their poll results. They are convinced that the only future and sustainable support base for the Rajapaksa regime is a purely Sinhala vote base and accordingly we witness an administration that is the most hostile, policywise, towards the minorities. An administration that seeks to eliminate the limited devolution currently in existence, prevents the singing of the national anthem in Tamil among mono-lingual Tamil speakers, creates an atmosphere where hate-mongering and low level violence against religious minorities goes on with impunity, an intolerance of dissent and an unprecedented assault on the independence of the judiciary and completely ignoring the key recommendations of the post war Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC).

Now the CHOGM summit is not costless to the Rajapaksa government, in policy terms. The Commonwealth recently adopted a Human Rights Charter, which underscores the normal requirement that an incoming summit chair, namely President Rajapaksa and his administration needs to abide by basic international human rights norms and minority protections. It is on this basis that Commonwealth member nations have been making representations to Sri Lanka about its human rights and post-war reconciliation process; representations that dovetail with the growing consensus at the UNHRC, that Sri Lanka should be held accountable for its international commitments and obligations on human rights and post-war reconciliation.



 

Accordingly, despite its own inclinations to the opposite, the regime is compelled to call a Northern Provincial Council election, differ its ad hoc attempts at nullifying the 13th Amendment through the 19th Amendment and even show a semblance of engagement with South Africa on lessons learnt from its own reconciliation process. The Attorney General rather predictably announces (quite unconvincingly) fresh investigations into the murder of the five students in Trincomalee and the assassination of the seventeen, Action Against Hunger, aid workers in Muttur. There is even a tactical pause in the anti-Muslim violence by extremists groups, though not in their hate speech and propaganda war, their command and control structures, obviously rather well-attuned to their master’s voice.
 

However, the internal and external political pressures on the regime are growing. The governance issues are causing slippage in the support of the Sinhala constituency for the government. From university lecturers, the private bar, the urban poor, trade unions, minority religious groups, all are having serious concerns and issues with the Rajapaksa Administration. The big question is whether larger doses of ethnic Sinhala nationalism (as quite distinct from a civic Sri Lankan patriotism), would ever make the Sinhala electorate continue to back the Rajapaksa administration, in the midst of growing concerns on governance and policies.