Revoking HSZs: President’s first act of ‘independence’ against his backers’ wishes

President Ranil Wickremesinghe during the weekend revoked a previous Gazette notification that declared several areas of Colombo as High-Security Zones (HSZs), but not before the original proclamation caused an uproar. 

On Saturday, first thing upon returning from a visit to Japan and the Philippines, the president issued a new extraordinary gazette notification, revoking the previous order, of which legality was challenged by a myriad of groups, including the National Human Rights Commission.

The narrative advanced by his communication team was that President Wickremesinghe had been duped to sign the original order that had been prepared by the Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of Defence, without legal input from the Attorney General. The two prime movers were the Public Security Minister, Tiran Alles and Defence Secretary retired Major Gen. Kamal Gunaratne.  Since the president is not expected to check the legality of every document sent for his signature - formulating them within the remit of the constitution is the duty of the Attorney General’s Department – and believing that the draft order was prepared with the consultation of the Attorney General, the president placed his signature for its publication in the National Gazette, says an inspired leak from president’s office.

Alas, later it transpired that the AG’s department had no role in it and the draft order had been prepared, if not by the sheer legal acumen of the defence secretary, with outside legal help.

Having signed the draft order, the president left for Japan to attend the state funeral of the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The event also doubled as a gathering of leaders of the world’s democracies. Abe, Japan’s longest-serving PM was one of the earliest advocates of a concert of democracies to check the rising power of China.  His 2007 speech, ‘Confluence of Two Seas’ at Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house is widely seen as a harbinger of Quad -  an informal group of democracies - Australia, India, Japan and the United States, that had been developed as a soft balancer of China.

In Tokyo, hobnobbing the world leaders, President Wickremesinghe might have felt embarrassed when the dictatorial underbelly of his government came to light as Sri Lanka’s revert to wartime High-Security Zones made it to international news. President Wickremesinghe is recently making a conscious effort to supplant his sheer lack of electoral legitimacy at home with international endorsements. He now seems to be more accountable to the US ambassador in Colombo than to the people of Sri Lanka. 

Even for him, it had been hard to defend, with a straight face, the needless declaration of HSZ. 

Also, the increasingly authoritarian and militarized trajectory of his government is making it harder for Sri Lanka to lobby for international financial assistance. 

None of that may concern his backers, the MPs of Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) or its strategist Basil Rajapaksa, who is plotting a return of the Rajapaksa dynasty. President Wickremesinghe is in a tight spot and he is one of the few politicians with somewhat international standing, but in all practical sense, he is a proxy of the Rajapaksas, and the Rajapaksas are veritable Third World pariahs in the eyes of much of Europe and America. 
His cabinet and the bureaucracy, including defence secretary and Minister Alles - who himself was miraculously discharged, not surprisingly, after the Attorney General decided to drop his indictment over the criminal misappropriation of Rs. 200 million provided by the treasury to the Reconstruction and Development Agency - are of the old guard and the Rajapaksa loyalists. 

Last Saturday’s decision may be the president’s first move that runs counter to the wishes of his Pohottuwa benefactors. Whether he can carve out a degree of independence and exercise the executive powers of his office, unencumbered by his backers is premature to tell. In theory, he can, but in practice, the Rajapaksas have numbers in Parliament and can impeach him at any time they want.

The revoked gazette order on HSZs may be a case of incompetence and insecurity of the old guard. That could be excused; that’s not the worst to befall the country owning to the incompetence of the rulers and policymakers. 
 However, a far more sinister objective to revert to the full-blown militarization in the past cannot be ruled out.  The Rajapaksas feel safer inside that militarized cocoon. A sizeable portion of Sri Lankans did not care about the militarization of the country until they went hungry. Now that protestors are hunted down and there is a general sense of public apathy for a fresh uprising, the security planners might have thought this as an opportune moment for the next suffocating measure. 

There is another incentive: HSZs justify a vast standing army that Sri Lanka maintains without a rational justification. Defence Ministry received the lion’s share of allocations of the 2022 budget. An estimated Rs. 373 billion (US$1.86 billion) is allocated for 2022, a 14% increase from 2021. That is more than the funds allocated for health and education put together.  The overwhelming portion (Rs. 326.3 billion) would be spent as the recurrent expenditure of its 346,000 active personnel - whereas the British Armed forces have only 194,000 active personnel in its ranks.

Sri Lankan armed forces are a mass army, but not a modern army. It operates vintage Main Battle Tanks, APCs, and aircraft, which are in museums in other countries. So much for billions spent on defence, Sri Lanka does not have a minimum credible air defence system.  Sri Lanka’s defence expenditure as a share of GDP (1.9%) is below the global average, and also well below most South Asian countries, including India and Pakistan. However, that is because, the country is also having the lowest government revenue as a share of GDP in the world, which was merely 9.6 % of GDP in 2020.

In times of economic hardship, defence is one of the areas that get the corners cut at the earliest. However, unlike its peers, the Sri Lankan armed forces do not have a large allocation for fresh procurement. Its excess manpower that exists for no rational explanation should be the first to get axed. It drains the public coffer and in fact, hinders its own transformation into a better equipped modern armed force. There exists no rational explanation for maintaining a vast army for cash-strapped Sri Lanka where 15% of the nation’s children are suffering from malnutrition. 

However, cultivating fear psychosis and creating a threat out of nothing, or exaggerating it provide a momentary distraction. This should also be viewed in conjunction with inspired leaks and planted stories in newspapers of police investigations into a plot to overthrow the government and other everyday conspiracy theories.
The Rajapaksas cultivated and exploited fear psychosis as an effective mechanism of control. Their loyalists know its utility. It turned Sri Lankans into prisoners of their own imaginations.

The president could well end up being a prisoner of his own making in the Rajapaksa’s gilded prison if he keeps blindly placing his signature to the dictates of Basil Rajapaksa.

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