A Presidency which transcends divisions

'I am the President of all communities.' This timely pronouncement by President Mahinda Rajapaksa helps to put the record straight on what is expected of the Executive Presidency in this country in the context of the issues faced by our communities. The President of Sri Lanka is representative of the totality of the public and is not the spokesman or advocate of this or that sectional interest. Nor is he to be associated solely with a particular community of the country. He is the representative of the collective body of Sri Lankans and is an embodiment of their legitimate interests.

These seeming home truths need to be reiterated because once safely in the seat of Executive power, Heads of State could easily forget or gloss over their responsibilities towards the total body politic. The possibility is also great that they could succumb to populist pressures. However, it is probably to the relief of our communities that President Rajapaksa is lucidly and unambiguously proclaiming his obligation to serve all our communities and identify closely with them all.

Such policy stances are of the utmost importance to polities such as ours which are pluralistic in nature. Ours is a country which is cradle to a number of races, religions and cultures and we are witness to how dangerously irresponsible demagoguery could exacerbate the divisions within our body politic and bloodily pit one section against the other. The most graphic example of this was the 30 year conflict which was defused, in a military sense, in May 2009.

What is left to be done is to find a final political solution to this conflict and this responsibility has been entrusted to the proposed Parliamentary Select Committee, which, we hope, would soon get off the ground. The groundwork could be laid for the work of the PSC through policy pronouncements of the kind which were made by the President, wherein he mentioned that he is above ethnic, religious and linguistic considerations and identified with the totality of our communities. Such statements help clear the air and indicate the policy parameters within which the state would be operating.

These policy parameters also help in creating the correct opinion climate for the evolution of a durable political solution. While we have a long way to go before a final political solution could materialize, public opinion in the country should, in the meantime, be made receptive to the view that Sri Lanka is not the exclusive preserve of this or that group, but belongs to all its communities.

Accordingly, all sections would need to be receptive to the perspective that what needs to finally evolve is a polity or country, where all communities, religions and cultures would be equal stakeholders.

The President's pronouncement that he would be serving all communities would prove instrumental in establishing the ideal opinion climate for the evolution of such an order of things where man-made differences would not matter.

The Executive President is elected directly by the people or the total polity and by virtue of this fact is obliged to govern in an absolutely non-partisan fashion. He also, therefore, bears direct responsibility to the communities of the land and should prove accessible to the latter. By the same token, he should also prove receptive to the just needs of our communities. These are some of the advantages of the Executive Presidency which need to be put to good use in our current efforts to unite as one country.

While it should be clear that the PSC is a 'long gestation' project, the Executive President should, meanwhile, go more than the extra mile to ensure that programmes which have met with the approval of the state and other responsible sections, such as the National Action Plan to implement the LLRC recommendations, are gone ahead with alacrity and resourcefulness.

The President is on record that he would be fully supportive of a solution which the PSC arrives at and this augurs well for the future, but the Executive arm of government must ensure that this process gets off the ground without further ado. The communities of this country are prone to be put off by inordinate governmental delays in executing processes that are geared to resolving their issues. The Executive Presidency must help in clearing these bottlenecks.