{"id":105250,"date":"2020-08-04T04:47:32","date_gmt":"2020-08-04T11:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=105250"},"modified":"2020-08-04T04:47:32","modified_gmt":"2020-08-04T11:47:32","slug":"elect-good-honest-educated-and-morally-upright-people-as-mps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/08\/04\/elect-good-honest-educated-and-morally-upright-people-as-mps\/","title":{"rendered":"Elect good, honest, educated, and morally upright people as MPs"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Elect good, honest, educated, and morally upright people as\nMPs\u201d is not a new slogan. It has been heard at least over the past half a\ncentury without any indication of its being heeded by the average voter. This\nis usually because the voters have no choice over the matter. It is the parties\nthat nominate their candidates for election subject to various considerations\nhaving little to do with their formal education and moral character. The main\ncriterion they seem to consider is how good is a candidate\u2019s chance of winning;\na candidate\u2019s acceptability to a particular section of the general electorate\ndoes not necessarily depend on its perception of the person\u2019s education or\nmoral rectitude. If one party does not nominate a person of less than ideal\nqualities who nevertheless stands a chance of winning votes for it in a\nparticular constituency, then the party runs the risk of losing that electorate\nto a rival party which fields a candidate with questionable but \u2018winning\nqualities\u2019 in that particular setting. For voters in such a context it is a\nchoice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee as in the nursery rhyme. This\nfrustrating fact is  well known and need not be elaborated here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not that the nomination committees of political parties\nwant to include in their nomination lists individuals who are known to them and\nthe public to lack the qualities named in the slogan (which forms the title of\nthis piece). They don\u2019t, but they can\u2019t help it. Politicians, however morally\nrefined, cannot avoid being pragmatists; they are obliged to strike a workable\nbalance between principles and demands of pragmatism. The most important thing\nin this situation is that a ruling politician must have a lot of humanity to\nsufficiently \u2018humanize\u2019 his or her unavoidable pragmatism. For it should not be\nforgotten that though a politician need not be a ruler, a ruler must needs be a\npolitician; in the treacherous world of politics, a politician cannot avoid\npragmatism, but they can still be humane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time, however, it may be assumed that there is a\ndifference. People are more aware of the necessity of having an elite of\ncultured technocrats of the Viyath Maga (Professionals for a Better Future)\ntype in parliament. The education and the moral background of candidates must\nhave received relatively more than customary attention from the nomination\ncommittees of all the parties, at least to some extent, though the ideology and\nthe organization mentioned were the brainchild of the present president. But\none cannot be sure that even the V.M. list of nominees (of the party that\nsupports him) is completely free of characters who should not be there. This is\nbecause party organisers cannot afford to ignore the reality that  under\nthe existing electoral system, people vote for a particular party, unlike in\nthe olden days, when widely known respectable individuals were elected to\nrepresent a constituency. Then it was the individual candidate, as much as the\nparty, that was chosen. Today, for getting elected to parliament, a candidate\nmust get enough preferential votes among a number of contending candidates put\nforward by each party for multi-seat constituencies; so naturally there is a\nform of undeclared war among candidates within each political party. Recently,\nI wrote an opinion piece published in The Island (July 7) – what you are\nreading is an adaptation of one paragraph from that article – pointing out the\nimportance of giving a chance to candidates to display their preferential\nnumbers in a striking way in order that the voters would remember the numbers\nof the candidates of their choice across the whole range of parties, alliances,\nand groups in the unusually long ballot paper. If that opportunity was denied\nit could be disadvantageous for the two most important types of candidates: the\nnew and the materially poor. Candidates who are poor cannot afford expensive\nmedia advertising; the little known new ones would find it hard to make their\nnumbers stand out among the numbers assigned to veterans whose already well\nknown names and previous designations render them conspicuous and memorable. So\nthe veteran candidates of every party would not be likely to object to the\nElection Commission\u2019s tough stand in this regard, for it would mean that they\nhad a special advantage over their newer or younger and probably more \u2018elect\nworthy\u2019 contenders in the invidious intraparty war for preference votes. This\nsituation can be most prejudicial to the newer fresher competitors, and also\ncontrary to the generally shared desire among the voters to elect a decent lot\nto the august body this time. It was heartening to hear party leaders on both\nsides on their final campaign speeches implicitly stressing the need for voters\nto make use of the preferential vote to reject possible rogues if any in their\nnomination lists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island Elect good, honest, educated, and morally upright people as MPs\u201d is not a new slogan. It has been heard at least over the past half a century without any indication of its being heeded by the average voter. This is usually because the voters have no choice over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rohana-r-wasala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}