Comments on: 3 October 2001 http://pact.lk/3-october-2001/ The interactive timeline of conflict in Sri Lanka Sun, 03 Apr 2011 21:52:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 By: Sunil Bastian http://pact.lk/3-october-2001/comment-page-1/#comment-10341 Sunil Bastian Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:28:53 +0000 http://pact.lk/2008/03/23/3-october-2001/#comment-10341 I am not that enthusiastic about talk of resurrecting the Constitutional Council because it amounts to tinkering with the presidential system, instead of questioning it fundamentally. When such powerful institutions are created in societies like ours where there are pre-capitalist relations as well as mentalities, people tend to look to this office as a saviour of everything, and appealing to the president becomes the answer to everything. We need a much more radical discussion about institutions. We need to distinguish between institutions and politics. Democratic institutions per se don't create democratic politics. I'm much less hopeful than some of my friends who are lawyers about institutional designs as solutions to Sri Lanka’s problems. We are very good at establishing commissions, passing laws. What has happened to our civil society is that instead of looking at society and developing a social base for reforms and change, we spend a lot of time tinkering with these institutions at the elite level. I am not that enthusiastic about talk of resurrecting the Constitutional Council because it amounts to tinkering with the presidential system, instead of questioning it fundamentally. When such powerful institutions are created in societies like ours where there are pre-capitalist relations as well as mentalities, people tend to look to this office as a saviour of everything, and appealing to the president becomes the answer to everything.

We need a much more radical discussion about institutions. We need to distinguish between institutions and politics. Democratic institutions per se don’t create democratic politics. I’m much less hopeful than some of my friends who are lawyers about institutional designs as solutions to Sri Lanka’s problems. We are very good at establishing commissions, passing laws. What has happened to our civil society is that instead of looking at society and developing a social base for reforms and change, we spend a lot of time tinkering with these institutions at the elite level.

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