Several academics questioned the government’s Constitution-making process at a public forum at the University of Colombo on Thursday.
Guruparan Kumaravadivel, a senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna, said the assumption that a majoritarian political process could deliver Constitutional reform for minority groups was “fundamentally flawed.”
He said the act of crafting a Constitution in post-conflict societies, like South Africa and North Ireland, included “pre-Constitutional agreements,” in which different parties agreed on the basic terms of what should be included in a new Constitution, before legal drafting began.
“Here, we’ve had nothing of that sort,” he said.
The government is postponing debate on divisive ideological issues facing the country, he said.
Different groups are receiving different stories about what the new Constitution might contain. He cited the example of Tamil papers reporting that the new Constitution would identify Sri Lanka as a “unitary” state in its Sinhala draft and not in its Tamil one.
“The same Constitution can be sold as apple juice to one community and pineapple juice to another,” he said.
Dr. Daniel Bass, the South Asia Director at Cornell University, said the conflict was resolved on the battlefield, rather than at the negotiating table in Sri Lanka.
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