The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) has, after weeks of dillydallying, written to President Mahinda Rajapaksa that it cannot be party to any move to dilute the Thirteenth Amendment or legislate for preventing a possible re-merger of the North and the East. This decision has come as no surprise.

There has been a demand for a Muslim majority council with jurisdiction over noncontiguous Muslims dominated areas in the East in case of a permanent merger of the northern and eastern provinces. The late SLMC founder leader M. H. M. Ashraff advocated this power sharing structure based on the Pondicherry model way back in 1986. It remains a promise the SLMC has failed to honour. The North-East merger being a prerequisite for the creation of such an enclave, it is only natural that the SLMC is not amenable to any constitutional amendment aimed at either abolishing the provincial council system or foreclosing chances of a re-merger or stripping the PCs of land and police powers.

EPDP leader and Minister Douglas Devananda, too, has got to perform a balancing act. For his political survival he has to be in President Rajapaksa’s good books while doing his damnedest to retain whatever support he has in the North. On the one hand he has to vie with the TNA which is campaigning on a platform of autonomy for Tamils in the North and the East and on the other he has to be mindful of the concerns of the Sinhala leaders he is working with. He has been running with the hare and hunting with the hounds all these years, but over the government’s move to amend the Thirteenth Amendment to take back powers devolved to the periphery he is caught between a rock and a hard place!

President Rajapaksa is in a quandary. The uncompromising nationalist constituents of his government like the JHU and the NFF want the provincial councils abolished posthaste at any cost and oppose the Northern PC polls tooth and nail. His left allies are averse to any move to dilute the powers of the provincial councils. They, in fact, risked life and limb to make the 13-A work in the late 1980s when the JVP went all out to torpedo it through sheer violence. Many a leftist perished at the hands of JVP death squads in the process. The CP, the LSSP etc therefore cannot be expected to help the government weaken or scrap 13-A.

The President has to muster a two-thirds majority in Parliament for amending 13-A before the Northern PC polls scheduled for September, but he cannot depend on the SLMC, the EPDP and his left allies for that purpose. How will he set about the task? Cutting the Gordian knot is out of the question as he is wary of risking his coalition’s modus vivendi.

President Rajapaksa has 118 SLFP MPs and his government may not collapse even if all other coalition partners pull out en masse. But, prudence requires that he keep his side intact without losing numbers in view of a possible mutiny on board like the one he experienced during war years with SLFP MPs like Mangala Samaraweera, Wijedasa Rajapakshe and Anura Bandaranaike crossing over to the UNP, threatening the very survival of his government. At that time he had to fight two wars, one on the military front and the other on the political front to prevent his government from falling. President Ranasinghe Premadasa and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga also had to contend with defections and the latter’s government fell due to a spate of crossovers in 2001. Therefore, the President cannot afford to lose any numbers in Parliament as that will strengthen the hands of ambitious, disgruntled SLFP MPs. (Unlike President J. R. Jayewardene he does not have ruling party MPs’ undated resignation letters in his pocket!)

President Rajapaksa, however, is not without anything to fall back on. Engineering crossovers is his long suit as is common knowledge. He only has to switch on the giant political vacuum cleaner at Temple Trees, as it were, and, slap-bang, political dregs in the rival camp will get sucked into it. If push comes to shove, he is likely to go down that road to muster the required numbers for his latest political project—and the country will be burdened with some more ministers in such an eventuality.