SRI LANKA: In Upcoming Poll, Women Make Their Own Way to Politics

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 5 2002 (IPS) - Prior to hitting the campaign trail for local government polls to be held later this month, Nimalka Fernando got another taste of the sexism that prevails in Sri Lanka’s political culture.

When Fernando, the leader of a group of women candidates, asked for a receipt for the cash deposit she had made to contest the elections, officials were stumped: The receipt book had only provisions to accept deposits from men.

“The receipt book had only ‘Received with thanks from ‘Mr’ there was no ‘Ms’ or ‘Mrs’ and the clerk was scrambling for a way out of this crisis,” Fernando recalled with a laugh.

A helpful superior then quickly asked the clerk to replace the ‘Mr’ with ‘Ms/Mrs’ and issue a receipt before the “prickly issue is splashed on television and the media” ahead of the polls, to be staggered over two dates, on Mar. 20 and 25, Fernando said.

Cases of discrimination against women are common in Sri Lanka, 51 percent of whose 19 million people are women. “It’s nothing new. You find this all over even though we outnumber men in terms of population and contribute much more than them to the economy,” Fernando added.

Indeed, discrimination continues to exist although this South Asian island nation has had two women leaders. Sri Lanka produced the world’s first prime minister in the 1960s, Sirima Bandaranaike. In the 1990s, it also had the first mother and daughter combination to lead a country — Chandrika Kumaratunga as president and Bandaranaike, her mother, as prime minister.

Sri Lanka has also seen women take an active part at the grassroots level to secure peace in the country’s 20-year ethnic conflict between the state and the separatist Tamil Tigers, who are waging a violent campaign to create their own homeland for their minority community.

Some recall that how, when the first attempts at all-party negotiations collapsed in 1984, bringing in its wake jingoistic calls to war, women took the first steps to call for a negotiated political solution with a petition of 10,000 signatures in the name of ‘Women for Peace’.

But women continue to find obstacles in formal political representation. “Women are also reluctant to get into politics for many reasons including its often violent culture,” said another activist.

According to latest available figures, the number of female parliamentarians in 2000 was just 4.3 percent versus 5.3 percent in 1994 while the number of women in the cabinet was 8.8 percent versus 13.1 percent in the same years.

Likewise, women also do not enjoy the spotlight in the economic sphere, despite their contribution to the national coffers. For instance, they account for close to 600,000 of the near one million Sri Lankan migrant workers in the Middle East — the country’s biggest foreign exchange earner — and the bulk of tea and rubber plantation workers –the two main agriculture exports.

Also, women make up some 200,000 or more than 90 percent of the workforce in the garment industry, which is now the biggest export earner.

These are valid reasons why women should receive their share of responsibility in the political, administration, judiciary and media fields, said Fernando. “The judiciary and media don’t have enough women in leadership roles.”

In the coming polls – to be held on Mar. 20 across the island except in the north and east, where Tamil Tiger rebels control some areas, and Mar. 25 in the last two regions — Fernando’s group of 59 women will contest seats in the capital Colombo’s municipal council. Another women’s group is contesting the polls in the eastern town of Batticaloa.

This, however, is not the first time women’s groups are involved in the country’s polls. That happened in 1999, when a women’s group broke new ground in an election in the county’s central region, but fared badly.

While the female candidates hope to secure some electoral triumphs this time, they are quick to point out that winning is not the only agenda. “Yes, we would love to win but we also need to keep raising women’s issues over and over again and put pressure on politicians to give us our rights,” said Fernando, a lawyer and well-known women’s activist here and abroad.

The Colombo group of women candidates is an eclectic mix that includes lawyers, women’s activists, former migrant workers, housewives, teachers, hired labour, domestic workers, printers, social workers, a cricketer, plantation workers, traders, an engineer, a company director, a trainee accountant and a dress designer. For the first time, probably, a group also has two candidates living in the slums.

Most are entering politics for the first time, have little political background but are keen to raise the independent status of women. “That’s one of the problems with women politicians in the past. They are either political widows or came from political families,” noted Sharmila Daluwatte, a lawyer and candidate.

Shanti Silva, another lawyer-candidate, said it was unfortunate that women who successfully completed their primary and secondary education had to stay at home and care for the children after marriage.

“All the knowledge we gained in school is worthless if we are forced to stay at home. The government should look at providing effective and safe day-care centres so that we could keep our children in a safe place and go to work,” she said.

According to Fernando, their foray into politics is a symbolic gesture to pave the way for more women to enter the fray. “Even if we don’t succeed and other parties solve the problems of women, then that’s fine. Ultimately we need solutions to women’s issues; it doesn’t matter who helps,” she said.

Among the issues the Colombo women’s group is campaigning for are voting rights for women workers in the Middle East, opposition to proposed changes in labour laws in free trade zones to increase night work and overtime for women without proper facilities, and laws against domestic violence.