Is parliament porous to the rabble?

Will the relevant party leaders ensure that no odious characters are nominated on the national lists of political parties, after they are defeated at the forthcoming polls? The National Lists of major political parties are now released for perusal, and there aren’t very many obnoxious characters on the respective lists of the main political formations.
But this is the sanctimonious character of our national political pantomime. The National Lists can be juggled with later, and new names introduced — these new names being of those who have received an enormous public drubbing at the hands of the voters.
At this electoral outing as well, there are a substantial number of unsavoury candidates who have managed to get on the nomination lists of various major political parties, and these include those who have been accommodated previously on the National List.
This in itself is not a positive reflection on the political ethics practiced by the major political parties, even though it can be said that the people would reject any notorious characters and sundry thugs if they present themselves as candidates at this electoral outing.
While there is some merit to this argument, there is not much rejecting the people could do if for the most part the nomination lists are peopled by those who are eminently rejectable.
Some analysts among the election-month punditry insist that some of the notorious notables have been nominated on the party lists, with the fond hope that they would lose and therefore go into political oblivion - - but the problem with this thesis, is that still others say that this is not the case, and that certain leaders of district nomination lists would see that some of the unwelcome characters on their lists would in fact trump at the election.
The expectation is that some of the notorious would ride on the coattails of the district political elite -- and you could replace the word coattail with saataka if there is a comprehension problem that dogs you here.
The plus side of it is that party motivations or the motivations, whatever they may be, of the district political elite, are not the final determinant of who gets elected and who does not.
On the 8th of April the final arbiter of that issue is your good-self.
You would decide whether Mr. X is an unsavoury nincompoop who does not deserve to be within yards of that august institution -- so-called -- of parliament - - or whether he or she is worthy of the honour of being your representative in that House.
The real bad flavour in the mouth begins to be felt when you have done your job, voted all the court jesters and sundry hoodlums out, and still find that this sort of vermin finds their way into parliament in some way, due to manipulations and replacements that take place in the party National Lists.
Some would say that crossing over and sitting on the opposite side of the parliamentary aisle is also a vexed issue of the proportions of surreptitiously smuggling in hoodlums to parliament through the National Lists.
Certainly, in terms of simple logic, getting elected on the list of one party and representing another in parliament is to raise the middle finger at the voter who voted for you and sent you there to be his or her representative.
Though showing the voter the finger would have been considered an affront to democratic practice, the courts of this land no less have allowed this state of affairs to continue because the judges in their wisdom have rejected political party disciplinary action against those MPs who have thought it fit to sit on the opposite side of the isle ---voting for the other party, while retaining their membership with the original parties they were elected from.
This practice is an electoral abomination and is a subversion of democracy, and Ranil Wickremesinghe the leader of the opposition seeks to arrest the trend by obtaining affidavits from those contesting under the UNP party list, ensuring that they would not cross over to the other side.
Certainly the cynical would say that it is pathetic to have to sign a piece of paper to ensure that once elected, a person would remain with his or her party and vote with it. Signing a piece of paper they might say would be to purchase fealty, but if that was so, the same thing could be said of marriage.
But yet, just about everybody in modern society — elite, poor, nationalist and reactionary included - - sign before a registrar of marriage and pledge their troth to their partner, so Ranil Wickremesinghe may be excused at least when the history is written, for his little pre-emptive stratagem to ensure nobody finds ways of defying the UNP parliamentary whip.
However, one should not be certain that the courts of this country would necessarily enforce such affidavits to the letter; after all many who have “crossed over’’ have remained with their original parties anyway, which is why they have even argued in some strange cases that they vote with the other side because their votes are “votes of conscience.”(!)
Our advice to party leaders and party district leaders is that they avoid all the rather unnecessary metal stress of guarding their own parliamentary group almost at the point of gun, by ensuring that they get the majorities they want in parliament, by putting forward eminent electable and ultimately acceptable candidates on their respective nomination lists.