SRI LANKAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Sri Lanka turns left
Following a poll that has altered the island nation’s political landscape, Neville de Silva looks ahead to what changes the new ‘Marxist’ president may be able to effect
Sri Lanka’s presidential election last month was indeed an election like no other.
It turned out to be more of a political game changer than I had anticipated when I referred in the July issue ofAsian Affairs to the impending poll as one that would be ‘like no other’.
Given the country’s political history since the executive presidential system was introduced in 1978, jettisoning the democratic parliamentary way of governance inherited from Britain when colonial Ceylon, as it was then called, gained independence in 1948, my reference was hardly intended to be facetious.
Several political parties have, over the past three decades or more, promised to abolish the authoritarian presidential system and return to the old order due to the dangerously excessive power vested in the executive president. But none has actually grasped the nettle and returned to the traditional system, or one that is more equitable and acceptable to the vast majority.
So powerful have those who inherited the system been, they have added to the centralisation of presidential power while sometimes reversing the constitutional changes of some more benign leaders. They enhanced what the architect of the executive presidency, then prime minister JR (‘Yankee Dicky’) Jayewardene, who first assumed the mantle, truthfully claimed – that all he could not do was change a man into a woman and vice versa.
But last month, Sri Lanka elected a Left-leaning political leader and his largely socialist- oriented and like-minded alliance,drawn from across the socio-economic spectrum, promising to throw the presidency into the waste-bin.
Unlike pre-election promises depicting the dangers to democracy of the formidable presidency, the traditional political parties, along with their allies,threatened to abolishit and replace it with a more amenable alternative,stirringpublic enthusiasm and expectations.
But those intentions were discarded as soon as theyreached the pinnacle of power.
Newly-elected President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, popularly known by his initials AKD, and the alliance he leads(the National People’s Power, or NPP), were very much a part of a hundreds of thousands strong public protest movement called the ‘Aragalaya’ (struggle), which demanded the ouster of the democraticallyelected president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the powerful Rajapaksa dynasty, as the president’s often inane policies left the country economically bereft.
Having contested the 2019 presidential that brought Gotabaya to power, AKD garnered a paltry 3 percent of the votes. The following year he won a mere three seats at the parliamentary election. He therefore found the Aragalaya fertile ground from which to launch hislacklustre political career.
Today, the leader who failed to make an impact at electionshas been catapulted to fame. He attracted national attention to win the presidency, defeating both the sitting president Ranil Wickremesinghe – making up for the unfinished period of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the country in the face of the mass uprising – and Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa, the son of an assassinated president.
Why AKD failed five years ago to rise to high office but did so last month is part of the narrative that makes this election unique.
While all other presidents who faced elections won in the first round, garnering over 50 percent or more of the vote, Anura Kumara Dissanayake had to face a second round,drawing preferential votes to claim victory, as constitutionally required.
Dissanayake found the Aragalaya fertile ground from which to launch his lacklustre political career
However, it is his political backgroundthat has been used by his opponents and critics to blacken AKD’s image. He belonged to a Marxist party – Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP- People’s Liberation Front) – that twice launched insurrections, in 1971 and 1987-89, to topple the government, though they were crushed, with heavy loss of life
AKD was only a child during the 1971 uprising and a student during the second, which was in fact a violent response to the Jayewardene administration’sefforts to shift the blame on to the JVP for the government-initiated 1983 pogromagainst the Tamil ethnic minority and the banning of the JVP and jailing of its activists, including some of its leaders.
The ruling class is desperately anxious about therapidly rising popularity of AKD and the NPP and their calls for ‘system change’, to rid the country of the aristocratic Old Guard that has governed Sri Lanka since independence,making their opposition resurrect the past and revive the old fear psychosis.
This class is held responsible for the widespread bribery and corruption. The NPP’s determination to end that political domination, and so eliminate corruption that has stymied Sri Lanka’s economic progress,has resonated among Sri Lanka’s youth and ordinary citizens, who joined hands to condemn Ranil Wickremesinghe’s neoliberal economic policies, which sometimes go beyond even IMFproposals, though the IMF today is Sri Lanka’s holy grail.
The youth, particularly the rural youth not conversant with English,have felt deprived of a place in society due to political influence and nepotism by those in power, who have, with impunity, fulfilled their obligations to their supporters and their families.
Although AKD has ideologically repositioned the JVP and used his expanded alliance to ‘soften’ the radical Left within it, this has not stopped the anti-JVP/ NPP opposition from raising the spectre of Marxism.
Sri Lanka’s ruling class is desperately anxious about the rapidly rising popularity of AKD and the NPP
That serves two purposes. One is to remind the older population who lived through one or both insurgencies of the violence it can unleash, and the radical policies that could deprive even the common man of hearth and home. Secondly, it will cause concern among potential investors, especially foreign investors who would likely steer clearof a ‘Marxist’-led government,as though dear Karl Marx’s ghost has taken up residence in Colombo.
With little foreign revenue coming in and long-term investors and tourists looking elsewhere to dump their money, the traditional ruling class hopes to bring the AKD government to its knees and prove to the public that the radical Left is incapable of governing the country.
Such revival of fear of the past is one reason why a sizeable percentage of voters kept away, while others did so because they have turned their backs on local politics, having become distrustful after decades of broken promises.
What this election has done is to change the entire landscape of Sri Lankan politics. This is the first time in history that a Left-wing government has been elected by the people, though Marxist-Trotskyist parties such as the pro-Moscow Communist Party and Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) have served in the cabinets of socialist-leaning Sirima Bandaranaike, the world’s first woman prime minister.
One can see the concern in the media of neighbouring countries, which continue to label the new president as Marxist.
AKD comes froma lower middle-class family and had his early education in village schools and later provincial schools, from where he entered university and graduated with a physics degree. While other presidents have come from rural backgrounds, AKD is the first with roots in village life, which gives him a perspective that is closely intertwined with the rural people.
Most of Sri Lanka’s previous rulers have come from aristocratic and upper middle-class families and been educated at leading public schools. AKD’s inability to converse in English makes him an exception, perhaps one that traditional politicians and their elite cronies would look down on. Already questions are being asked as to how he will be able to negotiate and discuss geopolitics, particularly critical for Sri Lanka.
Yet one can already notice that AKD is conscious of his own shortcomings – ‘I am no magician,’ he said in his brief inaugural speech – and has already moved to meet that contingency. In his current temporary cabinet of four, he appointed a Colombo public school educated woman with a PhD as his prime minister and moved cautiously in appointing secretaries to 15 ministries and several other state institutions.
At the same time, he needs to move fast enough to show the electorate what measures he has taken, or will do, swiftly, as he has dissolved parliament and fixed the parliamentary election for mid-November.His NPP needs to win a parliamentary majority, or at least one closer to it, in order to push through his pro-poor and socially-oriented legislation, which will boost hisplanned people-centred economic development.
To win sufficient seats in parliament, he has to convince the eager public that he will act quicklyto deal with corruption and bribery and bring those seen as responsible to justice for misuse and abuse of state resources and assets.
Whereas President Wickremesinghe used his position to belittle the country’s Supreme Court by ignoring or challenging the court’s decisions, thus earning the wrath of the legal fraternity and the public, his successor’s approach would certainly be more respectful, giving the judiciary the independence it needs.
What President Anura Kumara Dissanayake does in the next three weeks will be a good indicator of where he is heading, both domestically and in foreign policy. With a Marxist label attached to his back by his foes, critics are left wondering whether he will be more inclined to listen to China than to India.
Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London
News has just come in that a member of the independent Election Commission, Ms PMS Charles, has resigned. The reason for her resignation is not known but speculation in Colombo is that she was pressured to quit in further moves to scupper the election. It is also being said that one or more of the surviving three members will also resign as pressure mounts. This could happen by independence day