Foothold in a quicksand

Anura Kumara Dissanayake has been declared the winner of the presidential election held in Sri Lanka, a nation of 22 million people, last week. He was sworn in as the 9th president of the island state on Monday (September 23). The 55-year-old leader of the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party has been in parliament for 20 years and he has seen the way the political game is played. Senior politician and incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who replaced former president Gotabaya through a parliamentary vote in 2022, sought a mandate to continue his project of reviving the country’s battered economy. His main rivals from the Opposition, Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, ran on a plank of “change”, offering relief from the burden of the government’s ongoing, IMF-led reform programme.

JVP now has only three Members of Parliament (MPs), despite having a good cadre strength and a history of anti-establishment struggles. In fact, a 2015 Facebook post by Dissanayake is now going viral. He had then said: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” Mr. Dissanayake and his National People’s Power (NPP)/People’s Liberation Front(PLF) had vowed to not scrap the country’s unpopular USD 2.9 billion IMF bailout agreement, but instead renegotiate it.

For the first time in Sri Lankan history, second preference votes had to be counted to elect a new President. In Sri Lanka’s preferential voting system, voters get to mark three candidates on the ballot indicating their order of preference. No election outcome in the past has warranted a second round of counting. At the end of the first round of counting, Dissanayake was ahead with 42.31 per cent of the votes cast, and Sajith Premadasa was in second place with 32.76 per cent. The incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe had been eliminated in the first round after he failed to come within the top two in the vote list. A candidate has to get 50 per cent plus one vote to win.

A record 38 contenders vied for Sri Lanka’s presidency in Saturday’s vote. He defeated his closest rival Sajith Premadasa of Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) during the second round of counting. Namal Rajapaksa, the 38-year-old son of Sri Lanka’s former leader Mahinda Rajapaksa, came fourth, garnering about 2.5 per cent of the vote. In fifth place was Pakki Selvam Ariyanenthiran, who was put forward as the “Tamil common candidate” and got 1.7 per cent of the vote. No other contender managed to secure more than one per cent of the national vote.

Premadasa cumulatively secured over 40 per cent of the votes across Tamil-majority areas in the island’s north, east, and central hill country. Significantly, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) leader obtained more votes than P Ariyanethiran, a “common Tamil candidate” fielded by some political actors and civil society groups. In most of the Rajapaksa strongholds, Dissanayake had a strong showing. Also, in Hambantota, the Rajapaksa home district, Dissanayake polled more than what Gotabaya Rajapaksa polled in his landslide win in 2019. The same was the situation in the historic Polonnaruwa, Galle, Ratnapura, and Monaragala.

Harini Amarasuriya—an academic turned politician, who has old connections with India—was appointed as Sri Lanka’s 16th Prime Minister on Tuesday (September 14). Amarasuriya comes from the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance led by President Dissayanake. She succeeded Dinesh Gunawardena. Besides the Prime Ministerial position, Aamarasuriya has also been assigned several portfolios including Justice, Industries, Science and Technology, Health, and Investment. Amarasuriya, (54), spent most of her academic life in India, completing her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology at Delhi University between 1991-1994. The NPP parliamentarian became the 16th prime minister of Sri Lanka and the third woman politician to reach such a post after Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Kumartunga.

The new Lankan President has dissolved the country’s Parliament and announced a snap parliamentary election on November 14. Sri Lanka’s 225-member Parliament has a term of five years. The last parliament was convened in August 2020 and Dissanayake’s decision to dissolve the parliament came 11 months ahead of schedule. The NPP alliance led by Dissanayake and his JVP party has just three seats in the Parliament, as it has largely remained on the fringes of politics and had not come close to power until now.

Genesis of JVP

To understand Sri Lankan politics, which is on the crossroad, one must know the genesis of JVP—the political party the present President leads. The JVP, serving as one of the major opposition parties of Sri Lanka for a long time, has historically viewed India as an expansionist power seeking to colonise Sri Lanka, writes The Hindu. Here is a snapshot of JVP.

The JVP was formed in 1965. Its founder Rohana Wijeweera had exposure to leftist ideologies through the Communist Party of Sri Lanka. He went, as a student, to Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba International University, where he socialised with leftists from all over the world. On his return, he aligned himself with the Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist), before breaking away to form the JVP, with the intention of creating a revolution to turn Sri Lanka into a socialist state. Its members were mostly the youth who were unable to find jobs in the Sri Lankan economy, comprising British-era trading houses manned by Colombo’s English-speaking elites.

In the 1970 election, the JVP campaigned for Sirima Bandaranaike’s leftist United Front coalition comprising the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Communist Party. But the JVP’s support for Sri Lanka’s ‘bourgeois’ left was short-lived. In April 1971, it carried out an armed insurrection.

In 1977, with the election of JR Jayewardene, the Sri Lankan economy also released all JVP prisoners including Wijeweera, who went on to contest the 1982 presidential election. Indeed, the JVP made SLFP’s Sinhala Buddhist plank its own from about the time of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots and the flaring up of the Sinhala-Tamil ethnic conflict.

In June 1987, the Indian Air Force carried out Operation Poomalai to airdrop food to the north of Sri Lanka, which was Tamil-dominated. The next month came the India-Sri Lanka Accord under which Sri Lanka introduced an amendment in its Constitution to devolve political power to the Tamil north and east. However, the Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rejected the Accord. JVP launched protests against the presence of Indian troops on Sri Lankan soil. Among the Sinhalese, the protests found widespread support. Even SLFP workers joined hands with the JVP on the ground.

In the 1990s, the JVP tried to put its past behind and entered the political mainstream under a new leadership. It won one seat in the parliamentary elections of 1994.

In the 2001 parliamentary election, the JVP won 16 seats, indicating that it had gained the trust of sections of voters. Its high point came when it contested in coalition with the SLFP-led People’s Alliance in 2004.

In 2004, President Kumaratunga called for fresh elections, naming Mahinda Rajapaksa as the prime ministerial face of the People’s Alliance-JVP coalition, called the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). Of the 105 seats UPFA won in the 225-seat parliament, the JVP’s share was 39, its highest ever tally. Months later, it pulled out of the cabinet over the mechanics of sharing Tsunami relief aid with the LTTE.

Since May 2009, after President Mahinda Rajapaksa dominated the political landscape as the architect of the military victory over the LTTE, a host of Buddhist nationalist parties had come up competing for the same space as JVP. In 2008, the JVP suffered a vertical split.

In 2015, Dissanayake formed a coalition with 25 other organisations, including civil society groups, women’s organisations and others, called the NPP. The JVP now contests elections under the banner of the National People’s Power (NPP). Analysts see this as a “rebranding” exercise to shake off its violent past that continues to haunt it. Dissanayake, the leader of Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), has described the NPP as a national liberation movement.

End of oligarchy and dynastic politics

It may be recalled that the 2022 protests, commonly known as ‘Aragalaya’ were a series of mass protests that began in March 2022 against the Government of Sri Lanka. On April 3, 2022, all 26 members of the second Gotabaya Rajapaksa cabinet resigned with the exception of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. In July 2022, protesters occupied the President’s House in Colombo, causing Rajapaksa to flee and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to announce his own willingness to resign. About a week later, on 20 July, Parliament elected Wickremesinghe as President. Nepotism, corruption, neo-nationalism of Sinhalese Buddhists, and inefficiency of the rulers have led Sri Lanka to a serious crisis.

Analysts have argued that oligarchy has worked in Sri Lanka for the last 70 years because its leaders have institutionalised their power through law, media, and political rituals. The Colombo Telegraph (November 9, 2018) wrote: “The oligarchy led by Mahinda Rajapaksa defeated the other oligarchy led by Ranil Wickremesinghe. Mahinda occupied the Prime Minister’s office and Ranil retreated to the Prime Minister’s residence (Araliyagaha Mandiraya). The theatrics of both oligarchy groups are not over yet.” Commenting on the clash of oligarch families, the ex-Sri Lanka President Maithripala Sirisena, said that the national policies were formulated and implemented by a group identified as “Butterfly Club” under Ranil Oligarchy. As an immediate response to this, Mangala Samaraweera identified the inner coterie of Mahinda Oligarchy as the ‘Leeches Club’”. Thus, the 2022 crisis can be traced back to the clash between two powerful oligarchs of Sri Lanka, which Ranil Wickremesinghe led, with the clarion call for an ‘Arab Spring’-type uprising against Rajapaksas.

Political thinkers also claim that Sri Lanka is not a democratic state. Actually, it is being governed by a group of political oligarchs. Their power flows through their relationships with each other. Their wealth and connections allow them to influence public policy behind the scenes. Janice Jiggins (1979) in her book, ‘Caste and Families in the Politics of the Sinhalese, 1947-76’, argued that the results of the general elections in August 1977 had heralded the beginning of a ‘new era’ because the Constitutional amendment after the election marked the abandonment of the Westminster-style parliamentary politics for something more akin to the presidential system practised in France and the United States. According to Jiggins, this new system of governance was an admission that parliamentary democracy can no longer mask the oligarchic nature of the Ceylonese polity in which power was monopolised by a handful of families closely bound by ties of caste, marriage, and economic interest. Whichever political party came to office, the power remained with the oligarchy of Govigama families whose function was to perpetuate the hegemony of the comprador native bourgeoisie and their Western patrons as a whole.

Since independence from the British in 1948, all Prime Ministers and Presidents in Ceylon/Sri Lanka with one solitary exception have been from the “majority” Sinhala race, “majority” Buddhist religion and “majority” Govigama caste. The only exception (some say aberration) was Ranasinghe Premadasa who was a Sinhala Buddhist, but not from the dominant Govi caste.

The 2024 presidential election probably marks the end of dynastic oligarchic rule of Sri Lanka and the culmination of the dominant caste politics.

JVP’s relation with India and China

Although JVP has historically viewed India as an expansionist power seeking to colonise Sri Lanka, in an interview, the Lankan new president said, “We don’t want to be sandwiched, especially between China and India. Both countries are valued friends and, under an NPP government, we expect them to become close partners.”

It may be recalled that on February 5, 2024, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance, during his maiden visit, received a red carpet welcome in India. Nonetheless, analysts believe that Sri Lanka’s left-leaning president-elect Anura Kumara Dissanayake is expected to seek “maximum support” from Beijing through foreign direct investment, technology and tourism, according to analysts. On Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated Dissanayake on his election victory on Saturday, hailing bilateral ties as “a good example of friendly coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation between countries of different sizes” while committing to work with his new counterpart to boost relations.

The Global Times reported that the relationship between China and Sri Lanka has continuously strengthened over the past decade, particularly with the alignment of local development strategies with the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Observers believe that under Sri Lanka’s new administration, this pair of relations is expected to be further enhanced, as Dissanayake’s party shares many ideological similarities with China, and values the country’s ties with China.

It is also observed that Sino-Sri Lankan relations have been stronger when left-of-centre parties or politicians are in power on the Indian Ocean Island. China has maintained a relatively low profile in Sri Lanka over the past four years, especially in the last two. Aside from sporadic humanitarian aid and a USD 392 million agreement in May 2023 to build the South Asia Commercial and Logistics Hub (SACL) at the Colombo port, China has remained largely disengaged from Sri Lanka since the pandemic. Several factors explain this reduced engagement. One is that both the current Wickremesinghe administration and the previous Gotabaya Rajapaksa government proved unreliable partners for China, often reneging on commitments under Indian influence.

While China has engaged with almost all Sri Lankan governments, a look at post-independent Sri Lankan history shows that there is a difference in the level of Chinese engagement in the country, depending on whether Sri Lanka is run by the right-wing (represented by the United National Party (UNP) or the left-of-centre (exemplified by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and its offshoots) or coalitions led by these parties. When a left-of-centre government was in power, China had provided more aid, more loans, and more political support than when a UNP government was in power.

History of Sino-Lanka cooperation suggests that the new government of Sri Lanka will have an all-weather friend in China.

Observations

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is ready to discuss its controversial USD 2.9-billion bailout programme for Sri Lanka with the country’s new government, a spokesman said, on September 24. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the country’s first leftist president, has said he wants to renegotiate the deal, which has brought unpopular austerity measures. IMF noted that Sri Lanka which defaulted on its debt in April 2022 had stabilised since the bailout. If the IMF negotiation fails, Dissanayake may approach China for a bailout.

Unlike the 2022 economic crisis, the 2024 election has brought in a radical change in the political domain of the island nation. How the powerful oligarchs react to this change should be observed closely. The November election result is crucial for the future of Sri Lankan democracy.

China has emerged as one of the important factors in India-Sri Lanka relations. Apparently, China’s strategy of integrating all of India’s neighbours into the Chinese economy is near complete. Over the years, China has strengthened its strategic presence for encircling India, in Tibet, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan and in the Indian Ocean island states. It is high time Indian think tanks reevaluate the pitfalls of much hyped ‘neighbour first’ foreign policy which has miserably failed during the last one decade.

Views expressed are personal