 "Sri Lanka’s ‘vote for change’ offers hopes, opportunities but also challenges")
The election of the centre-left Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) as the ninth Executive President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is as much full of challenges as opportunities. The opportunities are those for ‘change’ that the nation’s population deserved, yearned and voted for. The challenges are for the new rulers and the regime, as ‘change’ in that sense is not going to be easy to carry out in a fast-changing global and regional situation, where the very term has come to mean different things to different people in distinctively different situations.
Dissanayake’s election has shown that patience and perseverance can win in the long run. The JVP was at it for long, first as a militant, insurgent force since inception in the mid-fifties, and as a mainstreamed, democratic group post-transition mid-way to the current transformation in the mid-nineties. If the tradition that a ‘generation’ represents three decades or 30 years, Dissanayake’s elevation as the party leader since 1914 and now as the nation’s President represents that ‘transition’, first of the party and then of the latter.
The immediate needs, necessities and urgencies may have compelled the nation to turn to the JVP for solace and solution at the height of the unprecedented economic crisis two years back in 2002. However, the fact also remains that the JVP needed to ‘change’ from being a rag-tag militant formation into an organised, credible and creditable political party that embraced democracy, for the nation to trust them.
After all, Sri Lanka heralded modern electoral democracy in this part of the world as far back as 1931 – and not without reason and purpose. Proving the point was the successive failure of the JVP’s own twin insurgencies of 1971 and 1987 to effect a ‘systems change’ that it desired through successive blood-baths in which the cadre-based outfit lost the most. Then came the LTTE brand of Tamil youth-led terrorism coupled later with conventional war, which too refused to produce the ‘desired’ results without the stamp of democracy on it.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsWhy, even the unparalleled mass Aragalaya protests that the economic crisis triggered and behind which some saw the hidden hands of the JVP transitioned into what the nation was more familiar with and comfortable with, once the immediate goal was achieved. It was all about getting rid of then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who came to represent all that was wrong with the nation’s post-Independence governance system and scheme.
The emergence of five-time former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, first to the very same post and later elevated as the nation’s Executive President by the elected, existing Parliament, as authorised by the Constitution, without doubt proved that the masses did not at any point favour either ‘mobocracy’ or anarchy, as some may have desired or feared, as the case may be. They simply overwhelmed those that had hoped for or worked for an ‘Arab Spring’ kind of an unsettled and unpredictable future for their dear nation and themselves.
Conditional mandate
Observing it all from the side-lines, if not from behind-the-scenes, the present JVP rulers are well aware of the possibilities and limitations alike. By giving the JVP a ‘conditional mandate’, and not a clean and sweeping one as in the case of each one his elected predecessors, the Sri Lankan voter has told them that the new regime was now under probation, at least until the 14 November parliamentary elections that President Dissanayake called just a day after his taking charge.
Well, the Constitution empowers him to do so, and his party had made it clear that they would seek a larger and a meaningful mandate from the people if they have to run a democratic government even more democratically than was possible under Dissanayake’s ‘terms of election’, if it could be called so. This way, yes, his new Prime Minister Harini Amarasurya and all-important Foreign Minister and political veteran, Vijitha Herath will hold office in a ‘caretaker’ government without having to face Parliament, of which they were members, even for a day.
The reasons were written into the presidential poll verdict and were exemplified by the composition of the outgoing Parliament. The voter in his wisdom gave Dissanayake a respectable 42 per cent vote-share. It was still nearly eight per cent short of the half-way mark, which alone would have given him an unquestioned victory, as much under the Constitution as in reality. If the Election Commission still declared him victor and under the due process, it owed to the complexity of a simple electoral process, so made by the Founding Fathers, as a check against a lot of other imagined and imaginable problem – but not the real one that was staring at them on the face, then as now.
The fact also remained that the JVP-NPP, as the party-led combine wants to be known, had only three MPs, including the President-elect, in the 225-member House. That was no way for the government to hope to conduct regular business the regular way. It was/is also politically expedient for the new rulers to capitalise on the prevailing voter-mood and try to make hay when the sun was shining.
Yet, for the JVP, winning close to 115 seats in the parliamentary elections is going to be tougher than bagging the presidency, the prize-catch for very many decades of sustained hard work on the ground. As can be expected, a post-poll projection of presidential vote-shares into parliamentary seats has given the JVP-NPP combine eight or ten seats short of the half-way mark one more time.
Perceptions, performance
The ground reality is full of possibilities but that need not be how the voter-sentiment should act/react if he really desired that ‘change’ and trusted the identified agents-of-change with ushering in that ‘change’. Pitted against the victor in a uniquely three-cornered main-contest, against the usual two, the two runners-up represented the identifiably centre-right, liberal western capitalist model.
Of the two, the outgoing President Ranil Wickremesinghe came a distant third with 17-plus per cent vote-share while the runner-up and his one-time compatriot, Sajith Premadasa, the Leader of the Opposition in the dissolved Parliament, came second with a 32-plus per cent vote-share. Together, their votes not only surpassed victorious Dissanayake’s 42 per cent. It also crossed the 50 per cent cut-off mark for a non-complicated clean victory, even if by a decimal.
Translated, the combo, if they buried personal egos and came together, has the potential to upset the ruling JVP’s parliamentary hopes and calculations. After all, Premadasa parted company with Wickremesinghe-led UNP, the nation’s GoP, less than five years back, to float a separate SJB, whose voter-strength derives possibly more from the nation’s three ‘minority’ ethnicities than from the majority Sinhala-Buddhist community, to which he belongs.
Reading the writing on the fall quick and fast, the UNP especially has offered to work with the other for the parliamentary elections. Once uncompromising, Wickremesinghe, who would be 80 at the time of next presidential poll in 2029, may now relent and retire. Or, else, his voters and leaders may desert him to greener pastures just as they had mobbed him on the very eve of the presidential poll with their loyalty commitments.
After all, Wickremesinghe had stolen most of them from the even more discredited Rajapaksa clan’s SLPP parliamentary under-writer of the past two years. His humiliating defeat now came in the aftermath of his UNP’s inability to win even a single elected parliamentary seat after senior leaders uncomfortable with his smarter-than-thou approach to politics and people around him had crossed over to the SJB at birth.
Together, it is a lesson in popular perceptions glossing over possible achievements, especially when the national psyche too was changing. It owed to external factors of the economic crisis and internal metamorphosis of individual and individualist kinds. Looking down at the world from (far) above, Wickremesinghe, for one, did not see the shifting sands of time and the moods of the first-time voters, who made up a million in a total of 17.1 m.
It was no different in the case of Sajith Premadasa, who too was/is cut out of the same ideological cloth and carried a clannish approach to politics and elections like Wickremesinghe and the Rajapaksas, though to a lesser degree. After all, he had not reached the top for him to imbibe that attitude, which thankfully his LTTE-slain father, President Ranasinghe Premadasa, was not known for. Premadasa, Sr, was a man of the masses and died in their midst when an LTTE suicide-bomber intervened in a May Day rally of the undivided UNP at the time.
Taxing the rich, sparing the poor
Yes, that is yet another factor that the new rulers have to factor in. Unlike in neighbouring India, where economic reforms caused the slow but sure demise of the political left and left-linked trade unionism, the latter especially had only flourished in post-reforms Sri Lanka. So have student movements in the country. Both are considered the backbones of the JVP’s cadre-base all along, and also that of the breakaway Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), born out of a determination to retain the old, possibly militant identity and ideology, still.
This would mean that whether now, or after the parliamentary elections, the JVP-led government will have to address the long-pending demands of various trade unions in multiple sectors, starting with pay-hikes to provide for runaway inflation, though nothing compared to those forgotten days of economic crisis, dollar-crunch, and hence long queues for food, fuel, medicines, et al. It is unlike the demands of the students, most of which could be set right through a few administrative instructions, not even parliamentary legislation or presidential order.
It can well begin with the budget-making for the new regime’s first fiscal, beginning 1 January 2025. It’s when various pending demands of the trade unions, farmers and other sectors will come under governmental review for action, present and future. Topping the list is the LKR 25,000 pay-hike per month in the government sector, which is necessarily the single largest employer. The government under fiscal crunch will have to find the resources if it is not to upset its traditional support-base, which would have no qualms to embarrass / harass the rulers as they have been doing all along, with a purpose, with a reason.
It will be the case with the JVP’s promise against prospective privatisation and job-cuts, tax and tariff hikes, initiated by the previous government, all of them coming with revenue implications for the government and politico-electoral implications for the JVP-NPP in general and President Dissanayake in particular. Of course, the JVP has always advised taxing the rich and sparing the poor. A reverse attempt by President Gotabaya bombed him out of power while one by Wickremesinghe, done with greater finesse, also did not help him politically. That was because the poor felt they would be paying more in terms of VAT, from the daily morning cuppa to the evening peg. They were also made to feel that the rich were only getting richer even when the nation was becoming poorer.
The nation and the rest of the world too would be watching how the first left and ‘socialist’ government in Sri Lanka in modern times will be faring all round, starting with the economy. It will begin with the new rulers’ pre-poll promise of re-negotiating the IMF bail-out package, by which Wickremesinghe swore only to lose the local constituency more than already.
The one ‘change’ that was noticeable in the new-normal JVP’s demeanour was their readiness and willingness to accept the IMF, which they have always condemned as a western creation to serve their capitalist constituencies in Third World countries. But how much of ‘change’ they can effect in the IMF’s approach will also dictate their future popularity in the country. It will have to be more than crossing the left-out t’s and dotting the i’s from the past. It is not going to be easy, and every stake-holder understands it but may not accept it.
Wait-and-watch
For the new-generation in Sri Lanka, both from the rural poor, the mainstay of the JVP, and the traditionally antagonist urban middle class who are the new converts, they have pegged their hopes, possibly last hopes of a fast and fine economic revival on the party-led government and President Dissanayake. If it requires them to give them both a parliamentary majority, who knows, they might oblige, for they cannot afford to be half-hearted in their own electoral initiative for ‘change’.
A lot however will depend on the new dispensation’s political and administrative approaches to governance issues to which they are new. Yet as prospective Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya told newsmen after the presidential poll results, they also ‘do not have the kind of administrative experience that had made the nation bankrupt’. That is a good way to look at ‘change’, but that will only be a beginning for effectively that change, effectively as well.
That way, until the parliamentary fate of the new leadership is known, they cannot afford to slacken, as they are sworn not only to wipe out corruption and wasteful expenditure in government. In the process, they will also have to pep up the sagging morale of the nation and its population, the latter especially as they are looking up for manna from Heaven, which they hope the JVP and JVP alone can deliver when in office.
Under the circumstances, the likes of foreign and security policy issues will have to take a temporary backseat, for the new government, both in terms bilateral and multilateral engagements, be it with the likes of India, China and the US on the one hand, and the IMF and the UNHRC on the other. They will also be alive to and aware of the possibilities flowing out of the parliamentary elections, and more so about the new rulers’ preoccupation with the same. Wait-and-watch, but in a positive way will be the mutual approach in the interregnum.
After all, having sworn to protect the nation’s armed forces from calculated and calibrated international harassment through the UNHRC processes, for alleged war –crimes and other human rights violations, the JVP government cannot be seen as deserting them, they are also being a strongly identifiable electoral constituency of theirs. The West would have got the same message and indications are that in the current UNHRC session, a facilitating resolution to continue with the contents of the expiring resolution that is harsh on Sri Lanka.
The US, the UK and the rest of the West will play along, yes, by continuing to vote in favour of their own resolutions, while those like India may abstain and China and the rest would vote against it – a message, each one of these in a changed Sri Lankan scene. That will also be the new government’s first major international exposure on the political front, just as the IMF-related issues, if not leading up to instant re-negotiations, is on the economic front!
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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