Photo courtesy of Sri Lanka Guardian
“…who’s the fairest of them all?” Grimm Brothers (Snow White)
The most iconic moment at Nelson Mandela’s star studded memorial service was a handshake.
As US President Barack Obama ran up to the podium under a light drizzle, a CNN reporter was droning about the extra security arrangements. Suddenly, the excited voice of Christiane Amanpour cut in, shouting, “Castro, he’s shaking hands with Raul Castro.” Mr Obama had paused to shake the hand of the Cuban leader and to share a few words with him.
That simple sign of civility had its decriers, especially on the right wing of the Republican Party. Mr. Obama was accused of being a traitor, of pandering to the enemy, of endangering democracy and American security.
Perhaps Sajith Premadasa has a few similar minded advisors.
Mingling with one’s opponents on nomination day has become a Sri Lankan norm. 2024 was no exception. President Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sirithunga Jayasuriya, ideological antipodes of long standing, chatted together amiably. Political opponents Namal Rajapaksa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake exchanged greetings and broad smiles. Sajith Premadasa seemed the only outlier in that polite crowd. Not only did he refuse to shake Ranil Wickremesinghe’s hand; instead of mingling and making friendly overtures he remained in his seat, assiduous courtiers in attendance, already a king.
The seemingly trivial incident matters because of the nature of Sri Lankan presidency. The US presidency was created as a democratic alternative to the only form of government available during the late 18th century – monarchy. Th Sri Lankan presidency was created with the opposing intent of turning a democratically elected leader into a de facto monarch. While the provisions of the 1978 Constitution might have been informed by US and French presidential systems, its ethos was rooted in our own monarchic past of absolutist rulers who were the state. When its creator J.R. Jayewardene bragged that, as the newly minted executive president, he can do anything other than turning a man into a woman and vice versa, he was speaking the truth as he saw it and desired it.
The individual centric nature of our presidency has given rise, overtime, to a messiah complex on the part of those who aspire to it. Candidates see themselves not as democratic leaders but as quasi-religious redeemers, destined to save a benighted land and a helpless people from unspeakable evils. This saviour complex, combined with the powers of the presidency and our ontological predisposition to grovel before rulers (we have no historic memory of holding a king to account for his actions), opens the door to megalomania. The character of the president becomes, to a great extent, the fate of the country.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa provides the best example of how personal attributes can shape national events. Had he been marginally less unintelligent or marginally less inclined to see himself as a pundit in all fields, Sri Lanka might have been spared bankruptcy and his presidency an ignominious end. But he was an ignorant man who believed himself to be a know it all and a credulous man who could be persuaded to embrace the most preposterous notions such as turning agriculture organic in one season or that Modern Monetary Theory, created for countries with convertible currencies, can work for Sri Lanka (that misconception underlined the money printing binge and caused the collapse of the rupee).
The fate of the nation thus depends not just on policy platforms and strategic plans but also on the character of the man or woman occupying the presidency. Since excessive power seems to addle even the most intelligent of minds through hubris (J.R. Jayewardene being the best case in point), ordinary everyday virtues and the seemingly meaningless civilities that often mark the boundary between civilisation and its absence assume added importance.
Sajith Premadasa’s churlish refusal to shake the proffered hand of a political opponent does not, by itself, mean that he’d make a worse president than every other candidate in that room. But it is a reminder of the danger of a system where, as in a monarchy, governance and character are symbiotically connected.
Executive presidency has brought us not development or stability but their opposite. Unfortunately, abolishing it is on nobody’s agenda. The winner would look to a second term and the losers another go at the crown. So it went. So it would go in the absence of a grassroots effort to push the rulers to effect this most vital of system changes.
Losings Touches
Cliodynamics is a new academic discipline founded by Prof. Peter Turchin. It is aimed at using big data (over 10,000 years) to make long term predictions on societal trajectories, political integration and disintegration, state formation and state collapse. In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Prof. Turchin identifies leading indicators of political/systemic instability: “Stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and the poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt.” The confluence of these factors exacerbates social fragility, undermines trust in state institutions and unravels social norms governing public discourse.
Thanks to Gotabaya economics and Rajapaksa rule, all these causative factors are present in today’s Sri Lanka. According to new research by Prof. Wasantha Atukorala of Peradeniya University’s Department of Economics and Statistics between 2021 and 2024, 60.5% Lankan families experienced income losses. The World Bank’s April 2024 report, Bridge to Recovery, states that Sri Lankan poverty increased for four consecutive years, reaching 25.9% in 2023 (it is estimated to fall marginally to 24.8% in 2024). Although relative poverty figures are not available, it is logical to assume that the income/wealth gap has increased. Declining public trust and exploding public debt are our everyday realities. Youth unemployment rate is at 23%. Our economy is incapable of absorbing the products of our education system. Had it not been for out migration, the pressure on the system would have been incalculable.
During his June 2022 appearance on Swarnavahini’s Ira Hari Kelin programme, Anura Kumara Dissanayake said that if allowed to form a government, NPP/JVP would restore societal normalcy in three to six months. He explained what such a restoration would entail opening schools and offices, ensuring medical supplies to hospitals, ending fuel and gas queues and shortages of essential items and providing fuel to farmers and fisher-folk.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe managed to achieve this societal normalcy in well under six months. Consequently by the end 2022, President Wickremesinghe was the least unpopular of party leaders with a net unpopularity rating of 45%, better than Sajith Premadasa’s 57% or Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s 55%. Yet in 2023, the Wickremesinghe administration made a number of moves which shifted a disproportionate share of the burden of recovery onto the bent backs of the poor and the vulnerable. Electricity and water rate hikes which were especially punitive towards low end consumers and VAT increases were cases in point.
Take the removal of all books (locally published and imported, including educational books) from the VAT exempted list, causing minimal price increases of 18%. The Wickremesinghe government blamed the IMF conditionality of ending all tax exemptions in explanation. Yet the same government ignored the same IMF conditionality to give China’s Colombo Port Logistics Centre a generous 15 year tax exemption on income and dividends. Meanwhile, the military continued to consume a huge chunk of the national wealth.
By mid-2024, the economy has stopped shrinking and experienced growth for three consecutive quarters signalling a turn around. But the benefits of this recovery have bypassed more than a quarter of Sri Lankans. By the time President Wickremesinghe started implementing a slew of social development measures, the electoral bus has passed him by (there obviously is a direct correlation between his partial shift to a more equitable growth path and the May-June increases in his popularity as per IHP polling). Had he followed a more balanced policy in 2023 and the early part of 2024, he could have improved his electoral prospects without enacting such repressive measures as the Online Safety Bill or embroiling himself in a systemically destabilising (and politically delegitimising) conflict with the judiciary to keep a kowtowing IGP in place.
Election is not the end of history. If the victor decides to follow Gotabaya Rajapaksa in denuding the tax base via huge tax cuts or President Ranil Wickremesinghe in overburdening the poor, he too would find himself facing an outbreak of public anger. As economist Albert Edwards, head of global strategy at the 159 year old French investment bank, Societe Generale, said, “We talk about Tiananmen Square being all about democracy; it was because they had runaway inflation. The French Revolution wasn’t about liberté, fraternité, egalité, it was about rampant food price inflation” (Societe Generale: Global Strategy Alternative View). Bangladesh erupted over unjust job quotas and Sri Lanka over crippling shortages and power cuts. Even the most repressive state cannot prevail against a people with nothing to lose.
Leviathan in waiting?
Sri Lankan film maker Jude Ratnam’s movie, Demons in Paradise turned him into a pariah in certain Tamil quarters. The movie focused on an aspect of the Eelam Wars most Tamils refuse to acknowledge – the atrocities of the LTTE including and especially towards dissenting Tamils. Explaining the movie, Mr. Ratnam said that he wanted to warn the Tamil diaspora against romanticising the Tigers. “Acknowledging the vice in our (Tamil) community, is how we can get away from it. If you keep denying it and play the victim card all the time, then you invariably return to it.”
Just as segments of Tamil society here and abroad romanticise the LTTE, segments of Sinhala society here and abroad romanticise the army. This depiction of army as repository of everything good and pure, symbolised in the figure of war hero, formed a key component of Rajapaksa politics. Now it has become an indispensable part of the JVP’s own bid for power. Retired military personnel, organised into the Aditana Collective, are being used as a force multiplier to help Anura Kumara Dissanayake over the finishing line.
“The returning warrior risks carrying the seed of violence into the very heart of his city,” wrote René Girard (Violence and the Sacred). Aditana Collective is composed of retired warriors most of whom have experienced and survived a brutal civil war and a no less brutal insurgency. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a modern name for an age old medical condition no warrior is immune to. Yet in Sri Lanka, it was ignored for acknowledgement would have gone against the myth of the angelic war hero who went to the battlefield with “the gun in one hand and human rights in the other, food for the innocent displaced on their shoulder,” according to Mahinda Rajapaksa’s picturesque retelling at the 2011 Victory Parade. So the problem of PTSD went untreated, unhealed. As a result, we have a military (serving and retired) who are “psychologically injured” in the words of Galkande Dhammananda Thero.
Commenting on the proliferation of societal violence in Sri Lanka, Dr Jayan Mendis, then the specialist psychiatrist of the National Institute of Mental Health, said, “We lived with a war for thirty years. All those who are 30 years or so were born, bred and schooled within a war situation… They knew of war and war alone… Now it is over. However, what one grows up with is not easily forgotten. Some would want to kill any person who troubles him on even a small issue, just to get even. They know of killings and murder quite well. That is their experience” (The Sunday Leader, 1.12.2012).
When the people of Rathupaswala protested against the contaminating of their drinking water by a glove factory owned by Dhammika Perera, the Rajapaksas responded by sending the 58th Division in full battle mode. The 58th Division has been implicated in numerous human rights violations including the White Flag incident. When the shooting was over, leaving three unarmed civilians dead, a Rathupaswala villager asked a soldier why he did not use rubber bullets. “We can’t mollycoddle people with rubber bullets,” the soldier reportedly replied, (The Sunday Times, 11.8.2013). That is the real face of “war hero” and of the Maroon Brigade the NPP/JVP is birthing.
At the national convention of the Aditana Collective, participants interviewed by a friendly You Tuber sang a curiously similar song “we saved the country once; the politicians messed it up; so we are coming into politics to save the country again”. What this amounts to is a delegitimising of civilian politics. It is a dangerous message for it bears a deadly resemblance to the explanation offered by the movers and shakers of every coup d’état anywhere in the world – military as the reluctant (and heroic) cleaners up of messes of civilian making.