Photo courtesy of The Leader
The tectonic plates shifted in Sri Lanka’s political fabric on September 21. The political rupture caused by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, once considered a rank outsider, becoming the president was that moment. It is a breach in a country where feudal overhang in politics is the norm. Two ruling families from the urban elite (Bandaranaikes and Senanayake/Jayewardene/Wickremesinghe) and a rural-based family regime (the Rajapaksas) being at the helm were taken for granted; no other alternative was considered possible. Welcomingly President Dissanayake severed the status quo.
The other seismic shift was the appointment of a feminist, Harini Amarasuriya, as the country’s prime minister. Several commentators have written about the political earthquake that President Dissanayake’s victory brought to Sri Lanka’s polity and sociality. President Dissanayake symbolises and crystallises a moment of hope riding on the spirit of the aragalaya, which is politically anti-establishment and grounded. The NPP and he were offering to forge an alternative path to debt restructuring.
Amarasuriya’s appointment as prime minister, too, portends a momentous shift for the country’s polity and sociality, especially as a debt ridden country. Sri Lanka boasts of electing the world’s first woman prime minister and has had two other women prime ministers, formidable women, in this role (although they were widows and came from political dynasties). Amarasuriya is the first woman prime minister to identify herself as a feminist and to possess a doctorate. It is a proud moment for Sri Lanka: a feminist at the helm. Kumari Jayawardena’s book Nobodies to Somebodies traces this highly educated woman’s ancestry to an establishment family. She, in contrast to other somebodies, holds high office on a pro-working class, pro-human rights, anti-corruption platform. She shatters facile readings of class and ethnic alliances in the country.
The political journey for Amarasuriya began with her involvement in Federation of University Teachers Association (FUTA) strikes in 2012. Her awareness of the troubled Sri Lankan polity and sociality started with working in psycho-social counselling settings, which included working in the entire country. She was exposed to the grounded realities throughout the country through her work, activism and union involvement. Her political ties to the NPP come not through political nepotism but from a political awakening through decades of witnessing or negotiating structural violence shaping the lives of many working people. In short, she is no political neophyte. She, however, has been labelled and lumbered with endless innuendos and criticisms extending from her personal life to her capabilities to hold down the task of prime ministering.
I want to take this moment to offer feminist reflections for a country where 52 percent of us are women and yet sexism and misogyny prevails. Sri Lanka proudly boasts relatively gender egalitarian Human Development Indices indicators across literacy and longevity. Yet women workers are underrepresented in the formal labour market and their participation rates hover around 33 percent and have been for decades; a remarkable anomaly for a highly educated labour force of women but none too surprising if we go by the public vilification, invectives and sexism Amarasuriya has had to endure in the past couple of weeks.
Nonetheless, women workers are the backbone of the country’s economy. The bulk of tea, garment and migrant domestic workers are low paid women workers, with the majority not earning a living wage. They have been toiling for decades to bring foreign exchange earnings into the country, so necessary for raising revenue to pay back the debt the country is saddled with.
A bastion of authoritarian political men and policies took the country into issuing risky international sovereign bonds with a global financial architecture stacked against the global South. Add to that potent mix corruption amongst the political classes, vested business interests and structural failures in the economy, where (green) manufacturing was not promoted and the country’s populace is addicted to unaffordable imports. The debt crisis did not happen in a year or two but was decades in the making, with structural conditions unaddressed. It is, as Amarasuiriya, sassily quipped: “We don’t have experience in bankrupting the country but we will gain experience in building the country”, when asked about the common criticism levied against the NPP on its lack of experience.
At that moment, rejoicing about the victory of NPP, Amarasuriya exhibited her quick thinking. However, close attentiveness to the video shows her pondering how best to respond amid elation. It is not the first time that Amarasuriya has displayed her capacity for careful and grounded analysis getting to the core of political problems, sometimes with wit and at other times with calm analysis. Soon after she was appointed as prime minister, this video clip and other old images were used to subject her political and personal life to a barrage of denigration, sexism, criticism and unsubstantiated homophobic innuendos, with these coming via social media from academic men to others.
Amarasuirya faces this bombardment partly because she disrupts idealised views of the patriarchal family by exposing alternative multiple family formations in the country. She shows how single women and men, unmarried or divorced or separated, belong to families and networks of friends and kin, forging success for themselves. The unsettling by Amarasuriya is also because of the political position she espouses. As a representative for a political alliance that includes the JVP, previously with a class base of low income and working classes consisting of youth, farmers and university students from rural and urban, the polity is unnerved.
Historically, the elite and upper middle classes have eschewed the JVP given its (implicit) feudal disdain for the working classes and low income groups (irrespective of ethnicity). Low income groups are often viewed as groups that the elite and upper income classes can be charitable towards but are rarely seen as citizens with equitable rights. The aragalaya public disrupted the feudal vestiges urban elite political families (Wickremesinghe/Bandaranaike) and rural-based political families (the Rajapaksas) unabashedly drew upon. Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda remarked that the opening offered by the aragalaya aided the NPP in capitalising and crystallising its political journey from the margins to the centre.
What of Amarasuriya’s feminism and feminist politics? Did this also matter in assisting the NPP speak to the power base of working class women who toil and are the underbelly of the economy, although often neglected? It most likely did.
Amarasuriya is a member of the Progressive Women’s Collective, part of the NPP, with clear aspirations for working class women in the country even as she is conscious that feminist politics is not about pigeon-holing herself as the spokesperson for a narrow women’s caucus. Her feminist perspectives, too, came under attack when a self-made businessman, having lost his bid at the presidential election (as a Communist Party candidate), condemned Amarasuriya via social media for her “external” views and lifestyle: a dangerous woman, without saying as much.
This is the moment to pause and remind misogynists (men and women) in the country that universal franchise came to those over 21 in 1931 and was struggled over by local feminists with Agnes de Silva at the forefront. Kumari Jayawardena traces in her Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World how de Silva advocated for equal and national rights as a mother of three children. Although she is more recently represented as a “scary” and formidable woman, she was an early suffragette and quintessentially a feminist advocating for national, ethnic and women’s rights.
Universal franchise came to the country 93 years ago in no small part because of feminist struggle and visions although feminist contributions are often ignored in common parlance. In the 21st century, it is time we mark 2024 for the promises and potential a feminist politician may bring towards society, polity and economy without wasting it with feudal and patriarchal invectives that Sri Lankans should leave to a bygone era. Instead of sanitising our present with ascriptions of idealised family living and visions of “good” women while chastising those not fitting the fantasy, we need to grasp and represent the complexity and richness of sociality by promoting political positions for an egalitarian polity.
Dangerous political women often cleverly disrupt the status quo. In Sri Lanka it means opening the space to those left outside layers of power for decades to be brought into the fold via inclusive politics. With a feminist also at the helm, 2024 may well mark the moment political and economic democracy start taking baby towards egalitarian polity, sociality and economy on the road to the Democratic Socialist Republic it identifies as but has not delivered socialist democracy to the majority yet.
Kanchana N Ruwanpura is Professor of Development Geography, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Fellow Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland and co-founder of the Institute of Political Economy, Sri Lanka. She can be found at @knr21_cam and @kanchana_ipe_sl. With thanks to a Bromanska Fellowship, University of Gothenburg, Sweden that offered time to read and write around the subject of feminist politics and corruption.