The Crisis in Sri Lanka

Mahinda Rajapaksa speaks to the media on November 11, 2018 in Colombo,

Sri Lanka. Paula Bronstein / Getty

BY KANISHKA GOONEWARDENA-
“In the name of God, go!” Rarely have these words of Oliver Cromwell been
recycled with such farce and frequency as during Sri Lanka’s recent political
crisis, not least by parliamentarians addressing rivals. As far as crises go,
however, it was a remarkably peaceful affair outside of parliament and
unrelated to any kind of revolution. Everyday life continued as usual even in
Colombo despite extra-bold newspaper headlines, which were greeted in the
distant North by “near silence.”
Yet there was no shortage of drama and spectacle. In the early days of
turmoil, parents were advised to cover their children’s eyes when footage
appeared on TV from parliament, where proceedings were disrupted by MPs
engaged in fistfights, flinging furniture, drawing knives, and throwing chili
pepper at ostensible opponents in the chamber. Curious foreign journalists,
seasoned diplomats, and local NGOs minding human rights rushed to warn of
an impending “bloodbath.” In such wishful thinking, one could be forgiven
for sensing a yearning for “external intervention.”
The crisis seemed to appear out of nowhere on the evening of Friday, October
26, 2018 when President Maithripala Sirisena abruptly removed Prime
Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP) from
office and appointed in his stead the former president Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Sirisena himself had defeated Rajapaksa in the last presidential election on
January 8, 2015, having defected in late 2014 from a senior position in
Rajapaksa’s United People Freedom Alliance (UPFA) regime to become the
surprise but successful candidate of the United National Front (UNF)
opposition.
Over the last weekend of October, a new cabinet, too, was haphazardly sworn
in, with the promise of a caretaker government. This was to be composed of
the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) led by the new Prime Minister
Rajapaksa and President Sirisena’s loyalists of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party
(SLFP) and its coalition in parliament, the United People’s Freedom Alliance
(UPFA) — a part of which had collaborated with the multiparty UNF
“national government” of “good governance” led by Wickremesinghe’s UNP
since the parliamentary elections of August 2015.
Sirisena’s re-alliance with Rajapaksa — which immediately gathered
predictable populist-nationalist enthusiasm as well as liberal-cosmopolitan
opprobrium —eventually proved to be methodologically flawed. This was
especially so in light of the December 13 Supreme Court ruling against the
president’s dissolution of parliament, once it became apparent to Sirisena that
Rajapaksa would not secure the parliamentary majority needed to form a new
government. Much to the delight of the “international community,” if not a
majority of Sri Lankans, normal service has resumed more or less in the
island after nearly two months of political chaos and juridical suspense.
Wickremesinghe was sworn in again as prime minister for a record fifth time
on December 16, albeit with a new cabinet limited (by the constitution) to
thirty ministers, about half the number of the profligate “national
government” preceding it — amounting to significant savings in public
coffers. Although the crisis in the most immediate sense is now over, how it
was precipitated and played out remains instructive for students of Sri
Lankan politics.
During the brawling in parliament — while Wickremesinghe still claimed to
be prime minister and refused to vacate official premises — the Sirisena-
Rajapaksa wager hinged on securing the support of at least 113 of the 225-
member legislature, by offering inducements to MPs from other parties to
cross over to their new coalition.
It is no secret that such machinations have long been a staple of Sri
Lankan realpolitik, practiced by all aspirants to state power; but typically they
have occurred away from the public eye, rather like bribes, though perfectly
legal according to successive constitutions, even after the latest Nineteenth
Amendment (2015) famed for “good governance.”
In a stunning TV interview on December 7, however, Sirisena broke the taboo
of revealing this public secret, divulging with admirable candor what had
gone awry with his Plan A with Rajapaksa: even though ministerial posts and
other attractions in the region of five hundred million rupees were offered to
prospective “crossovers,” they did not budge.
It would be naïve to ascribe the inertia of MPs so courted to an ethic of “good
governance.” As many commentators have noted, they were in all probability
offered more to remain in their seats than to cross the aisle. At previous
elections, Western-oriented Colombo liberals have accused the Chinese
government of financing the Rajapaksa regime’s electoral campaigns; now it
was the more far-flung Rajapaksa supporters’ turn to point the finger at
Western powers for funding Wickremesinghe’s soiled grip on power.
These allegations and counter-allegations poured more fuel on the already
flammable awareness that Sri Lanka is a strategic node of global geopolitical-
economic contestation involving the United States, European Union, Japan,
and especially India on one side, with China on the other. That China
financed several signature development projects of the Rajapaksa regimes
(2005–2010, 2010–15) in line with its own New Silk Road initiative — to the
visceral discomfort of India and Western powers — is well known.
Against this backdrop, it did not help Wickremesinghe’s cause that his first
publicized meeting after October 26 — held in Temple Trees, the prime
minister’s official residence — was with predictable foreign emissaries. While
critics asked if Wickremesinghe’s real constituents resided in Washington and
Delhi, Palitha Kohona and Tamara Kunanayakam, former Sri Lankan
ambassadors to the UN, accused foreign diplomats in Colombo of violating the
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
The “follow the money” principle proved even more damaging to
Wickremesinghe’s waning “good governance” reputation given his role in the
notorious “bond scam” (“Great Bank Robbery” in Sinhala) of 2015 and 2016
— a high-class act of “so-called original accumulation” involving central bank
bonds that directly robbed Sri Lankan public institutions to the tune of $11
million.
Estimates of the total loss to the government, the public, and the economy due
to cascading consequences of interest-rate increases caused by this
“meticulously planned, multi-faceted, and far-reaching” bond scam are
works-in-progress, but the overall damage may well exceed $5 billion
according to the most rigorous of projections. A significant portion of that is
being borne by middle-class and poorer Sri Lankans living on borrowed
money — on top of the austerity measures meted out by the “good
government,” especially to peasant communities.
The prime suspect of this crime — presently in Singapore, avoiding an arrest
warrant from the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court — is Arjuna Mahendran,
who was controversially appointed governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka
by Wickremesinghe in 2015, over Sirisena’s objection. Sirisena is now
threatening to name politicians connected to Wickremesinghe who benefited
from this white-collar swindle, lending credence to the widespread suspicion
that money generated from the bond scam was deployed in the election
campaigns of “good governance” MPs — and most recently against the
Sirisena-Rajapaksa bid for power. A Facebook satirist captured the mood
concerning the absurdity of this electoral political economy, by urging the
putative government to reduce, along with the cost of living, the price of MPs.
Apparently outbid in the marketplace for MPs, the Sirisena-Rajapaksa Plan B
was to dissolve parliament immediately, twenty-two months ahead of
schedule, with a view to an election in early January 2019. But the president’s
gazette notification of November 9 to this effect was promptly challenged by
the UNP and other parties at the Supreme Court, which granted petitioners
leave to proceed.
In further bad news for the attempted new government, on December 4 the
Court of Appeal issued an interim order restraining the new prime minister
and cabinet, on the basis of a no-confidence motion against Rajapaksa passed
in parliament with 122 signatures, with support from the main ethnic
minority parties: the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and the Sri Lanka
Muslim Congress (SLMC).
In the weeks leading up to the anxiously anticipated Supreme Court ruling,
while the country was without a prime minister and cabinet, legal and non-
legal pundits hogged newspaper columns, debating the constitutionality of the
dissolution of parliament. Their collective exercise exposed the ambiguities in
the Nineteenth Amendment — a rapidly written document open to various
interpretations.
At this juncture, much of the opposition to the Sirisena-Rajapaksa plan to
dissolve parliament and hold elections found expression in ethico-juridical
terms. The president and his judicially restrained prime minister were
depicted by adherents of the status quo ante as conniving architects of a
“constitutional coup” — lumpen populists with no regard for sacrosanct
liberal institutions of “good governance,” such as those embodied in the
Nineteenth Amendment. The real intent of the authors of the latter was to
fully abolish the executive presidency, which would present Wickremesinghe
with the prospect of becoming the head of state in the next election by virtue
of being the leader of UNP, without having to be directly elected by the
people.
It was indeed a populist move on Sirisena’s part, too, to align himself again
with what appeared to be still the most popular politician in the country.
Rajapaksa remains a figure like Vladimir Putin or Narendra Modi in his
unsurpassed ability to mobilize a “nationalist-popular” will in the ethnically
divided theater of Sri Lankan electoral politics — with deep support as well
from the laboring classes, especially in the smaller towns and villages, which
have suffered most from Wickremesinghe’s austerity measures.
This was amply demonstrated in the island-wide local government election on
February 10, 2018, when Rajapaksa’s SLPP coalition scored a landslide
victory, capturing power in 231 of 340 local authorities, reducing UNP’s share
to 34. Though ridiculed as “village idiots” by Colombo elites, both Sirisena
and Rajapaksa with their provincial sensibilities knew better than them that
populist also means popular.
Hence the conviction with which they presented their case to the people — to
place the fate of the country in the hands of fifteen million voters rather than
with 225 overvalued MPs, a thin majority of whom were still propping up a
massively delegitimated government, at an unbearable and unwarranted cost
to the nation.
While Sirisena’s rhetoric here could well bear the name “provincializing
Colombo,” the decisive political question of the hour pitted democracy against
liberalism. Due respect for liberal political-juridical institutions held in high
esteem by Colomboans connected to the “international community” was
countered by a duo of peasant stock with a direct appeal to the popular will of
the people.
Though hardly unanimous, the general feeling in the streets disgusted with
career politicians on all sides seemed largely to favor an election as the best
way out of the crisis. In contrast, the liberal opposition to the populist
Sirisena-Rajapaksa initiative pinned all hopes on the judiciary, which
eventually ruled in its favor on December 13, forcing Rajapaksa’s resignation
and Wickremesinghe’s return as prime minister.
In this context, there is irony in the “democratic” claims of those anti-populist
authors of the Nineteenth Amendment who threw their support behind
Wickremesinghe as much as against the strategically ill-advised Sirisena-
Rajapaksa plot. After being surprised by local government election results, in
the wake of the bond scam and other betrayals, the Wickremesighe-led UNF
took diligent care to postpone indefinitely the overdue provincial council
elections on the basis of a procedural pretext, undermining not only the letter
and spirit of democracy, but also the proper functioning of the key state
institution entrusted to devolve political power to the provinces and especially
ethnic minorities. It was the respected retired civil servant Jolly
Somasundram who best summed upthe Orwellian liberal logic that carried
the day: “No elections: democracy is saved.”
Constitutional Struggles
Wickremesinghe’s fear of elections and Sirisena’s eagerness for them in
league with Rajapaksa — this contradiction contains the key to Sri Lanka’s
current political-economic-juridical landscape. For a rapid sketch, it will be
helpful to recall that the present constitutional and other disputes go back at
least to the watershed year of 1978, when Wickeremesighe’s uncle, Prime
Minister Junius Richard Jayewardene, replaced the Westminister-style
republican Sri Lankan constitution of 1972 with one centered on an executive
president, combining selected features of the French, German, and US
models.
The concentration of executive power in the president’s office, away from
parliament, was of course self-serving to the UNP strongman, whose historical
accomplishment was the introduction of neoliberal economics to Sri Lanka
and squashing left opposition by any means necessary. This project, as has
been the case elsewhere, needed not democracy but “political will,” which
President Jayewardene supplied in abundance as he ruled with an iron fist by
invoking the infamous Prevention of Terrorism Act.
The PTA also proved handy in attending to a couple of other matters:
the Tamil Tigers fighting for a separate state carved out of the northern and
eastern regions of Sri Lanka; and the second insurrection of the People’s
Liberation Front (JVP) in the South that resulted in fifty thousand to eighty
thousand extra-judicial killings, mostly by the state.
Given the “Marxist” label attached to the JVP militants, no audible outcry
about their liquidation emerged from the “international community”
concerned with human rights. Instead, Jayewardene was feted in Washington
by Ronald Reagan and praised as an example for the rest of the Cold War
world; a suitably self-orientalized Yankee Dickie returned the favor by gifting
the Gipper a Sri Lankan baby elephant on the White House lawn.
The office of the executive president — to which prominent Marxists such as
Dr Colvin R. de Silva vehemently objected in the 1970s — drew no
memorable ire from liberal Colomboans, mostly allied with Jayewardena and
his political progenies, until it was occupied in 1994 by the more nominally
social-democratic and avowedly majoritarian-nationalist SLFP, after
seventeen years of UNP rule marked by what Edmund Burke would readily
have called Terror (“Bheeshanaya”). But the uneven development of
neoliberalism in Sri Lanka was accompanied by a rise of virulent nationalism,
both of the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority, which drastically
reduced the scope for political solutions to Sri Lanka’s increasingly violent
ethnic conflict.
Under these circumstances, no Sri Lankan president since 1978 from either of
the two main national parties seriously contemplated abolishing the executive
presidency, least of all Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose Eighteenth Amendment to
the constitution in 2010 got rid of the two-term limit on the most powerful
office of the country. To be sure, it was he who deployed its full force more
effectively than any other incumbent, to militarily defeat the Tamil Tigers in
2009, amid allegations of alarming numbers of Tamil civilian deaths in the
final stages of war, subsequently reported to be in the region of forty thousand
or more according to UN and other incriminating — and disputed —
estimates.
Influential efforts have been and still are under way to hold accountable those
responsible for such deaths and disappearances, both internationally and in
Sri Lanka, supported by the Tamil diaspora and NGOs. These, however,
played only a marginal role in Rajapaksa’s surprise defeat in the 2015
presidential election, after he had won a second term in 2010 by easily
prevailing over the challenge mounted by his former army commander
General Sarath Fonseka, who was recruited to run as the common opposition
candidate with UNP support because Wickremesinghe knew he had no
chance.
Having won the war, the Rajapaksa regime shot itself in the head. Drenched
with power, and with an opposition in tatters, it squandered the opportunity
to reach an agreeable political settlement with minority communities. Instead
of sublating majoritarian nationalism, moreover, it encouraged the most
deplorable elements of extreme Sinhala-Buddhist ideology such as the Bodu
Bala Sena to run riot —adding to its postwar repertoire a series of
Islamaphobic pogroms against the Muslim community.
Enamored with modernization, the Rajapaksas viewed the ethnic problem not
as political but economic — one that could be solved by development, on the
basis of large-scale infrastructure projects involving late-capitalist highways,
airports, ports, and Haussmannian urban planning. While all that no doubt
buttressed unprecedented GDP growth, thanks to special contributions from
China, the expected trickle-down to the masses fell well below expectations,
especially in the North and the East, amid impatient cries of corruption —
amplified by the regime’s nepotistic surplus.
It was not radically different from previous UNP governments in handling
dissenting views, but compared to Jayewardene’s tactics in the pre-Internet
era of two TV channels, the Rajapaksa regime’s efforts to control public
opinion had far more limited — and negative — effect. With news of media
repression appearing all over the media, the objective conditions and the
subjective timing for Rajapaksa’s defeat by Sirisena on January 8, 2015 were
set mostly by the president himself and his astrologer.
So it was Rajapaksa who dictated the script for the “good governance”
manifesto of Sirisena’s election campaign orchestrated by the UNP,
unwittingly enabling Wickremesinghe to plot his own “constitutional coup” to
assume power by way of the Nineteenth Amendment while branding it as an
exercise in democracy. The electoral calculus of Sirisena’s presidential
campaign was straightforward: to win a sufficient minority of the disaffected
Sinhala majority vote, together with virtually the entire minority vote
comprehensively alienated by the Rajapaksa regime.
It worked, arithmetically. Logically, however, astounding political amnesia
was required to think that Wickremesinghe and his cabal would deliver on
their promise of “good governance,” given their track record. It is unlikely
that a politician of Sirisena’s experience really believed the “good
governance” discourse to begin with; it is more likely that he saw in it the
opportunity for presidency unlikely to arise for him from within the nepotistic
Rajapaksa clan.
Yet he may have conjectured plausibly — with a majority of the voters — that
the worst of “good governance” would be better than the best of Mahinda
Chinthanaya. In the definitive rejection of that hypothesis following the Bond
Scam, local government elections and other misdeeds — in conjunction with
Sirisena’s own ambitions for a second term — lay the origins of the crisis.
Whereas the Supreme Court resolved the crisis by judicial fiat, it was Sirisena
who acted out its political denouement. Upon Wickremesinghe’s
unceremonious re-appointment as prime minister behind closed doors at the
presidential secretariat, the crème de la crème of the new government were
assembled around a conference table. There, seated at the head, with Prime
Minister Wickremesinghe immediately to his right, President Sirisena
delivered a forty-minute lecture that will be etched in memories of Sri Lankan
politics.
Speaking without notes to ashen-faced power brokers, he rehearsed the orrery
of errors that was the “good governance” government since 2015, detailing the
proven and alleged crimes, and promising an extended version of all that and
more in his memoirs to be published in early 2019. Wickremesinghe in
particular was singled out for neoliberal economics, obstruction to justice, and
being out of touch with the culture and pulse of the people. Enunciated in
eloquent Sinhala, it sounded like a village schoolmaster admonishing an ill-
reputed gang of English-speaking Colombo kids caught with their pants
down.
Yet the final nail in the coffin of “good governance” may have been
hammered by the prime minister himself, by re-inviting to his new cabinet a
disgraced former finance minister, one centrally implicated in the bond scam
and forced to resign from his last cabinet appointment. Even diehard liberal
supporters of “good governance” are wondering: what kind of influence does
Ravi Karunanayake exert over Wickremesinghe in order to regain a
ministerial post, against every conceivable expectation?
In Sri Lanka now, the political class — and perhaps more worryingly, politics
itself — is roundly despised. With the betrayal of “good governance,”
progressive voters are scrambling for a choice in the forthcoming provincial
(overdue), presidential (2019/2020) and parliamentary elections (2020). The
responsibility for this state of affairs lies not solely with the CEOs of “good
governance.”
Also questionable is the wisdom of the liberal intelligentsia that lined up —
gullibly or hypocritically — behind Wickremesinghe’s power trip. True,
honorable egalitarian spirits were present in the liberal protest against the
Rajapaksa regime, even in Colombo. But not even vulgar Hegelian
intelligence is needed to see how it served in reality as no more than the ruse
of robber baron reason. Its ideologues would have done better to note that
without addressing the pernicious Sri Lankan fusion of feudalism in politics
and neoliberalism in economics, the “good governance” project was from the
start as good as dead.
The Chinese Communist Party has always been far more democratic in its
internal operations than the archaic UNP under anyone, and the record of
other traditional parties is not better. No reform in Sri Lankan party-political
monoculture is imaginable without a revolution in the constitution of political
parties, which is evidently beyond the brains of the authors — the present
government and its NGO subcontractors — of the promised Twentieth
Amendment.
From a left perspective, the dangers of the present conjuncture in Sri Lanka
are clear enough. These in essence are not different from those of other
countries with failed neoliberal projects, and ripe with conditions for right-
wing and xenophobic forces. The inability of political liberalism to address
them in Sri Lanka is also overdetermined by ethnic conflict and attendant
nationalisms.
Surveying this situation with characteristic élan, Dayan Jayatilleka, Sri
Lanka’s ambassador in Moscow and admirer of both Rajapaksa and Putin,
prescribes as the appropriate response to it a “left populism,” with a gracious
nod to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s reading of Antonio Gramsci’s
notion of the “national-popular.” How this is to be distinguished from the all
too prevalent nationalist-populism of his current political role models,
however, requires elaboration, along with sober reflection on the recent
trajectories of “left-populism” in Laclau’s home continent.
Approaching the same neoliberal dead-end from a quite different perspective,
Gunadasa Amarasekara, the most articulate advocate of “National Ideology”
(Jathika Chinthanaya) in Sri Lanka, has advanced the notion of a
“civilizational state” — the symbiosis of an “ethical life” and a state form —
as the necessary antidote, appropriating his key terms from Samuel
Huntington and Martin Jacques rather than Hegel.
In Civilizational State and Socialist Society, the Marxist political-
economist Sumanasiri Liyanage argues that Amarasekara’s conception could
usefully be historicized and actualized by way of dialectical critique, in
alignment with Gramsci’s theorization of the “integral state” as an
articulation of political society with civil society. While this contention, too,
needs to be properly differentiated from the hegemonic claims of majoritarian
nationalism, theoretical-political debates asking us to reread Gramsci offer an
immense improvement over the Colomboan discourse of dead but dominant
liberalism.
Better with than without Gramsci, then, the crimes of cosmopolitan Colombo
may be most rewardingly viewed from the provincial Tamil capital of Jaffna.
Especially pertinent in the context of what Jayatilleke announced on
Facebook as “our October Revolution” — before conceding that “we’ve lost
the battle but won the war” — are Ahilan Kadirgamar’s perspicuous
reflections from the North on the local government election. In a close reading
of election campaigns and results of a multitude of parties and independent
groups, he underlines the losses recorded in February 2018 by the TNA —
more adept at exchanging high-level favors with the UNP in parliament than
connecting to Northern grassroots — and the corresponding ascent of two
opposed tendencies.
One is the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), with its “virulent Tamil
nationalist politics” mirroring extremist Southern tendencies and even
welcoming them, as nothing nourishes one suicidal ethno-nationalism more
dependably than another. The other has emerged from “pockets of
progressive politics which have eschewed narrow Tamil nationalism,” by
engaging in impressive anti-caste mobilizations, social development initiatives,
and projects of economic democracy — under the auspices of Eelam People’s
Democratic Party (EPDP) and some who have broken away from it, the Social
Democratic Party of Tamils (SDPT), the New Democratic Marxist Leninist
Party (NDMLP), and a few independent groups.
In their theoretical visions beyond nationalism, democratic organizational
efforts, and local-electoral successes — matching or exceeding the much older
TNA in several electorates — Kadirgamar finds “hope to re-chart Tamil
politics.” What’s left of the Left in the South too would do well to follow the
example of these comrades — and the refreshing radicalism of Tamil estate
workers in the plantation sector of the Hill Country — rather than old
pyramids of patronage maintained by the political status quo.
For only a constellation of emancipatory left forces from the South as much as
the North, liberated from ethno-nationalist temptations and neoliberal
delusions, would be qualified to tell the ruling gang of Sri Lankan feudal lords
and liberal technocrats: “In the name of God, go!”
Posted by Thavam