The Wickremesinghe government was unnerved by the huge attendance at NPP public rallies.
By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Dec 6 2024 – On 26 December 2004 a powerful Asian tsunami swept over many of Sri Lanka’s coastal provinces, killing thousands of people and wildlife, devastating habitats and even washing away a trainload of passengers far from the rail tracks.
Almost 20 years later, on November 14 this year, another tsunami struck, sweeping across the country in an unprecedented wave that mesmerised many of the 22 million population.
But this was a tsunami of a different kind. It took much of the nation by surprise, causing a tectonic shift in the country’s post-independence political landscape and traditional ways of governance as it dispensed with the corrupt old guard.
The November 14 parliamentary election uprooted the long surviving ruling class and the comprador capitalism of the old political parties that had dominated Sri Lanka’s politics since independence in 1948.
If the 2004 tsunami was geological and physical in nature, and the damage it wreaked was within the country, this one was essentially political and its impact was felt not only in neighbouring nations but far beyond, particularly in the western world, though for different reasons.
November’s election was won by a political alliance formed just a few years earlier, which swept aside Sri Lanka’s major parties that had dominated politics for over 60 years. And on its way to gaining power, it made history.
MAN OF THE SOIL: Anura Kumara Dissanayake
This is not only because the alliance won 159 seats, an unprecedented majority of over two-thirds of the seats in a 225-member legislature – the first time this has happened since the introduction of proportional representation decades ago.
Nor is it because it won 21 of the country’s 22 district constituencies; nor even because it was the first Sinhala-Buddhist party from the country’s south to win parliamentary seats in the predominantly minority-Tamil constituencies in the north, including the Tamil heartland of Jaffna, the east and the mainly Tamil plantation areas in the central hills, defeating long-established Tamil political parties that perpetuated Tamil nationalist politics.
This nascent election king-maker that made political history in November was a Left-leaning alliance of small political parties, trade unions, civil society organisations and activists named the National People’s Power (NPP). It threatened to oust the decaying and corruption-ridden politics of the past and implant an entirely new political and governance system.
Today, for the first time in its history, Sri Lanka has a government led solely by a Leftist alliance.
The NPP that emerged as a political party in 2019, led by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, (popularly called AKD), a member of one-time Marxist party Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP- People’s Liberation Front), which he had joined as a student, contested the presidential election that year but gained a paltry 3 per cent of the vote. The following year, the NPP managed to scrape together 3 seats in the 225-member legislature.
It was scornfully named by its rightist parliamentary opponents and critics as ‘3 per cent’ for its poor electoral showing at both elections, which swept the Rajapaksa clan into power, the country’s most powerful political family, with one sibling as president, another as prime minister and still another as finance minister.
Yet in a remarkable change of events that shook the country’s political establishment, a party that only five years earlier had been derided and dismissed as a minor nuisance has risen to the pinnacle of power.
The NPP’s opponents label them as violent Marxists
Its capturing of executive and legislative power with relative ease in an unforeseen peaceful democratic transformation has resonated in nearby countries, some of which face civil turmoil and upheavals at home.
It is this transmogrification of an alliance virtually discarded by voters five years earlier as a political nonentity which has reduced to virtually zero long surviving parties with seasoned leaders and politicians. When the nation awoke the next morning to the news, it seemed like a fairytale.
But history intervened between the elections of 2019 and 2024. This helped the NPP’s slowly gathering public support to transform the one-time Marxist party into a democratic socialist progressive political entity, despite the fact that the earlier JVP had been involved in armed insurrections, the second in the late 1980s, which was virtually forced on it by a pro-western rightist government determined to crush democratic dissent.
Although the JVP was the hardcore party at the centre of the now emerging NPP led by Dissanayake, a progressive socialist determined to transform Sri Lanka into a people-centred democracy, 20-odd other organisations that formed the NPP were more inclined to follow the Dissanayake ideology.
In 2022, public protests against the then Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency began to spread, due to his unbelievably incongruous and inconceivable policies, which led to shortages of food and domestic essentials like fuel. Mass protests erupted in Colombo and protestors camped opposite the presidential secretariat in their thousands for months.
It was a grand opportunity for the progressive democratic NPP, which has been calling for the abolition of the executive presidency and a return to the parliamentary system, to join the ‘Aragalaya’ protest movement and establish its credentials as a people’s movement determined to dispel the old order and build a new Sri Lanka.
Unable to quell the public protests, President Rajapaksa fled the country, having earlier appointed a political opponent but still one of the ruling class, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as prime minister. Wickremesinghe was later elected president by the Rajapaksa-family led parliamentary majority, as the constitution allowed it.
Wickremesinghe’s high-handed policies, backed by the military and police to crush public dissent, and his deal with the IMF that led to more austerity and increasing poverty, promising economic prosperity only in future years, drove the people increasingly to oppose his policies and authoritarianism.
Hailing from a remote village in rural Sri Lanka and from a poor family living in a hamlet, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, like many of his comrades from the JVP and later the NPP, is a genuine man of the soil, the first such leader Sri Lanka has ever had.
Having struggled to educate himself in village schools and later at a provincial government school, AKD nevertheless managed to enter university and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics – a rare achievement for a boy of his background.
Had President Wickremesinghe had an opportunity to postpone national elections, he would have done so, just as he did the local government elections during his interim presidency, fearing public defeat. But the constitution stood in his way.
Seeing the massive attendance at the NPP’s public rallies, the Wickremesinghe government, and others expecting victory at parliamentary elections, panicked. They started branding the NPP as Marxists and insurrectionists who had engaged in armed violence and were likely to do so again. They demonised the NPP and created a nightmare image of a country under an authoritarian regime.
But such attempts to scare-monger the Sri Lankan people and potential foreign investors failed, due to Sri Lanka’s important geopolitical position in the busy Indian Ocean.
Yet this has not stopped the NPP’s opponents labelling them as violent Marxists, even as they forget their own past running armed paramilitary groups responsible for the killing and torture of hundreds of civilians in the late 1980s.
Those who read some of the Indian media and western news reports will not forget how they came to name the NPP as the country’s Marxist government, and continue to do so. However, over 60 per cent of Sri Lankan voters turned their backs on these nightmare visions, whether they came from local political leaders and their loyal press, the Indian or western media, which was likely hoping for a return of pro-western politicians and the continuation of corrupt regimes.
They now fear that the NPP will pursue the corrupt and bring them to justice for robbing state assets, as it has promised to do.
While the NPP’s immediate priorities are to continue dealing with the IMF to rescue the economy and other domestic issues, foreign policy does not appear to be at the top of its list. But, caught between India and China as ever, major issues lie ahead in this regard, which the NPP cannot afford to ignore for long.
Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London
IPS UN Bureau
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