An Inflection Point in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka knows political turbulence. The island nation has survived, among other calamities, a twenty-five-year civil war, two insurrections, and pogroms. Yet the two-plus years leading to this past September’s presidential election were unprecedented even by these standards. 

The crisis began in the spring of 2022, when the country ran out of fuel, cooking gas, and milk. Soon ordinary life was unravelling: twelve-hour power cuts; nonfunctional schools, hospitals, factories, and offices; an inflation rate second only to that of Zimbabwe. Over 80 percent of the population struggled to find sufficient food, per a World Food Programme survey.“Without gas, without kerosene oil, we can’t do anything,” a part-time chauffer in Colombo lamented to Reuters. “Last option what? Without food we are going to die. That will happen, hundred percent.”

That spring of want gave way to a summer of fury. In July a popular uprising overthrew the main author of the crisis: the incumbent president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. At the 2019 presidential election, Rajapaksa had been the overwhelming choice of the majority Sinhala community. His impressive 52 percent of the national vote owed nothing to Tamils and Muslims, who make up 11 and 9 percent of the population. Rajapaksa inherited a lower-middle-income economy and bankrupted it in under three years via a bizarre policy concoction of tax cuts, money printing, and an overnight chemical fertilizer ban.

His successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, managed to curb runaway inflation, halve economic shrinking, and restore growth. But these achievements were marred by corruption scandals and poverty doubling. There were few public protests, but popular wrath churned underneath the seemingly placid waters.

This was the background against which Sri Lanka held its ninth presidential election on September 21. Two of the three frontrunners were from the ruling elite. The incumbent, Wickremesinghe, had served as prime minister six times; the opposition leader, Sajith Premadasa, was the son of a former president. The third candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, depicted himself as the ultimate outsider, representing ordinary Lankans denied their rightful place in the sun. 

Born in 1968 into a lower middle-class Sinhalese Buddhist family in the arid, underdeveloped district of Anuradhapura, Dissanayake joined the People’s Liberation Front (JVP) in 1987. The JVP, a self-identified Marxist-Leninist party, was then in the throes of its second armed rebellion against the state. Once the insurrection was defeated and the JVP returned to the peaceful mainstream, Dissanayake rose through its ranks, entering parliament in 2000. In 2019 he made his first presidential bid, representing the National People’s Power (NPP), a new coalition of twenty-one small organisations led by the JVP. The pluralist NPP was meant to widen his appeal beyond the JVP’s traditional lower-middle-class Sinhala base. The gambit failed; Dissanayake secured a paltry 3 percent of the vote. 

The crisis of 2022 changed the NPP’s fortunes. By the time this year’s election came, it was attracting broad swathes of the populace, from poor farmers and struggling informal sector workers to wealthy entrepreneurs, professionals, and retired military brass. This time, Dissanayake cruised to victory with 42 percent of the national vote. 

The NPP victory is an inflection point in Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history. For over seven decades two parties, the United National Party (UNP) and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), governed the country, alone or in alliance with smaller formations. (Since November 2019 the Sri Lanka People’s Party, an offshoot of the SLFP, has held the presidency and parliament.) The NPP campaigned on a “change” platform, promising a total reset of the political system. Delivering on that promise requires overcoming three Himalayan challenges: an economy with deep-rooted structural malaise; ethno-religious relations poisoned by decades of violence and discrimination; and a dysfunctional political system weighted down by an uber-powerful presidency. The problems are interrelated. Dissanayake’s ability to resolve one will depend on his capacity and willingness to grapple with the others.

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When Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) gained independence, it was among the most stable and advanced countries in the Third World. It emerged from British suzerainty peacefully, in sharp contrast to neighboring India. The British left behind a functioning tea planation economy, an excellent network of road and railways, and free health and free education systems. 

That head start was soon lost because of corruption, nepotism, and, most important, a series of attempts by postcolonial leaders to impose a Sinhala-Buddhist identity on a diverse society. Less than six months after independence, the UNP government enacted a law disenfranchising almost a million Malayaga (Upcountry) Tamils—descendants of indentured Tamil laborers that the British brought from India to work in tea plantations. The motive was partly electoral; in 1947 the community had voted overwhelmingly for left parties. 

In 1956 S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the founder of the SLFP, brought Buddhist monks into politics—they formed a political organization, the United Monk Front, which campaigned heavily for him—and won office on an explicitly Sinhala nationalist platform. He made Sinhala the sole official language; Tamil public servants had to pass a Sinhala competence exam to secure promotion and pay raises. When Tamil leaders protested, thugs attacked them just outside parliament. The first post-independence race riots followed, with Tamils as the main victims. 

Ethnic supremacism should have no place in Marxian politics. Yet the Lankan left has often embraced Sinhala nationalism. In mid 1960s the two major left parties—one Trotskyite, the other pro-Moscow—endorsed Sinhala Only policies and demonstrated against linguistic parity. By this time they were in a parliamentary alliance with the SLFP, which they categorized as “petty-bourgeois” or “national bourgeois” and thus a lesser evil than the “comprador bourgeois” UNP. Some more radical, younger leftists accepted this alliance, but others decried it as a betrayal of revolutionary ideals. 

Rohana Wijeweera, a twenty-two-year-old activist, belonged to the latter category. Expelled from Lumumba University in Moscow for supporting China, he returned home and formed the JVP in 1965. Though it self-identified as a proletarian party representing worker-peasant interests, most of its cadres belonged to the Sinhala-Buddhist rural petty bourgeoisie, especially educated but unemployed youth. 

Inspired by the Cuban revolution and Vietnam’s war of liberation, the JVP adopted a more combative ideology than the traditional left parties. Four of the “five classes” that were mandatory to attend for full membership located the party within the revolutionary currents sweeping across the Third World in the 1960s. They dealt with the crisis of capitalism, the failures of the left, the history of socialist revolutions, and the imperative of armed struggle. The fifth lecture, titled “Indian Expansionism,” exposed the JVP’s chauvinist roots; it described the Malayaga Tamils as witting or unwitting agents of Indian imperialism. 

In April 1971, less than a year after the SLFP-led United Front (UF) alliance came to power on a decisive mandate, the JVP launched an insurrection. Poorly armed guerrillas attacked police stations across the country and tried to capture government installations in the capital, Colombo. The attempt failed. The UF government banned the party, incarcerated its leaders, and killed tens of thousands of activists.

The insurrection sent shock waves through the political establishment, highlighting the need to alleviate the rising unemployment among Sinhala youth. Sluggish economic growth hampered job creation. In any case, most educated Sinhalas wanted public sector jobs with permanence and pensions. In response the government introduced a new quota system for university admissions that favored Sinhala over Tamil and rural over urban students. The intake of Tamil students, especially at the prestigious medical and engineering faculties, was drastically curtailed, impeding one of the few avenues of economic advancement open to them.

Ethnic relations deteriorated further in 1972, with a new constitution that turned the country into a fully sovereign republic. Tamil legislators backed complete independence from Britain but opposed the document’s Sinhala-supremacist clauses, such as re-enshrining Sinhala as the sole official language and making the state responsible for fostering Buddhism (only Sinhalese are Buddhists). The UF government rode roughshod over these objections. In 1976, despairing over their relegation to second-class status, Tamil political parties adopted a resolution calling for an independent state (Tamil Eelam) in the Tamil-majority Northern and Eastern provinces. 

The UF was voted out of power in 1977. Its policy of import-substitution had caused shortages, queues, and even mass hunger. (Public eateries were banned from serving rice on two days a week; citizens were forbidden from transporting paddy and rice without a permit.) Riding a wave of public anger, the UNP, led by J.R. Jayewardene, won the election in a landslide. In 1978 he introduced another constitution, replacing the country’s Westminster-style parliamentary system with an executive presidency. He didn’t conceal his endgame: “The only thing that a president cannot do,” he said, “is turn a man into a woman and vice versa.” Thereafter presidents had the authority to make judicial appointments and dissolve parliament, effectively placing them above the law. 

Jayewardene claimed that an executive presidency would bring about political stability and economic growth. It did anything but. Over ten years he amended his own constitution sixteen times. In 1977 he liberalized the economy by removing import controls, ending the shortages, while slashing consumer subsidies and other welfare measures. The growth rate shot up at first, as un- and under-utilized resources were made available, but the benefits barely trickled down to the bottom. Between 1977 and 1984, real wages deteriorated among all categories of workers while prices increased over 200 percent. By the middle of the decade, nearly a fifth of the population was unemployed; the bottom 50 percent were receiving only 12 percent of the gross national income. Then, as political turbulence increased, all economic growth turned sluggish. 

On July 23, 1983, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed thirteen soldiers on an army patrol—the most devastating militant attack up to that point. The dead bodies were flown to Colombo for a memorial ceremony at the country’s main cemetery. Rioting started there and spread across the country, as Sinhala mobs murdered Tamils and burned their properties. The police and the army gave the rioters free rein. Some ministers actively enabled the violence. The government put the death toll of Black July at three hundred, but independent sources (such as the UN) have claimed that around three thousand Tamils were killed.

Jayewardene indirectly blamed the violence on the Tamil victims. While the fires were still smoldering, he introduced a sixth amendment to the constitution, forbidding even the peaceful advocacy of separatism. Parliamentarians were compelled to take an oath on it; when members of the main Tamil party, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), refused, they were forced out of the legislature. This fatally weakened the democratic wing of the Tamil polity, effectively handing leadership of the separatist struggle to armed groups, including the LTTE. 

Before Black July, all militant groups were short of recruits, money, and external support. The nature and scale of the violence changed that. Young Tamils joined in large numbers and money poured in from the diaspora. India, already irked at Jayewardene for aligning with the United States and Pakistan, and pressured by its own Tamil citizens, began to train and arm the militants. What became known as the Eelam War began that year; soon militant groups controlled large parts of the Northern and Eastern provinces. 

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Black July had a catastrophic effect on the JVP. In 1977 Jayewardene had de-proscribed the party and released its jailed leaders, after which it entered the democratic mainstream—to the point that Wijeweera contested the 1982 presidential election, in which he got 4 percent of the vote. During this period, it dropped its chauvinist ideology, supporting Tamil peoples’ right to self-determination (though not total separation). 

Black July ended that nonviolent, non-racist trajectory. The JVP had played no part in the pogrom, but Jayewardene, partly to distract from his own culpability, blamed it along with two other left parties and banned all three. Forced back underground, the party abandoned its relatively internationalist position, deciding its political future lay with the Sinhala community. (It may also have been a factor that Tamil voters overlooked Wijeweera in the presidential election.) By 1985 the JVP had outflanked the Jayewardene administration on Sinhala supremacism, rejecting not just a political solution to the Tamil problem but denying the problem so much as existed. The next year Wijeweera secretly published a book, Solutions to the Eelam Struggle, blaming the US for instigating Tamil separatism as part of its Cold War strategy of fragmenting South Asia.

In 1987, with India threatening to overtly intervene in the civil war, Jayewardene agreed to a cease-fire. Under the Indo-Lanka Accord, an Indian peacekeeping force (IPKF) was deployed in the Tamil North and East and the constitution was amended to introduce what it called provincial devolution, providing a degree of self-rule to Tamils in areas like education, health, and welfare. 

The JVP rejected the accord. It declared that provincial councils would divide Sri Lanka, called the IPKF an army of occupation, and launched a “war of liberation” against both. In reality, they targeted not Indian soldiers but members of the governing party, leftists backing devolution, and ordinary citizens violating “patriotic” orders. The JVP, for instance, would declare impromptu curfews, after which everything was expected to shut down for the day. The government would countermand. As a result, private offices would be closed while public offices stayed open. 

This was the party Dissanayake joined as a twenty-year-old. He would function as an underground activist until the insurrection ended in November 1989 with the capture and killing of the top leadership. President Ranasinghe Premadasa had de-proscribed the JVP the earlier that year in the hope of commencing negotiations—only for the party to refuse. By 1994, however, it was once again immersed in democratic politics. In 2004 it joined President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s government as a junior partner. Dissanayake served as minister of agriculture until the JVP left the government in protest against Kumaratunga’s diplomatic overtures to the LTTE. 

The Eelam War had, meanwhile, resumed in 1990, by which point the LTTE had driven out or subsumed all other Tamil groups and the Indian forces had left. Another cease-fire came and went in 1994. A third went into effect in 2002, with Scandinavian monitoring. It lasted four years, during which time the LTTE built a parallel administration, murdering its political opponents—and many civilians—along the way. 

In 2005 Kumaratunga retired after two presidential terms. The SLFP picked Mahinda Rajapaksa, a Sinhala hardliner, as its candidate for the next presidential election. The JVP backed Rajapaksa fully, playing a major part in his victory over the UNP’s Ranil Wickremesinghe, the “peace” candidate. Over the next months, the JVP urged Rajapaksa to abrogate the cease-fire; when the war resumed in 2006, the party backed it enthusiastically. Even today it claims credit for “pushing” Rajapaksa into resuming the war. 

In May 2009 Mahinda, together with his younger brother, Gotabaya—an army officer of twenty years’ standing who migrated to the US upon early retirement, returning in 2005 to become secretary to the ministry of defence—decimated the LTTE, ending the war. The cost of the victory was dear: according to a UN panel, as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final two years of the conflict.

By then the JVP was back in the opposition; its alliance with the Rajapaksas had come to a bickering end in 2008. As the Rajapaksas grew more popular among Sinhala voters the JVP’s electoral base eroded. The party suffered two splits, losing its best orator, Wimal Weerawansa, and most talented organizer, Kumar Gunaratnam, in the process. The JVP seemed to be going down the same path as the traditional left: into political oblivion.

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When Gotabaya ran for office in 2019, he campaigned on his record of vanquishing the LTTE. Whatever his successes at coordinating the war effort, he abjectly failed in managing the state. He cut taxes, increased spending, and printed trillions of rupees to bridge the gap. During the pandemic, he reduced expenditure on health and increased it for the military. In 2021 he unilaterally imposed a chemical fertilizer ban that drove the agriculture sector to near breakdown, leading the generally non-political paddy farmers to protest: they burned effigies of Gotabaya and Mahinda. 

By April 2022 usable foreign reserves were down to “near zero levels,” per the treasury, not enough to pay for a single shipment of fuel or cooking gas. Normal life was rendered impossible by twelve-hour power cuts and five-day queues for essentials. The government shut down schools. Farmers and fishermen couldn’t work and hospitals ran out of basic drugs. In a surreal move, public officials were given Friday off to grow food at home.

While opposition parties scrambled to respond, people took to the streets demanding “Gota go home!” On April 3, when a group of activists called online for a day of mass protest, the government imposed a curfew. In a Sri Lankan first, hundreds of thousands of people broke it: entire families, including grandparents, demonstrated peacefully, many holding handmade placards. This act of civil disobedience launched a popular resistance movement known as the Aragalaya, or struggle. 

The following month, anti-government rioting broke out after pro-Rajapaksa thugs attacked protesters encamped outside the president’s office. The government resigned. With no opposition politician willing to step into the breach, Gotabaya appointed the UNP’s longtime leader, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as prime minister. His ascent suggested the unprecedented nature of the crisis. At the 2020 legislative election, the grand old party of Lankan politics had failed to win a single constituency; it got allocated one seat based on its national vote share, for which Wickremesinghe nominated himself. 

The crisis worsened. By the first week of July, fourteen Lankans had died in queues. The protesters gave Gotabaya time until July 8 to “go home.” He ignored the popular ultimatum, busy with moves to replace Wickremesinghe with Dhammika Perera, a businessman closely allied with the Rajapaksa family. On July 9 angry Lankans stormed the president’s house. Gotabaya escaped in haste, using an underground tunnel, a ship, and finally, a military plane. When he resigned from Singapore, the Rajapaksa family allegedly helped Wickremesinghe into the presidency in return for his protection. 

As president, Wickremesinghe rationalised fuel distribution and improved the management of the state-owned cooking gas and electricity companies. By December 2022 queues were over, power cuts a fading memory, tourism was booming, and a kind of normalcy had returned. Yet the underlying structural problems remained. After declaring bankruptcy in April 2022, Sri Lanka had to restructure its debt as a precondition for accessing fresh credit. In March 2023 Wickremesinghe signed an IMF bailout package, giving some respite to the cash-strapped economy. But the attached conditionalities—especially steep hikes in VAT and utility rates—pulverised low-income earners. Poverty doubled in two years; around a million electricity lines were disconnected in 2023 alone (this in a country of 22 million people). By 2024 around a quarter of Lankans were food insecure. Those who could migrate did: population growth dipped into negatives. 

Corruption scandals exacerbated the popular rage at falling living conditions. In February a senior minister, Keheliya Rambukwella, was arrested for allegedly purchasing counterfeit drugs for public hospitals, causing four deaths (the case is ongoing). He was later also accused of having been involved in purchasing eyedrops for use in post-cataract surgery; by then, according to the Daily FT, ten patients had lost their eyesight permanently as a result. The political class’s lavish privileges were another sore point. In 2023, amid bankruptcy, the country spent almost twice as much on maintaining four former presidents and the widow of a fifth as it had the previous year. According to The Daily Mirror, Mahinda renovated his official residence at the public’s expense, with a bill of over $2 million. 

During the early days of the Aragalaya, three young people made an eighty-mile solidarity march from the city of Kandy to the main protest encampment in Colombo. “We managed not because of the strength of our bodies but because of the strength of our minds,” one marcher told the media. “We are saying leave us a country where we can live in freedom and manage with the income we earn through our work.” The NPP courted such young voters—especially the more than a million of them who were voting for the first time.

Besides standard constituencies (women, students, monks, workers, and farmers), the NPP also reached out to retired military and police personnel, retired bureaucrats, professionals, and small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs. Its attractive social media ads appealed to such diverse groups as differently abled people, dog lovers, and professionals leaving the country for greener pastures. Their messaging was unusual, even culturally subversive: one ad showed a young couple watching a an NPP video and clinking champagne glasses. It established the party as new and fresh, and its competitors as moribund. 

The NPP focused on the fallout of the economic crisis, connecting the incompetence and criminality of the state and the plight of the people. “You’ve tried everyone else and failed,” Dissanayake told voters throughout the campaign. “Give us a chance and see,” was Dissanayake’s main argument to the voters. By August 72 percent of Lankans felt that the country was heading in the wrong direction; only 8 percent thought the opposite. Many saw the election as a chance to settle accounts. For such voters, angry at the status quo, despairing of the future, and fed up the elite, Dissanayake was an option worth trying.

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Dissanayake has led the JVP since 2014. Like many other party notables, he came of age between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. These events left a curious imprint on their political convictions. On International Workers Day, they march under pictures of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Yet the JVP, like the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties, retains little of the ideology of Marxian socialism. The hammer and sickle flies outside the party’s modernist headquarters, but the new government has vowed to honor not only Wickremesinghe’s IMF deal but also an agreement he made in September with a group of International Sovereign Bond (ISB) holders. “While Dissanayake’s election constitutes a major shift in Sri Lanka’s political landscape,” Moody’s Ratings remarked a few days into the new presidency, “we believe the broad appetite for reform will remain intact.” The Colombo Stock Exchange concurred with a bullish spell. Days after his investiture, Dissanayake appointed the head of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the oldest business association, as one of two special economic advisors. 

Dissanayake has promised to build a Sri Lankan nation in which all ethnic and religious communities are equal partners. But he seems unwilling to address, let alone resolve, the ethnic conundrum. Though the JVP no longer opposes provincial devolution, it has not articulated a solution to the minority question, limiting itself to anodyne remarks about equality, solidarity, and justice. The NPP as a whole is more pluralist, but its main constituent, the JVP, has just one Tamil and no Muslims in its central committee. 

Most of Jayewardene’s successors came to office pledging to abolish the presidential system, only to forget the promise once they were installed. Dissanayake too has made the same pledge. If he tries to bring in a new constitution, Tamils would ask for greater devolution. But many Sinhalese would find that demand unacceptable, as would two pillars of the NPP: the military, whose members are mostly Sinhala Buddhist, and the association of Buddhist monks, known as the Sangha. Both of those constituencies are seen as—and see themselves as—protectors of Sinhala-Buddhist interests; in the last several years, they have spearheaded attempts to use “Buddhist” archaeological sites to justify expanding Sinhala Buddhist settlements in the North and East. The chance of Dissanayake standing up to them is minimal.

A minor story about road closures demonstrates his dilemma. Days after his investiture, Dissanayake reopened two roads next to the President’s house in Colombo, which had been closed to the public since 1996, when a LTTE suicide bomber struck in the vicinity. A former Tamil parliamentarian hailed the decision and asked that the many closed roads in the North be reopened as well; the government has yet to respond. If the president is incapable of granting such a small request, will he be able to make major political concessions to Tamils or Muslims? 

Within forty-eight hours of being sworn in, Dissanayake dissolved the parliament. Legislative elections are scheduled for November 14. If the NPP secures a majority—a near certainty—he will have about two years to implement broader relief measures, including more subsidies and reductions in VAT and PAYE rates. Since a new act prevents the government from printing money at will, he will have to choose between cutting taxes on the rich and increasing welfare. Meanwhile, national debt is growing: in 2023 it rose by $16.6 billion, an increase of 21 percent. Dissanayake will also have to implement the rest of the IMF’s demands (including introducing a wealth tax and an inheritance tax), and reach an agreement with the remaining ISB holders, including Hamilton Reserve Bank, which has filed a lawsuit against Sri Lanka in an American court. 

One way of squaring the financial circle is to reduce the defense bill. Before the first JVP insurgency, Sri Lanka had a mostly ceremonial army with few guns and no fighting experience. But over the course of the civil war it was transformed into a heavily armed, gargantuan force, and military spending in has only increased in the postwar years. Today Sri Lanka is ahead of most developed countries in militarization, ranking forty-third in the Global Militarization Index (compared to eighty-third in the Social Progress Index). In 2022 its armed forces numbered 400,000. Tellingly, fifteen years after the war ended, most army divisions are located in the North. 

Even bankruptcy has made no difference. In the 2024 budget, defense was allocated almost twice much as education. Paradoxically, low pay and low pensions have compelled serving and retired soldiers to sneak out to join the Russia-Ukraine war—on both sides. Much of the money is spent on expensive military hardware, on privileges for upper rankers, and on building a Pentagon-style military headquarters in the administrative capital, Sri Jayawardenepura. (Construction is ongoing.) In 2015 Transparency International placed Sri Lanka in the “very high risk” category for corruption in the defense and security sectors. 

No previous administration dared to reduce military expenses for fear of being denounced, especially by the Sangha, as traitorous. In this regard, Dissanayake has an opportunity his predecessors did not. According to opinion polls, Lankans of all ethnicities and religions agree that military or police spending should not increase. If he is willing to brave the wrath of the military and the monks, he has a chance to pull the country away from the fiscal abyss. But if he squanders it and the economy nosedives again, popular unrest might well break out. The example of Gotabaya Rajapaksa—elected on a tidal wave of adulation in 2019 and driven out by the same people in 2022—haunts Sri Lanka’s halls of power. A precedent has been set. Dissanayake ignores it at his—and the country’s—peril.