Anura Kumara Dissanayake is now the ninth Executive President of Sri Lanka. He is the first Left-leaning Head of State the country has seen since 1970, and perhaps the first anti-establishment candidate elected to power since independence. With his victory, Sri Lanka follows a long line of countries, including those in South Asia and Latin America, where radical candidates have eaten into the stranglehold of elite politics.
Perhaps it’s embedded in our DNA, but every time the status quo gets ruptured, we in Sri Lanka tend to view the winning candidate as the outlier or the underdog. Judged against even that criterion, however, Dissanayake – ‘AKD’ to most Sri Lankans – has become the true outlier.
This was an election where all the dominant issues – from the economy to the state of politics itself – were fought along a simple, if reductionist, binary: continuity versus change, systemic versus anti-systemic. The electorate that went to the polls and voted for a member of a political dynasty in 2020 – Gotabaya Rajapaksa – now swung to the other side by looking beyond dynastic politics and lineages altogether.
The Western and Indian press have been predictable in their response. Almost all the major newspapers have described Dissanayake as a Marxist, a radical outsider who (presumably) wants to rupture the system completely.
The Economist asks: “How worried should Sri Lanka be about its ex-Marxist President?” and then claims that “he is not as bad as he sounds”. Yet for a candidate regularly vilified, sometimes irrationally so, for being a communist and an out-of-step Left-winger by the Opposition and sections of the press, he has been surprisingly moderate, and nonplussed, in his first few days in office.
Perhaps the media hasn’t caught up to who Dissanayake is or what he represents. But then, neither have we.
Stumping its critics
The National People’s Power (NPP) generated quite a lot of hysteria in the last few weeks before the election. Much of this was driven by the then Government, but also the Opposition. In the papers and online, on social media and offline, MPs and relatives of MPs made the most outrageous claims about the party and what it supposedly stood for.
Going by some of their remarks, the NPP would rescind the country’s agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) upon coming to power, it would nationalise businesses, and end private education. These claims weren’t made by local commentators only: at least one pundit claimed that an AKD victory would steer Sri Lanka away from India into China’s orbit.
All this was, of course, unsurprising. What’s surprising is how quickly the NPP has stumped its critics. Not that the party didn’t merit some of the bad press it got. Even supporters of the party contended that it wasn’t doing enough with minority voters. If election results are a good barometer of this, the party fared less successfully in the north and east.
Yet after assuming the presidency, AKD has done much to reinforce his party’s shift to the Centre. Here it has managed to make an important distinction between the establishment and the system. It is anti-establishment, yes, but not anti-system.
This too is unsurprising. The NPP is a classic example of a revolutionary party that moved towards the Centre after entering parliament. We have seen such developments in Latin America as well. Parties that are revolutionary prefer working outside the electoral system when they are excluded from that system.
In this election cycle as in others in Sri Lanka, parties with a parliamentary presence emphasised the same things, including engagement with the IMF and the country’s multilateral creditors. In his first address to the nation, not surprisingly, AKD reflected on the need to stabilise the economy.
The road ahead
Meanwhile, ‘experts’ who predict Sri Lanka edging to Beijing may be putting the cart before the horse. As Ramindu Perera has pointed out in a recent article, articulate though its anti-Indian rhetoric was, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s (JVP) opposition to Indian intervention was conditioned by historical factors. The fact that New Delhi invited the NPP and Dissanayake earlier this year showed that even India had come to terms with this.
The prospect of a Left-wing party riding to power on the back of a Right-wing Government was palpably real: no government that implemented austerity on its people, even at the supposed behest of the IMF, would survive an election. Both New Delhi and Beijing came to terms with this.
The country’s Prime Minister, Harini Amarasuriya – the first elected woman Prime Minister not from a political dynasty – has been unequivocal about what Sri Lanka’s foreign policy should be. In an interview before the election, she pointed out that the island had a lot to learn from countries like China but also noted that the culture of rent-seeking, graft, and aggrandisement that had been a hallmark of infrastructure projects should end.
To be sure, the NPP has a lot of homework to do. It must acknowledge where it failed with certain electorates, in the north and east, and ensure it does not take its victories elsewhere as a licence for complacency.
The NPP has had an interesting if not intriguing relationship with minorities, especially Tamils. It remains to be seen what an NPP government would do over, say, forced disappearances during the civil war. It should take concrete steps to reach out to Tamil people: to give one example, it should decriminalise the memorialisation of the dead in the north.
These are small steps, but if they are enforced, the NPP can truly achieve that break from the past for which it has campaigned for years if not decades.
(The writer is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific-focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk)