There is a section of the liberal media and intelligentsia that struggles to analyse the Gotabaya Rajapaksa-Pohottuwa phenomenon in its entirety, often focusing entirely on the ethno-religious element of the election campaign, its rhetoric, and the spectre of political ‘bhikkhus’ marching in unison with a southern political elite. 

The intertwining of the Buddhist establishment and Sri Lanka’s political elites is not a recent relationship, from Buddharakkitha Thera and Somarama Thera to the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) all the way up to the comments by Asgiriya Chapter Deputy Chief Incumbent Ven. Vendaruwe Upali Thera at an almsgiving to mark President Gotabaya Rajapaksas’s birthday in 2019, which referenced the need for Hitler-esque military rule to “build the country”. 

The context for the size and manner of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa victory at both the presidential polls and then the General Election cannot be understated:

1. Easter bombings and intelligence failures leading up to the attacks

2. The subsequent media exposure revealing the Arabisation of parts of the Eastern Province

3. Deterioration of material living conditions of Sri Lankans amidst a stagnant economy

4. The portrayal of corruption charges as political witch-hunts and the inability to successfully prosecute major cases of corruption

5. Co-sponsorship of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution that called for foreign judges as part of a local accountability mechanism

6. Corruption scandals such as the bond scam and the long-term lease of the Hambantota Port to a Chinese entity

Ethno-fascism was simply one component of the attraction while it also coincided perfectly with the sociopolitical moment the nation was in – reeling from multiple terrorist attacks from a new threat supposedly emanating from a hitherto peaceful minority. The resulting insecurity was only compounded by the deterioration of economic conditions.

Any political calculation that analyses the Gotabaya/Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) victory as being primarily driven by ethno-religious ultra-nationalism will be superficial and any commentary that confuses or conflates a broad left-of-centre nationalist movement with religious fascism and racism is frankly misguided. 

Sri Lankan political commentary must learn to recognise the context behind this Sri Lankan tendency towards ethnic majoritarianism and reconcile itself to both the shortcomings and inabilities of various oppositional elements over the years to offer an attractive alternative. An alternative that is willing to negotiate with the majoritarian polity instead of simply casting aside a sizeable portion as prejudiced undesirables – a Hillary-esque “basket of deplorables” clinging to Obama’s “guns and religion”.

A liberal analysis

Uvin Dissanayake, writing in Groundviews in the aftermath of the Gotabaya victory of 2019, outlines the liberal analysis of the victory as a “result of ethnic majoritarianism on the part of his mostly Sinhalese voter base”. However, just take a look at what might reasonably be considered the most liberal of electorates – the Colombo District. 

The United National Party (UNP) under the Ranil-Maithri axis clinched the populous district comfortably, but fast forward to the 2020 General Election, where the picture would change dramatically. Traditional UNP strongholds such as Colombo Central, North, West, and East were victories for the newly-formed Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), but with far slimmer margins than envisaged. Meanwhile, other divisions such as Kolonnawa, Moratuwa, and Ratmalana shifted towards the SLPP. 

As much as the Gotabaya movement was branded ethnic nationalist and with no small amount of justification, there was certainly a larger than-expected minority base that voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa and even for parties connected to the SLPP. The Muslim community in particular was heavily patronised by the SLPP establishment and the elevation of President’s Counsel Ali Sabry as a prominent surrogate on the campaign trail was largely successful. 

Sabry stated during the campaign that some 35% of the Muslim community was in support of the Gotabaya project and that it was his aim to increase this base to over 50%. At a 2019 event at the Shangri-La Hotel organised by the National Muslim Collective Forum, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was himself bemused by Sabry’s 35% estimate, claiming that the number might be closer to 65%. 

These delusions of grandeur cannot hide the fact that Muslim leaders from former Colombo Mayor A.J.M. Muzammil to Moulvi Rizwan Saudi and Abdul Raheem of the Tamil Muslim National Alliance (TMNA) to Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) MPs Hasen Ali and Basheer Segu Dawood and many more pledged their support to the Gotabaya candidacy. 

Yes, Ven. Vendaruwe Upali Thera did quite literally link the Gotabaya presidency to a ‘Buddhist Order’ but as Ahilan Kadirgamar noted in The Hindu, it was “perhaps lower- and middle-class economic disenchantment and youth disillusionment that ensured a mass vote” for Gotabaya Rajapaksa. 

As Dissanayake notes in Groundviews, “articulations of the standard ethnic majoritarian account of Gotabaya’s victory seem to underplay the extent to which the Yahapalanaya Government failed to repay the faith that was put in it,” rejecting the “explanation which frames the result as a simple function of the racism of voters”.

The partitioning of the Aragalaya

A recent thought-provoking piece by Tisaranee Gunasekara titled ‘Saffron, Kurahan, Red or Green?’ considers what the future might hold for Sri Lanka regarding the various realignments between political parties in search for a working majority and how ethno-religious factors will play into the Sri Lankan electoral dynamic in this post-Aragalaya era. Here, there are some criticisms of the foundations of the narrative of the Aragalaya: “In those early days, the Aragalaya was not only non-party, it was also secular,” notes Gunasekara, referring to an “initial idealistic phase of the Aragalaya”.

The partitioning of the Aragalaya is interesting and follows a specific mainstream media narrative that considers two distinct phases, one idealistic and the other implicitly less idealistic, cynical perhaps.

The Aragalaya is a catch-all term, intentionally broad and all-encompassing. It should not be utilised to describe any part of the movement in isolation – not the thousands that were deemed violent for occupying the Presidential Secretariat or those who marched to Parliament on 9 July, and certainly not the small groups of community members that gathered once a day for a few hours at a roadside near their neighbourhoods with signboards and chants. 

The Aragalaya is really only useful to define a broad group of Sri Lankans that was against the prevailing status quo and Rajapaksa rule, which generated and dominated this status quo. Further, to define the movement as having two distinct phases confuses the Aragalaya for a monolith controlled by a centre. In that sense, there are different groupings within the Aragalaya and this is perhaps the only way to really analyse the phenomenon with any degree of nuance. 

It is my contention that what is described above as the idealistic, non-party Aragalaya was a reaction to the Pohottuwa-led economic debacle – a physical embodiment of the anti-Rajapaksa movement, it was a desperate scream for accountability. This explains why the mass protests lost their strength in numbers once Gotabaya Rajapaksa left office as the last of the Rajapaksas in Executive positions and Cabinet posts. 

In some sense, the perceived idealism was really an affirmation of the majority’s rejection of the Rajapaksa power centre – it was a broad collective that pulled together the various moving parts of political organisations, civil society, and activist groups as well as the many millions of Sri Lankans who felt as though they had been duped and exploited. 

Whatever movements and groups that are now being labelled with the Aragalaya tag are not splinters of a larger Aragalaya but the constituents that made up the aforementioned ‘idealistic’ Aragalaya. The perceived splinter is the inability of any single constituency to accede to the leadership of the Aragalaya as a whole. 

The establishment and its media surrogates are attempting to, and have to some extent succeeded in branding the Aragalaya’s past with some version of an attempted violent Marxist overthrow of the system and capture of the State. 

In reality, the most common refrain from within the Aragalaya with the largest subscription beyond the anti-Rajapaksa track was the call for early elections. Indeed, anyone who was serious about the Aragalaya has called for early elections to cut short the SLPP’s parliamentary term and reconstitute the Legislature. This is the only real and universal rallying cry, the only forward movement that has a broad and significant following. 

The other means of separating one phase of the Aragalaya from another is to describe the initial Aragalaya as being secular in nature. However, the Aragalaya did not begin with protests around GotaGoGama (GGG) and the blindfolding of the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike statue, as poignant as those moments were. The real struggle was born in rural Sri Lanka and spawned from the villages. 

The earliest groups of no more than 30-40 Sri Lankans who pushed back against various State institutions around the country were usually working alongside local clergy. This should not perhaps render any protest less idealistic – religious institutions are very much entrenched in Sri Lankan lives and are often conduits of local consensus. 

‘Temple-based neo-fascist movement’

Elsewhere in the same piece, Gunasekara notes that “populism’s obituary is ever premature,” referring to the uncomfortably narrow defeat of the authoritarian populism of Bolsonaro by Brazil’s own version of a Bernie Sanders – newly-elected President Lula da Silva. The reference to authoritarian populism as a “new normal, something democracies must learn to manage,” taken together with an analysis of the electoral origins of the Gotabaya administration is an extremely interesting dynamic. 

Firstly, it must be said that while everyone from Bolsonaro to Trump and Italy’s new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is considered authoritarians, their political campaigns, policies, and overtures are explicitly cloaked in socioeconomic populism. This should not in itself render populism derelict, far from it; political parties have an opportunity to appeal to a large portion of this base if only they were willing to absorb some portion of the populist rhetoric instead of disregarding the entire project. One would hope that populism’s obituary is indeed premature and indefinitely so.

Perhaps the main contention is that the “break-up of the UNP in early 2020 was a key causative factor of the current disaster. Had the UNP faced the election as a single party, the Rajapaksas would not have gained a nearly two-thirds majority… and the validation conferred by it.” The break-up of the UNP as a causative factor in Gotabaya’s victory ignores the context of that election – would the margin be different had part of the UNP not broken away to form the SJB? This is not the best way to phrase this question, it might even be the wrong question entirely. 

What if the SJB had not split from the UNP – would the UNP have performed any better than it did? To answer this, one must be clear as to why the UNP failed so miserably with Ranil Wickremesinghe at its helm, even without a number of front-benchers. The answer can be found in the election results that showed a clear rejection of the UNP’s political establishment in favour of the breakaway group led by Sajith Premadasa. 

The elephant in the room has always been the deeply ingrained and perpetual unpopularity of Wickremesinghe and his many failures as the lead protagonist of Yahapalanaya. The question should assess why Premadasa and the company felt compelled to make the riskiest of political gambits to contest separately under a new party and to build a grassroots organisation from scratch to challenge the SLPP juggernaut. Wickremesinghe was a spent political force, poisonous to any alliance with hopes of a majority. 

It is thus strange that Gunasekara would call for a convergence of the SJB and the UNP, ostensibly once more under the leadership of President Wickremesinghe. It also appears that the President has rather definitely set his stall out with the ‘authoritarian populists,’ representing a marriage of two extremely unpopular and politically bankrupt establishments. 

At this juncture, it is important to remind voters of a speech in Parliament by Prime Minister Wickremesinghe in 2016, which threatened to expose the “Rajapaksas’ temple-based neo-fascist movement,” saying, “What happened at the Abhayarama yesterday? Some 20-30 people came there… We have information about the Abhayarama discussion... We are investigating these racist movements and in a couple of weeks more organisations will be revealed. We are ready to counter this.” 

While the UNP-SLPP partnership was not what some commentators had in mind, it is certainly what President Wickremesinghe had in mind – a convergence with the temple-based neo-fascist movement. 

Left inclinations 

The contention by Gunasekara that the “main differences between the UNP and the SJB are not political or ideological but personal; a sense of pique, thwarted ambitions” is also somewhat misplaced. While it is fair to state that Sajith Premadasa’s personal ambitions were blocked by the UNP Working Committee, those ambitions were hardly the sole reason for the split. Many UNP backbenchers accepted what the electorate had been telling them for the better part of three decades: Ranil Wickremesinghe does not have the faith of the wider electorate and has a history of being unable to build meaningful, sustainable coalitions. 

Finally, it is not a reconstituted UNP that has the opportunity to trounce the ‘ethnic majoritarian’ coalition; it is a reconstituted populism of the centre-left that holds the proverbial key. Sajith Premadasa has all the democratic-socialist/American New Deal inclinations necessary to form a broad-based coalition. 

For good measure, the SJB leadership even possesses the most popular elements of the UNP’s economic centre-right as well as those that were to the left of the Ranilist UNP. From MPs Kabir Hashim to Eran Wickramaratne, Dr. Harsha de Silva, Imthiaz Bakeer Markar, and Ranjith Madduma Bandara, the SJB already has a convergence from across the economic-political spectrum. In what political playbook would an SJB convergence with the UNP strengthen the former? 

In an environment where food inflation is at 70%, 42% of children under the age of five are malnourished, and basic medicines are impossible to procure, it should surprise no one that the wider electorate will reach for some form of populism. No political party or leader will be able to succeed in the near future by turning their nose up at populism. Instead, they must dive head first knowing that in a democracy, the rule is simple – give people what they want, or somebody else will. 

(The writer has over a decade of experience in the banking sector after completing a degree in accounting and finance. He has completed a Master’s in International Relations and is currently reading for a PhD at the University of Colombo. He is also a freelance writer and researcher and can be reached on email: kusumw@gmail.com and Twitter: @kusumw)