Features

A strange paradox: Political stability in spite of circumambient crises

Published

4 years ago

2021/10/10

by Rajan Philips

Every crisis in Sri Lanka’s checkered history, both before and after independence, began and ended with a political crisis. More accurately, perhaps, every crisis got extended, for nothing ever ended except the war. Ironically, it is the Rajapaksas, who claim sole ownership for ending the war, that are now caught all ends up in all manner of crises. What is strange and paradoxical about their situation is that for all the crises that they are the primary cause of and are being resoundingly blamed for, their political positions are in no immediate danger.

There is no threat to the presidency of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. No one is even thinking of impeachment, let alone saying it. The SLPP government has a solid majority in parliament to ward off any no confidence motion (NCM). Not that anyone is looking like trying one. And the Samagi Jana Balawegaya will not risk a second setback after falling on their face when they tried an NCM against Minister Gammanpila over petroleum price hikes. Where there might be some reason for worry, for President Rajapaksa and the SLPP in parliament, is over prospects at the next elections. But elections are a full three years and more away, which are a long time in politics by any measure.

When government worked

The next three years are also going to be peppered with crises if what is going on now is any indication of what is going to follow. It is this juxtaposition of political stability and circumambient crises that renders the current situation strange and paradoxical. This is a uniquely unprecedented situation. In the past there was political instability, governments were elected and ejected, but the departments of government did their job like clockwork, unlike the broken clocks and daily alarms we now have for government agencies.

In the past there was always a political dimension and overtone to a serious crisis. The malaria health crisis in the 1930 became the baptismal fire for Sri Lanka’s left movement. The 1947 General Strike, Sri Lanka’s belated substitute for an independence struggle, hastened the departure of the Empire and the arrival of independence. Public outrage over food scarcity and prices precipitated the Great Hartal of 1953 and the resignation of a young Prime Minister (Dudley Senanayake) who had won a popular landslide victory barely a year earlier.

Three years later, in 1956, the blunderbuss government of Sir John Kotelawala was routed at the polls. The next eight years were years of tumults and crises – communal riots, labour strikes, the assassination of a Prime Minister, schools take-over, a failed army coup, Tamil satyagraha in the North, emergency rule and so on. There were three elections, four Prime Ministers, two centre-left coalition governments and several cabinet overhauls. Through it all, and to my point in this essay, the government worked.

The schools and hospitals were open. Children studied and played. The sick were attended to. Look where they are now. Trains and buses ran, though not like in Japan or Singapore, but infinitely better than now after 40 years of economic liberalization and privatization. Farmers and fishers, the largest of Lanka’s working populations, subsisted and produced. Colonial era plantations were past their productive peaks, but they were kept on a plateau through careful research and correct ministering. Now the bottoms are coming apart.

The farmers effortlessly straddled tradition and modernity, switching from the plough to the tractor, blending the organic and the inorganic, and reaching the elusive self-sufficiency in rice in the 1980s. There were middlemen in agriculture, but no mafia. No one executively told farmers, no more pohora, only manure. Until now. And no one apparently advised the current omnipotent executive that tea doesn’t grow on cow dung unless there is a cow for every bush.

For all its travails, the 1956 government introduced income tax and taxation became the staple source of government revenue. Until someone lamebrained in the current government decided that removing taxes is a shortcut to economic growth and bigger revenue. In one stroke, half a billion rupees of revenue were written off. Balance of payments and imports became chronic problems in the 1960s, but government after government kept managing them.

Foreign reserves began to be counted in terms of months of imports, but never in terms of weeks or days. No one ever thought there will come a day when a Sri Lankan government will run out of cash to import basic food and the new necessity of fuel. And after imposing the biggest import ban in history, this government actually ended up increasing the annual import bill. That is the record. Not even the most blinkered Rajapaksa apologist can pretend to not see the record for what it is.

Stability and Crisis

After two decades of government turnovers, electoral stability was realized for the first time between 1965 and 1970, when the third and the last Dudley Senanayake government lasted its full elected term. It was badly defeated in the 1970 election, but the UNP maintained its largest vote base despite the poor electoral returns. After 1970, electoral stability came to be more contrived than democratic.

The 1972 Constitution provided for a one-time extension of parliament by two years. Objectively, it should have been a defensible extension to make up for the time lost owing to the JVP insurrection. But the United Front government’s intentions were not pure, and the First Republican Constitution itself was arrogantly adopted as a proud government product to the exclusion of not only the UNP opposition but also the constitutionally sensitive Tamil Federal Party.

After lambasting the two-year extension of parliament from 1975 to 1977, JR Jayewardene went for broke and cancelled a whole election for the chicanery of a referendum in 1982. JRJ had already upended the country’s parliamentary system in the name of providing political stability. The outcome though was not political stability but electorally enduring governments.

Internal instability of governments has been a feature of Sri Lanka’s political history from 1947, if not from 1931. The difference before and after 1977 is that, before 1977 internal instabilities eventually brought down governments and precipitated elections. After 1977, governments lasted in spite of internal instability. More often than not, after 1977, presidents and governments have lasted in office much longer than they deserved to last. But there has been no political stability in spite of prolonged government tenures.

What President Jayewardene was planning to achieve by way of political stability, was to have the same party, obviously for him – the UNP — in power over several electoral terms, if not for ever. What he did not bargain for was that internal instability would arise within his Party (and his government) almost instantly over the position and powers of the Prime Minister in the new presidential system, and more persistently over presidential succession. As it turned out, the presidential system that was created to entrench the UNP in power ended up devouring the grand old United National Party itself.

What JRJ could not also have foreseen was how his constitutional experimentation would play out in the event of the SLFP returning to power with a younger Bandaranaike as President. True to form, as under the UNP presidential governments, internal political instability became a government problem for President Chandrika Kumaratunga. More so in her second term, and she was even forced to bow out earlier than she was planning to, and reluctantly left the family torch to be usurped by the newly arrived Mahinda Rajapaksa.

What JRJ most certainly could not have seen coming, at least in President Jayewardene’s view of the Sri Lankan society, was the arrival of the Rajapaksas out of nowhere. The now powerful brothers and their extensions were not only out of JRJ’s political radar, but were not even embryonic in the presidential order when it was newly set up. Whatever may have been their status in the 20th century, the Rajapaksa brothers have dominated Sri Lankan politics in the 21st century, and it would be correct to say that their dominance over the last two decades has no parallel in the politics of the last century.

There has never been an instance in Sri Lankan politics when so many brothers and sons and nephews have been part of the same kinship political apparatus. It is their kinship apparatus and their success in subordinating the state resources to kinship power that has made their hold on power internally stable. The 2014 defection of Maithripala Sirisena was an aberration that has only proved the rule, in that even after defeating Mahinda Rajapaksa in the presidential battle, Sirisena lost the war over the SLFP to the Rajapaksas. Whether there will be another defection to end the Gotabaya presidency three years from now, it is too early to speculate.

The more immediate question is how will the current contradictions between regime stability, on the one hand, and the plethora of crises – health, social and economic, on the other, play themselves out between now and the electoral reckoning more than three years from now? The traditional perspective is one of crisis heightening and potential confrontations between public protests and government forces. The government is far too entrenched to be knocked over by a single strike. Equally, the government is not in a position to permanently rule by force, suppressing protests.

Between these contending options, is there a role for the national parliament to play – to make the current regime change its ways, rather than the proverbial regime change? The 1972 Constitution exalted parliament, the National State Assembly, as the Supreme Instrument of State Power. The 1978 Constitution trashed that notion and introduced the notion of separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. But from day one of the 1978 constitution, the executive has been the dominant instrument of state power. It is time for parliament to restore its role as a co-equal branch of government. Is the current parliament capable of restoring itself? (To be continued).

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

24 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

24 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

24 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins