Features

JRJ’s 117th Birth Anniversary: Open Economy and Executive Presidency

Published

3 years ago

2023/09/24

by Rajan Philips

President Ranil Wickremesinghe interrupted his busy flight schedule between conferences to issue a commemorative message on September 17 to mark the 117th birth anniversary of President JR Jayewardene. I am not aware of any special significance associated with #117, nor can I remember Mr. Wickremesinghe issuing birth anniversary statements in the recent past.

What is special this year is that Ranil Wickremesinghe is the incumbent President. The first time in 35 years after President Jayewardene retired from office, someone politically and personally close to him happens to be Sri Lanka’s Executive President. President Jayewardene was not only the founding father of the executive presidency, but also the political godfather and avuncular mentor of Ranil Wickremesinghe. So, the latter’s commemoration of the former is both special and significant. We can appreciate that.

There is of course the little detail that Ranil Wickremesinghe is not a president elected by the people, but by their representatives in parliament. Mr. Wickremesinghe was not even elected as an MP in the last election. He is a double beneficiary of the National List scheme and the constitutional provision for interim presidents.

Some might see the irony in the backdoor path that brought Ranil Wickremesinghe to the high office in contrast to the electoral sweep that brought JRJ to power with a five-sixths majority in the 1977 elections. Others might see the smooth working of JRJ’s 1978 Constitution through the tumults and crises brought upon the country by GR, the infamous Seventh Executive President. Now we have in Ranil Wickremesinghe the Eighth Executive President and the first unelected one. The titles sound more monarchical than republican.

President Wickremesinghe knows full well the dire circumstances that brought him to power without an election. And he will do anything to deflect any blame that may be aimed at JR Jayewardene for the country’s current situation. So, Mr. Wickremesinghe sweepingly said in his message, as reported in the media, that “if Sri Lanka had been able to sustain the socio-economic reforms initiated by the late President in 1977, the nation would be a developed country today.” That is understandable even though it is easily refutable. Quite apart from the formality of argument, the material evidence over the last four decades will give the lie to Mr. Wickremesinghe’s assertion.

What is laughable is the claim that followed: “neighbouring countries like India, China and Vietnam, which transitioned from closed and socialist economic practices, had studied Jayewardene’s approach and prospered by adapting their policies to the changing times.

” This is as laughable as what President Jayewardene once said on a public occasion that the American freedom fighters at the Boston Tea Party must have been drinking tea imported from Sri Lanka for inspiration. Pieter Keuneman characteristically chimed in to remind everyone that there was no tea or coffee in Sri Lanka in 1773. The tea that was the cause of taxation protests in colonial America was imported from China by the East India Company.

JRJ’s Long Legacy

The serious truth of the matter is that President Jayewardene was able to launch his political and economic initiatives on the very morrow of his massive victory in 1977, expand and entrench his power immensely by transubstantiating himself from Prime Minister to President and extending the life of his tyrannical majority in parliament through the subterfuge of a referendum, and hold on to power for 12 long years. Power and longevity that should have been more than enough to permanently “sustain the socio-economic reforms” he initiated. But it didn’t.

It is a bit rich, therefore, for President Wickremesinghe to now suggest that Sri Lanka failed to sustain the reforms initiated by JRJ because of other factors that frustrated JRJ’s initiatives. The fact is that the seeds of unsustainability were in the reforms themselves – both in their content and in their implementation. It is historic comeuppance that Ranil Wickremesinghe should have been called upon to deal with the mess that is the long legacy of JR Jayewardene, even though the immediate trigger for it had arrived in the person of Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

What President Wickremesinghe is referring to as JRJ’s “socioeconomic reforms” are in fact two major initiatives, namely, the liberalization of the economy and the constitutional change that replaced Sri Lanka’s parliamentary system with a presidential system of government. There is a difference between the two which looks more significant in hindsight than it did then.

The difference is that there was no surprise about the economic liberalization program that JRJ implemented. The program was also an extension of traditional UNP policies that the country had grown accustomed to, including those who were opposed to them. The economic changes were much anticipated and were widely seen as an antidote to years of autarkic scarcity that preceded the 1977 elections. The election results showed the magnitude of resentment and the massive desire for change.

The constitutional changes centered on the presidential system were a different beast. The economic program did not require a presidential system for its implementation. There was nothing in the country’s objective conditions that warranted a shift from the parliamentary system to the presidential system. It was all JRJ’s idea, idiosyncratic and egotistical. He was its originator, advocate and champion.

Initially and for a long time there was no support for it even within the UNP, and the country at large couldn’t have cared a hoot about it. But after the death of Dudley Senanayake in 1973, JRJ was able to bring the party along to supporting his idea. With his leadership of the party consolidated and electoral victory assured, it was not at all difficult for him to weave the constitutional changes including the executive presidency into the UNP Manifesto. It would not have happened if Dudley Senanayake were alive in 1977.

After a landslide victory, the newly anointed cabinet ministers had neither the need nor the inclination to critically assess the pros and cons of the change from parliamentary system to presidential system. In any event, none of the ministers could have demurred or disagreed because their individual letters of resignation as MPs were all in the President’s pockets. What was a massive change was adopted with minimum scrutiny. The political purpose behind the constitutional changes would seem to have evolved during President Jayewardene’s long tenure.

This is evident from the frequency of self-serving and ad hominem (directed at people rather than positions) amendments to the constitution during JRJ’s tenure. The eventual purpose was to make the UNP the permanent governing party of the country. The whole scheme backfired because presidential ambitions of leading UNP ministers created intense rivalries within the party. These rivalries were exacerbated by the proportional representation and preferential voting schemes that created caste-based voting blocs in the country.

Toxic fusion at the Top

In the end the UNP was in power for 17 years, and 11 of which were under the Jayewardene presidency. Prime Minister Premadasa succeeded JRJ as President overcoming intense internal opposition. The Premadasa presidency ended in 1994 with his assassination by the LTTE. Since then, the country has not had a single elected UNP President. There is a UNP President now, but he got there, courtesy of Gotabaya Rajapaksa and he is staying there because of the support of the Rajapaksas.

The once mighty UNP was reduced to a single National List MP in the last parliamentary election. The SLFP is a disgrace. The SLPP is vanishing faster than it emerged. The SJB is a rudderless flotsam. The implosion and fragmentation of the mainstream parties cannot be explained in isolation from the devouring behemoth that is the executive presidency. The JVP stands robust because it has been least impacted by the executive presidency. The Tamil and Muslim parties – they are on orbits of their own.

There is no point in invoking every known name from Karl Marx through Antonio Negri to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to make sense of, let alone justify, any aspect of the JRJ contraption even in its most sanitized form. President Wickremesinghe of course offers no defence or justification of the executive presidency. He is not interested in defending it or reforming it. He is interested in it only to satisfy his itch to become an elected executive president. But he takes a different position on JRJ’s economic policies. They are his premise and his launching pad to propel Sri Lanka into its flight of prosperity (hopefully, not fancy). That is why he offered his ringing praise of them in his commemoration message.

But the economy that President Jayewardene triumphantly opened up (“Let the Robber Barons come”) in 1977 has produced mixed results. It ended scarcity, boosted exports and created jobs. Decades of investments in land and agriculture finally brought self-sufficiency in rice production. But the open economy also opened up new avenues of corruption, even as it tore apart the social welfare system that had been developed from even before independence and by every government including UNP governments. The fundamental flaw of the open economy was that expanding consumption became the main driver of the economy without any corresponding increases in production capacities. Consumption demanded imports and ate up the dwindling foreign reserves.

The crisis escalated under Gotabaya Rajapaksa. We cannot say that Gotabaya and his misdoings were inevitable consequences of the open economy and the presidential system. But we can say that it would have been impossible for someone like Gotabaya Rajapaksa to filter up to the very top in a parliamentary system. More than anything else, the presidential system and the political culture that grew with it enabled the toxic fusion of absolute power and absolute ignorance at the summit of the state.

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Features

Political violence stalking Trump administration

Published

5 hours ago

2026/04/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

A scene that unfolded during the shooting incident at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. (BBC)

It would not be particularly revelatory to say that the US is plagued by ‘gun violence’. It is a deeply entrenched and widespread malaise that has come in tandem with the relative ease with which firearms could be acquired and owned by sections of the US public, besides other causes.

However, a third apparent attempt on the life of US President Donald Trump in around two and a half years is both thought-provoking and unsettling for the defenders of democracy. After all, whatever its short comings the US remains the world’s most vibrant democracy and in fact the ‘mightiest’ one. And the US must remain a foremost democracy for the purpose of balancing and offsetting the growing power of authoritarian states in the global power system, who are no friends of genuine representational governance.

Therefore, the recent breaching of the security cordon surrounding the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington at which President Trump and his inner Cabinet were present, by an apparently ‘Lone Wolf’ gunman, besides raising issues relating to the reliability of the security measures deployed for the President, indicates a notable spike in anti-VVIP political violence in particular in the US. It is a pointer to a strong and widespread emergence of anti-democratic forces which seem to be gaining in virulence and destructiveness.

The issues raised by the attack are in the main for the US’ political Right and its supporters. They have smugly and complacently stood by while the extremists in their midst have taken centre stage and begun to dictate the course of Right wing politics. It is the political culture bred by them that leads to ‘Lone Wolf’ gunmen, for instance, who see themselves as being repressed or victimized, taking the law into their own hands, so to speak, and perpetrating ‘revenge attacks’ on the state and society.

A disproportionate degree of attention has been paid particularly internationally to Donald Trump’s personality and his eccentricities but such political persons cannot be divorced from the political culture in which they originate and have their being. That is, “structural” questions matter. Put simply, Donald Trump is a ‘true son’ of the Far Right, his principal support base. The issues raised are therefore for the President as well as his supporters of the Right.

We are obliged to respect the choices of the voting public but in the case of Trump’s election to the highest public position in the US, this columnist is inclined to see in those sections that voted for Trump blind followers of the latter who cared not for their candidate’s suitability, in every relevant respect, and therefore acted irrationally. It would seem that the Right in the US wanted their candidate to win by ‘hook or by crook’ and exercise power on their behalf.

By making the above observations this columnist does not intend to imply that voting publics everywhere in the world of democracy cast their vote sensibly. In the case of Sri Lanka, for example, the question could be raised whether the voters of the country used their vote sensibly when voting into office the majority of Executive Presidents and other persons holding high public office. The obvious answer is ‘no’ and this should lead to a wider public discussion on the dire need for thoroughgoing voter education. The issue is a ‘huge’ one that needs to be addressed in the appropriate forums and is beyond the scope of this column.

Looking back it could be said that the actions of Trump and his die-hard support base led to the Rule of Law in the US being undermined as perhaps never before in modern times. A shaming moment in this connection was the protest march, virtually motivated by Trump, of his supporters to the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, with the aim of scuttling the presidential poll result of that year. Much violence and unruly behaviour, as known, was let loose. This amounted to denigrating the democratic process and encouraging the violent take over of the state.

In a public address, prior to the unruly conduct of his supporters, Trump is on record as blaring forth the following: ‘We won this election and we won by a landslide’, ‘We will stop the steal’, ‘We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen’, ‘If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.’

It is plain to see that such inflammatory utterances could lead impressionable minds in particular to revolt violently. Besides, they should have led the more rationally inclined to wonder whether their candidate was the most suitable person to hold the office of President.

Unfortunately, the latter process was not to be and the question could be raised whether the US is in the ‘safest pair of hands’. Needless to say, as events have revealed, Donald Trump is proving to be one of the most erratic heads of state the US has ever had.

However, the latest attempt on the life of President Trump suggests that considerable damage has been done to the democratic integrity of the US and none other than the President himself has to take on himself a considerable proportion of the blame for such degeneration, besides the US’ Far Right. They could be said to be ‘reaping the whirlwind.’

It is a time for soul-searching by the US Right. The political Right has the right to exist, so the speak, in a functional democracy but it needs to take cognizance of how its political culture is affecting the democratic integrity or health of the US. Ironically, the repressive and chauvinistic politics advocated by it is having the effect of activating counter-violence of the most murderous kind, as was witnessed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Continued repressive politics could only produce more such incidents that could be self-defeating for the US.

Some past US Presidents were assassinated but the present political violence in the country brings into focus as perhaps never before the role that an anti-democratic political culture could play in unraveling the gains that the US has made over the decades. A duty is cast on pro-democracy forces to work collectively towards protecting the democratic integrity and strength of the US.

Features

22nd Anniversary Gala …action-packed event

Published

5 hours ago

2026/04/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

The Skyliners: Shanaka Viswakula (bass), Mario Ranasuriya (lead guitar), Daryl D'Souza (keyboards) and Kushmin Balasuriya (drums)

The Editor-in-Chief of The Sri Lankan Anchorman, a Toronto-based monthly, celebrating Sri Lankan community life in Canada, is none other than veteran Sri Lankan journalist Dirk Tissera, who moved to Canada in 1997. His wife, Michelle, whom he calls his “tower of strength”, is the Design Editor.

According to reports coming my way, the paper has turned out to be extremely popular in Toronto.

In fact, The Sri Lankan Anchorman won a press award in Toronto for excellence in editorial content and visual presentation.

However, the buzz in the air in Canada, right now, is The Sri Lankan Anchorman’s 22nd Anniversary Gala, to be held on Friday, 12 June, 2026, at the J&J Swagat Banquet Convention Centre, in Toronto.

An action-packed programme has been put together for the night, featuring some of the very best artistes in the Toronto scene.

The Skylines, who are classified as ‘the local musical band in Toronto’, will headline the event.

Dirk Tissera and wife Michelle: Supporting Sri Lanka-Canada community events, in Toronto, since launching The Anchorman
in 2002

They have performed and backed many legendary Sri Lanka singers.

According to Dirk, The Skylines can belt out a rhythm with gusto … be it Western, Sinhala or Tamil hits.

Also adding sparkle to the evening will be the legendary Fahmy Nazick, who, with his smooth and velvety vocals, will have the crowd on the floor.

Fahmy who was a household name, back in Sri Lanka, will be flying down from Virginia, USA.

He has captivated audiences in Sri Lanka, the Middle East and North America, and this will be his fourth visit to Toronto – back by popular demand,

Cherry DeLuna, who is described by Dirk as a powerhouse, also makes her appearance on stage and is all set to stir up the tempo with her cool and easy delivery.

“She’s got a great voice and vocal range that has captivated audiences out here”, says Dirk.

Chamil Welikala, said to be one of the hottest DJs in town, will be spinning his magic … in English, Sinhala, Tamil and Latin.

Both Jive and Baila competitions are on the cards among many other surprises on the night of 12 June.

This is The Anchorman’s fifth annual dance in a row – starting from 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 – and both Dirk and Michelle, and The Anchorman, have always produced elegant social events in Toronto.

“We intend to knock this one out of the park,” the duo says, adding that Western music and Sinhala and Tamil songs is something they’ve always delivered and the crowd loves it.

“We have always supported Sri Lanka-Canada community events, in Toronto, since launching The Anchorman, in 2002, and we intend to keep it that way.”

No doubt, there will be a large crowd of Sri Lankans, from all communities, turning up, on 12 June, to support Dirk, Michelle and The Anchorman.

Features

Face Pack for Radiant Skin

Published

5 hours ago

2026/04/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

* Apple and Orange:

Blend a few apple and orange pieces together. Add to it a pinch of turmeric and one tablespoon of honey. Apply it to the face and neck and rinse off after 30 minutes. This face pack is suitable for all skin types.

According to experts, apple is one of the best fruits for your skin health with Vitamin A, B complex and Vitamin C and minerals, while, with the orange peel, excessive oil secretion can be easily balanced.

* Mango and Curd:

Ripe mango pulp, mixed with curd, can be rubbed directly onto the skin to remove dirt and cleanse clogged pores. Rinse off after a few minutes.

Yes, of course, mango is a tasty and delicious fruit and this is the mango season in our part of the world, and it has extra-ordinary benefits to skin health. Vitamins C and E in mangoes protect the skin from the UV rays of the sun and promotes cell regeneration. It also promotes skin elasticity and fights skin dullness and acne, while curd, in combination, further adds to it.

* Grapes and Kiwi:

Take a handful of grapes and make a pulp of it. Simultaneously, take one kiwi fruit and mash it after peeling its skin. Now mix them and add some yoghurt to it. Apply it on your face for few minutes and wash it off.

Here again experts say that kiwi is the best nutrient-rich fruit with high vitamin C, minerals, Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin E, while grapes contain flavonoids, which is an antioxidant that protects the skin from free radical damage. This homemade face pack acts as a natural cleanser and slows down the ageing process.