Features

On Third Way Centrists and neoliberal authoritarians

Published

4 years ago

2022/12/4

By Uditha Devapriya

Historically, the United National Party was a party of businessmen, traders, and rentiers. It underwent two shifts in its early phase: under the Senanayakes (1948-1977), and under J. R. Jayewardene (1977-1989). Under Ranasinghe Premadasa (1989-1993) it went through its third shift, enacting somewhat progressive economic measures while fortifying the State’s military and defence sectors. The measures which are most often invoked by commentators today are janasaviya, the Garment Factories, and the ‘peoplization’ of bus services, as well as the leasing of plantations to only local companies.

It was during this time, moreover, that the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), headed by economists and academics like Dr Howard Nicholas, began serious discussions about industrialisation. That such institutions have moved away from their mandates – as Ahilan Kadirgmar has clearly noted – tells us much about the policies that should have stayed after Premadasa’s assassination. It also tells us about the policy paradigms that came into effect and moved to the mainstream, throughout the Third World, in the mid-1990s: put simply, from their fealty to socialist planning and to industrialisation, Marxist and left-wing parties in Asia and Africa, including in South Asia, turned to the right.

These shifts must be seen in the context of their time. The collapse of the Soviet Union had drained socialist politics of credibility, especially in countries like India and Sri Lanka. The resurgence of the Right, initially in Indonesia, then in Chile, Sri Lanka, the US, and UK, had led to the destruction of entire national industries, the financialization of entire economies, and the emasculation of entire working-class movements. These governments had enacted reforms that crippled trade unions, but empowered a middle class bourgeoisie that enabled right-wing parties to remain in power – as the UNP found out in 1982 and 1989.

Left-wing parties, as well as parties which espoused a Third Way between capitalism and communism, took time to accommodate these developments. The neoliberal wave of the 1980s deprived the Marxist Left of its two most important foundations: national industries and trade unions. Its credos had been the ownership of the means of production and the equitable distribution of income and wealth. Lacking the wherewithal to commit to either, the Left slowly compromised on its ideals: in the mid-1980s, the Democratic Party in the US and the Labour Party in the UK thus embraced the tenets of Third Way Centrism. When the Right crumbled under the weight of its contradictions, and authoritarian governments in the Third World were toppled and defeated, it was these Centrists who took over.

It must be noted that Third Way Centrism would not have materialised without the collapse of the Soviet Union. The latter event made redundant the kind of anti-communist rhetoric that Republicans in the US and Conservatives in the UK had been deploying for decades. This made it possible for Centrists to come to power by appropriating the economic policies of the Right while retaining some socially progressive measures: in the UK, for instance, the Blair government continued Margaret Thatcher’s labour policies, while moving closer to the European Union and enforcing its employment clauses.

Yet these developments underlay a fatal contradiction, between the deindustrialisation of these economies, the financialization of their markets, and colossal job losses in former industrial zones, like Michigan in the US. Coupled with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and its later phenomenal rise, these fed into xenophobic fears of being taken over by migrants and other economies. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka faced a renaissance in Third Way Centrist politics, symbolised by the election of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party under Chandrika Kumaratunga in 1994 – and, more fittingly, by the UNP’s shift from Ranasinghe Premadasa’s policies to his successor’s neoliberal outlook.

In other words, it was at the point of socialism’s global downfall that the Centrists took over. But the Centrists in Sri Lanka continued in power long after their colleagues in the West had been swamped by the nationalist opprobrium their policies had provoked. In the UK, the Labour Party lost power in 2010, while a (relatively) moderate Conservative Party ceded to a right-wing fringe in 2016. British politics has never recovered since. In the US, the disastrous financialization and deregulation of the economy, initiated by Ronald Reagan, encouraged by Bill Clinton, and pursued to a catastrophic climax by George W. Bush, led to the bailout of the corporate sector by Barack Obama and a reversion to the tenets of industrialisation by the Trump and, much more constructively, the Biden administrations.

Sri Lanka’s civil society justified Centrism by posing it against a rising wave of Sinhala nationalism. In other words, Sri Lanka’s liberal intelligentsia saw Third Way Centrism as an alternative to chauvinism: to them, it was not “socialism or barbarism”, but “centrism or barbarism.” Such Manichean distinctions failed to explain why nationalism could enter the political mainstream in countries like Sri Lanka. Yet civil society went on to deploy those distinctions against their nationalist opponents, even as Western governments realised that nationalism was a product of an economic system badly in need of repair.

It is for these reasons that I find Sri Lankan civil society’s obsession with Sinhala nationalism to be unhelpful and counterproductive. Doubtless, there are important convergences between authoritarianism and nationalism. Doubtless, these convergences have been for the worse. And doubtless, it is these convergences that the present political set-up in Sri Lanka is benefiting from. The SLPP has tapped into, and is tapping into, ethno-supremacism of the worst sort, which is not just exclusionary, but uncontrollable. It has played around, and is playing around, with a political discourse charged by majoritarian sentiment. The SLPP may or may not be intrinsically motivated by these elements, but its deployment of them has led to the unnecessary fragmentation of the country’s polity.

However, in focusing almost completely on the linkages between authoritarianism and nationalism, liberal and left-liberal circles have ignored the economic dimensions of those linkages. This is why, with the same breath with which they deplore the Wickremesinghe regime’s authoritarian drive, certain commentators can commend the Budget for being “more good than bad.” Such sentiments are puzzling at best and convoluted at worst, but once you trace them to civil society’s prioritisation of personalities (the Rajapaksas as the bête noire of liberal politics) over institutions and political systems, indeed over economic policies, they become easier to understand and dissect.

It goes without saying that the focus of liberal commentators today has shifted to the prospect of Mahinda or Basil Rajapaksa’s return, rather than the neoliberal authoritarian culture being institutionalised by a conspicuously non-Rajapaksa President.

These commentators do not necessarily prefer Ranil Wickremesinghe, but their fixation with him for over two decades as a Centrist hero has not waned. This may be contradictory from a liberal perspective, but not so if you account for the ideological complexities of Sri Lanka’s civil society, which has, historically, preferred an “enemy’s enemy is my friend” strategy to practical politics. These complexities have led the country’s civil society to commit two blunders: to view the Rajapaksas as the sole cause of the country’s problems, and to ignore the economic dimensions of those problems. Hence the dichotomies they deploy against their ideological opponents, and hence their ambivalent attitude to Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom they consider authoritarian, but also amenable on issues like the National Question, which have turned Tamil parties into cautious allies of the government.

The US has experienced the consequences of neglecting the economic dimensions of these issues. Most Americans did not vote for Trump, yet he assumed the presidency through a systemic anomaly. Trump came to power wooing dispossessed blue-collar workers. Not a few among them preferred Bernie Sanders. But they wanted Sanders, not Clinton: hence when the latter replaced the former as the Democratic candidate, they switched. Chastened by these lessons, the Biden administration abandoned financialization and is overseeing the re industrialisation of the American economy. This policy, writes Cédric Durand in the New Left Review, “points to a structural break in the regulation of capitalism, the shock-waves of which will reverberate in the global political economy for years to come.”

Will Sri Lanka learn these lessons? The government and civil society have locked horns with each other. Civil society sees the government as authoritarian, while the government sees civil society as an obstacle that should be cut off. Lost in all these confrontations are the debates that should matter, such as the industrialisation of the economy. The longer these issues are ignored, the more pronounced and dangerous their repercussions will be. Unless someone initiates a discussion, or even a conversation, the neglect of these issues will lead to resistance from both sides: from a civil society that venerates Centrism politically and is yet to renounce neoliberalism economically, and from a political system which has, for over half a century, embraced and fetishized neoliberal authoritarianism.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

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Features

Proactive peacemaking becomes a paramount need

Published

7 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wasting wars: Some war-displaced people in Lebanon. BBC

It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.

As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.

However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.

The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.

However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.

A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.

There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.

At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.

When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.

Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.

As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.

However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.

However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.

The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.

Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.

Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.

Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.

It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.

In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.

The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.

This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.

Features

Dialog Brings Sri Lanka’s Largest Digital Vesak Experience to Matara

Published

7 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

From left to right: Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, and Lasantha Theverapperuma experience the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered VR tours.

Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.

One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.

Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.

Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.

Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.

Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha

Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”

Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”

Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.

Features

Beauty, elegance and talent…for women

Published

7 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.

According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.

Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.

With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.

The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026

A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.

Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.

The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.

Launching the first round of auditions

The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.