OPTIONS FOR CHANGE IN THE CATACOMBS OF CATASTROPHE

by DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

The simplest way to understand the crisis that Sri Lanka finds itself in is to understand it as if this country were an individual. It is the story of a middle-class person who had a gambling habit and has found himself on the street, a bum, begging for handouts, unsure when his next meal is or where it might come from. To make this story more accurate, Sri Lanka is a teenager who enjoyed a middle-class life whose family was bankrupted because his father was a gambler and a lousy one at that.

From where might salvation, liberation or even simple improvement come? Still more modestly, who and what might enable the country to hit the brakes before plunging over the abyss and into freefall?

GOTA HELL

We can rule certain things and people out. We cannot expect solutions from the country’s leader President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, because he kicked us into the deepest socioeconomic pit in our history since Independence. He was, if one may borrow Tina Turner’s lyrics, “simply the best/better than all the rest”.

Gota is taking two steps back and one sideways, for every step forward that he takes –such as canceling out by his Bloomberg interview and recent conduct, his address to the nation and pledge of the reintroduction of the 19th amendment.

Most damning of all, the ridiculousness of his initial, foundational assumption that he was insured by China and therefore could commit any economic craziness that caught his fancy and also proceed to dismissively discriminate against China (the highway tender), has now been revealed. Gota just doesn’t have what it takes to make rational evaluations and judgments.

Why doesn’t he phone President Xi, the “governance policy” of whose Communist Party he wanted to learn, thank his for the birthday greeting and ask him for a bailout? Better still, why doesn’t he fly to China, cap in hand? Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike had that kind of equation with Premier Zhou Enlai, to the extent that she never had to ask, he just brought it up in official conversation, recorded it in an official letter and handed her a very large cheque (1971).

Gotabaya Rajapaksa doesn’t know that he has a near zero-chance of achieving his stated intention of making it to the end of his term. The mass mood is such he may not even be able to make it to the end of the year.

He should have realized that the only way in which he could have lasted even half of the rest of his term, or even limped to the end of it, was to speedily divest himself of power by means of a robust—not diluted–21st amendment, transferring it to a diversity of democratic institutions while retaining only the power which a broad political consensus allowed him to, thereby reducing his target profile.

Gota has now given himself only one exit, because he has presented the citizenry with only one way to be rid of the source of their unprecedented suffering—and that is the way that autocrats from the Shah through Marcos to Suharto went.

SIRISENA AND/OR DULLAS?

The way to go should be readily obvious to the SLPP (‘Pohottuwa’) that unless it wishes to be buried electorally, politically and perhaps literally, under the rubble of the Gotabaya presidency when it falls, which it will, sooner than later.

When a social crisis was growing in the 1950s which erupted in the Hartal of 1953 and the so-called silent Revolution (with its Sinhala Only downside) in 1956, SWRD Bandaranaike broke away from the UNP and founded a new, center-left party. The solution therefore came from within, but through a rupture.

As I had noted in 1995 in my first book, Sri Lanka in 1988 faced a combination of all three types of crises a state can face: (a) an anti-systemic civil war in the south generated by governance and socioeconomic grievances, (b) a secessionist civil war in the northeast generated by ethnoregional/ethnolingual grievances, and (c) a foreign military presence on part of the island’s soil. The solution came from within the ruling party: Prime Minister R Premadasa who was readying his independent candidacy and campaign structure when he was given UNP nomination, accepted the challenge of a “torch blazing at both ends”, ran against the odds and won.

When Sri Lanka had failed under five presidents (JR, Premadasa, Wijetunga, Chandrika) to defeat the Tigers who were pounding Colombo with suicide bombers and truck bombs, while waging mid-intensity large unit warfare in the island’s northeast, Mahinda Rajapaksa rose to the challenge and prevailed. He was the ruling party’s candidate.

Is there anyone in the ruling party or the (now fractured) ruling coalition of 2019-2020 who might play a pale version of the role of these unconventional figures who arose within the establishments of their day? I can think of only two personalities, each one capable of bringing some talented players with them, and if they combine forces, could amount to something significant. One is ex-President Maithripala Sirisena, the other Dullas Alahapperuma (ably supported by Dr Charitha Herath and Dr Nalaka Godahewa, two sharp policy minds in parliament). But do they have what it takes? If so, they should surely manifest it at this late stage.

Much will depend upon whether this progressive tendency will crystallize soon enough to make an impactful intervention in the crisis, and whether it will succeed in creating an ‘ensemble’ –or as General de Gaulle called it, a “rassemblement”, a “rally” — of center-left forces, involving the SLFP and its leader, ex-President Maithripala Sirisena, and the nine smaller allies.

Former President Sirisena who successfully piloted the 19th amendment through, stitching together a two-thirds majority for it, knows from experience what the defects of 19A are, and has presented his party’s ideas for constitutional change to the experts’ committee drafting a new Constitution, should convene an all-parties roundtable to hammer out a compromise that can get the 21st amendment (building on Wijayadasa’s) 150 votes.

PRIME DONNA-ISM & POLITICS

Politics is intervention. Let me record and reiterate my criticism of the non-acceptance of the Prime Ministership by Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa. My criticism stems from my understanding of political responsibility and opportunity in a situation of grave national crisis. In his autobiography, the philosopher Louis Althusser reminds us of what is vital in serious politics focused on state power and making history:

“…to seize the opportunity, the ‘chance’ as Machiavelli describes it… ‘the precise moment, the opportunity’ (Lenin) ‘have to be seized with both hands’ (Machiavelli, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao), since they may only last a few hours. Once they had gone, and with them the chance to change the course of history…”. (Althusser, ‘The Future Lasts a Long Time’, pp. 229-231)

There is a major move that the Opposition Leader can make. Convene a National Roundtable of the best economists and public policy experts in the island, discuss and debate in continuous session to a finish (over a weekend) and present to the Parliament and the public the Plan for the rescue of Sri Lanka. In the recent past the main Opposition has only been negativistic but it must now be creative and constructive.

All said and done, it must be recognized that the SJB and JVP are the only two cohesive, compact political parties and therefore, crucial change-agents. Whether or not they will prove decisive change-agents is another matter.

AUDIT ARAGALAYA 1.0

In terms of strategy and tactics, the JVP-JJB, the FSP-IUSF and the Aragalaya must have the courageous lucidity to admit the monumental blunder of the second half of May 9th. Let’s leave the rights and wrongs, the good and bad, the ethics and morals aside. Look at the balance of forces in the concrete situation.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa was far worse off on the night the light-show was projected on the walls of the Presidential Secretariat, than when he woke up on May 10th morning. After the night of May 9th, Colombo woke up to effective military deployment on the streets and a shrunken Aragalaya. Society was shaken by the violence and relieved by the military presence. It wasn’t only Mahinda Rajapaksa who blew it on May 9th. He did so in the morning; Gotabaya’s opponents did so from the afternoon till the next morning.

So far, the discourses of the civil society liberal-legalists, the main Opposition (SJB), the Left (JVP, FSP) and the Resistance (IUSF, Aragalaya 2.0) – “abolish the executive presidency”, “all 225”, “74 years” –remind me of nothing so much as the famous phrase of the Swiss founding father of cultural history, Jacob Burckhardt: “terrible simplifiers” (“les terribles simplificateurs”).

SOCIALIST SOLUTION?

The economy is ‘the real foundation’ (Marx) of society upon which politics and other levels of the superstructure spring. The economic factor is not the dominant factor every time in everything but is ‘ultimately’ or ‘in the final analysis’ the ‘determinant’ factor. The crisis of the Sri Lankan economic ‘foundation’ is so intense and all-encompassing that the we are living in ‘the final analysis’. The political ‘superstructure’ cannot but undergo transformation commensurate with the character and scope of the crisis.

Sri Lanka’s crisis is not a crisis of capitalism but rather of Gota Chinthanaya, and as such does not require a “system-overthrow” as the radical left would have it, but if the crisis and dysfunctionality of Sri Lanka’s capitalism has metastasized, and cannot be attenuated before people start dying of poverty, hunger, ill-health and cannibalistic violence over scarce resources; if our political class has failed us, then it may take a conversion to some form of socialism, merely to become functional again.

Left leadership also requires educating the masses that class consciousness is not social resentment.

The sheer survival of Sri Lanka as a society, a community and a people, and the preservation of Sri Lanka as a State in the world, is more pressing and more fundamental than the form or mode it takes, be it liberal-democracy or capitalism.

CHANGE-AGENT

But what will be the decisive agency of change? Who will bell the cat?

Peter Youssuf, a member of Iraq’s Christian minority, a former member of the Iraqi Communist Party’s Central Committee who had been in jail for 22 years, broken jail on eight occasions and was the Editor of the ruling Ba’ath party newspaper Al Thawra, was escorting my father and our family on our visit to Iraq as guests of Tariq Aziz, Information Minister and Foreign Minister (later executed during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq).

Peter Youssuf and my father Mervyn de Silva (who died 23 years ago this week) were debating the question of “what is the decisive factor in a political crisis?”. Though I was a teenager at the time, I’ve never forgotten Peter Youssuf’s emphatic answer in the cold night air in the Iraqi desert: “In the final analysis, what is decisive are the men with the guns, and the men who control the men with the guns.”