Progressive cosmetics, not-so-progressive politics

By Uditha Devapriya

There is an important aspect to recent debates over the government’s economic reforms and proposed laws, which include the Draft Online Safety Bill (OSB); and that is the government’s perspective on them. The government frames these reforms and laws as not just important but also essential. The reforms, it states, are crucial to securing IMF and World Bank funding, while the laws are crucial to protecting Sri Lankans from disinformation.

These are laudable motives, and they must be pointed out as such. Yet to what extent is the government moved by them? This is the discussion we must be having, which we are not.

The first step, I think, is in acknowledging the need for reform and legislation. There is a crisis, and it needs immediate attention. The government has chosen to go up – or down – the path of the IMF. It has committed the country to that path. While this does not exclude the possibility for abandoning it later on, this seems highly unlikely in the short and medium term.

On the other hand, laws like the Draft Online Safety Bill pretend to address a need. Sri Lanka is bombarded with disinformation and hate speech every day. Politicians, no less than ordinary citizens, find themselves on the receiving end of it. In that light, there needs to be some higher body to moderate harmful content.

The second step has to do with means. These reforms are essential and these laws address real needs. But are we deluding ourselves into thinking that grinding austerity on the one hand and draconian legislation on the other is the only way about them? There are other, alternative paradigms available.

If the government has not even bothered to consider them, that underlies its conservative and anti-reformist agenda rather than any real objective need for the policies they are implementing. And if the government invokes external parties, groups, and interests like the IMF to justify those policies, it is skating on dangerously thin ice. Civil society and people in general need to bring this to public attention.

The Gotabaya Rajapaksa government paraded itself as an institutionalist and meritocratic State, but had to resign when people called its bluff. The present government is trying a different tactic: depicting whatever it does as part of the common good. If the Rajapaksa regime’s economic policies were irrational, this regime’s policies are, as Dayan Jayatilleka notes correctly, no less so. Yet while pursuing them, it has also, on the sidelines, promoted its actions among marginalised groups. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s wooing of minority parties, his intervention in the Kurundi issue, and the framing of the OSB as beneficial to women and children vis-à-vis social media, are just a few examples.

In this the present government has benefited from two developments: the convergence of nationalist and neoliberal elements, and the personality of the President. President Wickremesinghe is, whatever one may say, more forceful than his predecessor. Of late he has taken to the international stage to express somewhat distinct and coherent views on the Global South, Western hypocrisy, and multipolarity.

He has also taken an interest in climate change and diplomacy. These have lent to him a veneer of sophistication and progressivism which has emboldened his champions to demean, if not downplay, his critics. The SLPP can hardly be squared with all this, but the President’s champions can always say, as they always do, that his alignment with is essential to his reforms.

Whether these tactics will work remain to be seen. On the one hand, the State bureaucracy is by law and custom tied to the regime. On the other hand, talk of public sector reform or retrenchment has increased discontent within it.

To be sure, every grass-roots community group, from lower middle-class consumers to trade unions, have taken to the streets, even as influential think-tanks and economists make statements that can be construed in favour of the government’s narratives. Yet while civil society has reached a consensus on what it wants to do with laws like the Online Safety Bill, it has reached no agreement on where it wants to go beyond abolition or repeal. There are also clear differences of opinion within civil society: journalists are against the Bill, yet artists and influencers may be more inclined to view its “positive” aspects.

It’s not just civil society, of course. Oppositional parties and people in general are guilty of promoting disunity where there should be unity. The President’s overtures to Tamil parties, for instance, was carefully concerted to win their support for his political agenda. While this tactic failed, the fact that minority parties were willing to set their differences aside and talk with the president indicated that the government could, at the drop of a hat, disunite the Opposition. On the other hand, the Opposition should have replied, not by pooh-poohing minority party concerns like devolution of power, but by arguing that such issues cannot be resolved by an unpopular government and head of state.

The Diana Gamage episode is another case in point. The video in question showed a male MP striking a female MP. Yet SJB MPs took to social media, not to condemn what someone from their ranks had done, but to deflect blame by suggesting that the female MP also contributed to the confrontation. Supporters of the government, specifically of the UNP, then took this as evidence for the SJB’s misogyny, a disconnect between its advocacy of women’s issues and its selectivity vis-à-vis its own MPs. The government cannot be blamed for jumping on the bandwagon and encouraging such narratives. It is up to the SJB, and the Opposition in general, to troubleshoot without going all self-defensive.

The biggest weapon this government can wield, which it is wielding, is its ability to depict whatever it does as being for the common good and the people’s welfare. Be it women and children vis-à-vis the OSB, or the future of the country vis-à-vis economic reforms, it has managed to co-opt a section of civil society, and the general population, to its vision. A smart opposition should counter this. Immediately, but constructively.

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