Taking policy discussions from policy hawks

By Uditha Devapriya

The financial crisis that swept through South Asia in early 2022 did not, to borrow an oft-quoted Sinhala witticism, fall from the sky. They had their antecedents and they followed a predictable course. In both countries the unravelling of the crisis led to the expulsion of the President, in scenes that were reported by the mainstream media in terms which did not, I believe, do full justice to the complexity of the situation. But the media, despite its objective veneer, has a tendency to reduce, if not ignore, these complexities.

To many if not most journalists, a debt crisis remains a symptom of the failures of political elites. As such their reporting remains limited to a particular frame, a limited canvas. We saw this clearly in Sri Lanka. Scenes of people taking to the streets, calling for the President’s resignation, and entering his official residence, were framed almost exclusively as a classic anti-state uprising. One would be tempted to compare these developments to the Arab Spring – something the government itself bought, as witness a government press release which characterised the demonstrations along exactly those lines.

Yet the crisis in Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, cannot be compared to the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. It cannot be compared to the protests in Lebanon. The crisis in Sri Lanka and Pakistan was fuelled by overheating economies reeling from the effects of COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine War, colossal political mismanagement, and decades of neoliberal globalisation and authoritarianism. It was more systemic than political, more economic than systemic. It bore the hallmarks of the debt crises that swept through Latin America in the 1980s, crises which permanently disfigured their economies.

The media’s obsession with the political dimensions of all this is understandable. People distrust the political establishment, deeply. They no longer feel that the system serves them. They want to topple, overturn, and replace it. The government’s callous disregard for their suffering deserves no second opinion: they have grossly failed the country and its citizenry. Their response to the carnage of May 9 was to turn against the people, to bemoan their lack of patience, and to gaslight them. For years and decades, they have been enforcing the same failed policies, like a prayer. A systemic crisis of the sort we are seeing through has its origins in too many political decisions, overseen by too many governments.

As such, commentators and journalists may feel validated in doing scoops on political elites. Yet while it is understandable, even justifiable, their fixation with the political aspects of a crisis of this magnitude has led them to leave out, or belittle, its structural causes. It is like a poorly designed house lacking not just architectural grace, but also a solid foundation: what attracts attention is the lack of artistry, not the absence of a foundation. Perhaps because of this, the media in general, together with civil society, has been attributing too much in the crisis to the failures of the Rajapaksas and their allies, their authoritarian and militarist drive, and their strategy to use the current political set-up to make a comeback.

And in doing so, they have, I think, misread the causes of the crisis. What the crisis did was to speed up something that was decades in the making. Since 1977 the country has been experimenting with one neoliberal model after another, dismantling the State sector and subsidies and liberalising the economy in a bid to spark growth. Such efforts have come to nothing: inequalities have widened and nationalist backlashes have, as I pointed out in my column last week, wildly accelerated. In the absence of radical economic reforms, of the sort that could have strengthened domestic industries and spurred industrialisation, these efforts have only reinforced the island’s dependence on private capital. 2022 took all these to their final, inexorable conclusion, ending with a proverbial bang.

Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the mainstream media – barring a few journalists and commentators – churns out the same policy prescriptions that got us into this mess. As Hashim bin Rashid points out in an insightful piece in Jamhoor, “middle-class professionals and policy hawks… continue to peddle the only solution they know: go back to the IMF.” This solution is also peddled by journalists, even those who, not long ago, sided with lower middle-class protesters who wanted to see through radical economic reforms in tandem with political change. With the waning away of the aragalaya – a movement now dominated by left groups, which the media ignores or criticises – after July, economic discussions have yet again reverted to middle-class policy elites and hawks.

This was predictable. The protests themselves remained united at the core, but deeply divided along the periphery. Once they realised their primary objective of ousting Gotabaya Rajapaksa, these divisions came up to the surface, to the extent that the protests have now split between student-political left (the JVP-FSP and the IUSF), and centre-right liberal (the Black Caps) flanks. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s rise to the presidency emboldened many in the aragalaya whose anger was directed at the Rajapaksas, not the far more right-wing UNP. The bottom line to all this is that, after Rajapaksa fled, policy discourses that had once been dominated by Colombo elites and think-tanks again came under them.

In giving these elites more airtime and space than protest groups calling for real economic change, the media remains guilty of perpetuating discourses that have got us nowhere for the last four decades. In this I am not disparaging multilateral financial institutions, the ambits and mandates of which may have changed – for the better, I hope – in this period. I am, however, deeply sceptical of policy elites, based in think-tanks and civil society groups – who on the one hand can call the present Budget “more good than bad” while criticising the Rajapaksas on the other, and who, while (rightly) bemoaning the failures of the Rajapaksas, demonise student groups for “vehemently [opposing] any kind of education reform” and criticise “restrictive labour laws.” We badly need a new debate over the crisis we are living through. Our elites have failed us. Not just political elites, but also policy elites.

What, then, is the alternative? Left groups – including but not only the IUSF – claim they have one: reverse deflationary economic policies, tax the super-rich, and hold the politically corrupt to account. Such proposals are coupled with reforms like the abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. It goes without saying that the discourse of industrialisation – in my view the only discourse that is of some relevance to Sri Lanka’s present crisis – has been, and is being, pushed by the socialist Left and the socialist Left only. It is this which animates Left economic discussions and Left student and trade union protests, such as the one held earlier this week at Ratmalana. In tandem with anti-government demonstrations, these groups have been campaigning against big corporates, more or less accusing them of being in cahoots with an increasingly authoritarian and militarist State.

However, while lauding these tendencies among the Left and encouraging them, one must note their limitations and shortcomings as well. Marxism is not merely the firebrand of revolutionary politics, but also the instrument of emancipatory economics. Left economic discussions are heavily charged by rhetoric on social welfare: broadening the tax base, reducing the burden on low-income earners, outlawing mis-invoicing. But these are based more on the distributist and welfarist aspects of Marxist political economy. To undergird them, there must be a similar discussion of its production aspects. It is debatable, however, whether those aspects have been incorporated properly in wider trade union discourses of opposition to wage cuts and staff retrenchments in the public sector.

Tragically, Sri Lanka’s New Left is rather chameleonic in its approach to these issues. The Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) has been better and more consistent. The JVP-NPP is another kettle of fish altogether, as witness its rhetoric on private universities, with several MPs opposing it and Dr Nalinda Jayatissa admitting the need for it on TV.

This has, I think, prevented it from formulating the sort of radical economic programme that it needs to mobilise the people. In the absence of these aspects, protests, regardless of how colourful or widespread or well prepared they are, will simply not move people – not least because Sri Lankans, as a whole, tend to view socialist economics – as opposed to socialist politics – negatively; typical, after all, was the response of my friend, who praised the FSP and IUSF for their commitment to the aragalaya, then demeaned the Left in general for its talk of import substitution. Simply put, then, if the New Left does not accommodate these complexities, it will fail to take back policy discussions from policy hawks.

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