Politics
The coming deluge
by Uditha Devapriya
As far as presidential discretion goes, pardoning Duminda Silva was hardly an unprecedented act. This is nothing to be surprised at; it has happened before, it will happen again. The issue, therefore, is less about why it happened than why now.
The timing was wrong. The optics were wrong. The man being pardoned may or may not have deserved a pardon – let history be the judge of that – but letting off someone convicted by the country’s Supreme Court of one of the highest crimes outlawed in the land on a Poya Day, let alone a Poson Poya Day, should raise more than just eyebrows. The precepts of the Buddha are as much about forgiveness as the gospel of Christ, but forgiveness is, and should be, placed in its proper context. The president let out 94 prisoners, 16 of them former LTTE cadres. They had good reason to be forgiven. Duminda Silva may have had good reason too; who can tell? In his case, however, absolution could have come later.
The government cannot fault the people for turning what followed into a series of irreverent memes. First the president announced his address to the nation. Then 
Many of those tuning in didn’t listen to the speech. They overlooked it. And in overlooking it, they overlooked the man making it. The responses to Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s social media posts are a 180 degree turn from what they used to be. This is a huge volte-face, and it tells us how the president of the country is perceived by many of his people.
Even if one didn’t expect such a reversal, the reactions to the speech showed just how badly things have changed. It is not that the president did not make valid points. He did. He is right about the vaccine situation; as a study by Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health notes quite correctly, Sri Lanka “presents an example of what a well-organized, centrally-designed, publicly-financed health system can achieve”, especially during a pandemic.
He is also right about his efforts at allocating “over 400 billion rupees to provide loan deferral facilities to small and medium enterprises.” As someone who experienced how loan deferral schemes could thwart the possibility of financial bankruptcy in the first wave, I agree with the need for such measures. These were, to be sure, not the only points that he made, but many of his other points seemed well made and well taken as well.
Yet people have begun to view the government in a different light now. Some of its biggest defenders have turned, or are turning. They haven’t taken kindly to some of the government’s choices, particularly those relating to vaccine procurement and delivery. It is true the country is being inoculated in practically every corner. But as specialists and experts have pointed out correctly, vaccine procurement should have picked up in January. It did not.
Worse, having dithered on procuring vaccines, a decision that backfired when India’s Serum Institute suspended exports of AstraZeneca (a decision for which the regime alone can’t take the blame), officials bungled on the PCR front, letting cases come down by way of reduced test numbers. As anyone would know, reducing cases by reducing tests is like painting spots on a cat to prove it’s a leopard: it’s deceptive, dangerous, and damaging.
Valid as these concerns are, though, they are nothing compared to perceptions of the regime’s disconnect from ground realities. Critics of the government should be forgiven for comparing its failings to the failings of its predecessor, yet anachronistic though such a comparison may be, for those making them, it remains relevant. And why? Because for such critics, there’s no line dividing a government which compromised on national security from one which erred in the face of biggest pandemic we’ve seen since the Spanish Flu.
If there’s no point bringing up the Easter Attacks here, it’s not only because it’s hard to score points with such tragedies today, nor because people have forgotten the mistakes of the last government, but because that was then and this is now. One could have applied this principle to the previous regime; when an MP grumbled about people honking horns at security escorts holding up traffic a few months after the Easter attacks, even Rajapaksa critics asked that MP why his likes were using the “Rajapaksa bogey” to cover up their failures.
It’s interesting, how roles can be reversed. About three weeks ago, social media was ablaze with vehicle owners protesting the fuel price hike by travelling on wheelbarrows; such posts, pertinent as the anger buttressing them may have been, and other posts showing vehicle owners defying travel restrictions during the subsequent “lockdown”, revealed a rift between middle-class critics of the regime and the bulk of the country stuck at home without as much as a motorcycle. Yet, ironically, it only reflected perceptions of the regime’s own disconnect: from not just its middle-class critics, but also the many others suffering in silence.
It’s a knife that cut both ways: while the suburban bourgeoisie complain about such issues as import restrictions and Chinese letters on butter packages, the regime, through its policies, is concurrently distancing itself from the peasantry and working class. What we’re seeing there is Bonapartism in reverse: populists unable to balance social classes.
In his speech, the president spoke about how the previous regime let the country down, and how it lost track of what had been a booming economy until then. He quoted the figures, gave the statistics, and drew a convincing picture of how things would have turned out if Mahinda Rajapaksa did not lose in 2015. For the sake of argument – and there are many arguments that support the president’s view here – let us assume that had a turnaround not happened in 2015, had Maithripala Sirisena not defected, had Ranil Wickremesinghe not become Prime Minister through Sirisena, and had the Mahinda Rajapaksa branch of the SLFP been recognised as the opposition, things may have improved. By that same logic, let us forget that personalities and individuals, by themselves, cannot decide on the direction of the wind.
The problem isn’t that these statements are flawed, though flawed they are. The problem is that they would have been more convincing had they been made, say, a decade ago. That they don’t seem convincing now tells us much about how circumstances and contexts change, and how what was true then does not necessarily remain true forever.
It also shows us how protean the local electorate is, and how voter sympathies, particularly Sinhala middle-class sympathies, can shift from party to party. Put simply, it shows how an electorate that voted against the Rajapaksas, yet still gave them a thin margin of defeat at the August 2015 election, then gave the SLPP a majority in January 2018 and a bigger landslide to Gotabaya Rajapaksa in November 2019, with a gargantuan two-thirds mandate in August 2020, can turn the other way. The social media factor, hyped as it may be, is not a point to be discounted there. It worked against the status quo twice, in 2015 and 2019. Often it can work in favour of the government. Yet the tide can easily, and quickly, turn.
We are living in strange times. The government and opposition don’t see eye to eye on most matters, but unlike what went for politics before 2015, both sides are zeroing in on one aim: winning 2024. It comes to no surprise that none other than Champika Ranawaka, the foremost anti-Rajapaksa figure with nationalist credentials, has replied through supporters and proxies to Victor Ivan on abolishing the Executive Presidency, cautioning against rushing it. Similar sentiments have been expressed on the issue of human rights probes by the SJB.
What these show is that the opposition, barring perhaps the JVP and the UNP, has prioritised winning elections in the long run over propping up liberal utopias in the short.
In such circumstances, the government will find it unwise to play the war card, the security card, and the nationalist card, with voters who have a far bigger assortment to choose from. It is true that as far as nationalist credentials go, none can beat the Rajapaksas. But given recent incidents, and how Sri Lanka’s online middle class is reacting to them, the government would do well to note the anger rising up among even its most fervent supporters.
The president’s speech is a sign of things to come. If his men do not heed the wind, the tide can turn against them. Sooner or later, it may well turn against us too.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com