The road ahead for the NPP

By Uditha Devapriya

With less than a month before the Local Government elections, the NPP government has few cards to deal at the table. I can’t recall an election season where there was so little enthusiasm or excitement in the air. But this is an indication that things are not what they were before, that it isn’t business as usual in Sri Lanka. The NPP can benefit from this, but it can equally lose.

Since coming to power, the NPP has demonstrated a commitment – if one could call it that – to a vague, amorphous mixture of continuity and rupture in the policies it has pursued. Thus, while Aresuming negotiations with the IMF despite decrying them when it was in the Opposition, it has wavered in its stance on the privatisation of Sri Lankan Airlines.

The NPP’s biggest break, of course, has been its dealings with India. Modi’s visit was bound to raise a lot of speculation over what Delhi wants from Colombo, but the flurry of memes and social media posts contrasting the NPP’s and JVP’s rhetoric for the past many years (and in the case of the JVP, the past half-century) with its attitudes now was both predictable and pathetic. Tilvin Silva’s response, that the India of today is not the India that once was, is a half-hearted attempt at self-absolution: it does nothing to conceal the irony of the JVP been so welcoming to India.

In his tract on the ethnic conflict, written on the eve of the second insurrection, Rohana Wijeweera framed Indian intervention in Sri Lanka as part of a wider historical process, underscoring the island’s long history of occupation by foreign forces. Neither Wijeweera nor the top brass of the party advocated for or justified violence against the Sri Lankan Tamil community, even those who were wrongly viewed as “fifth columns.” Yet in making such observations, Wijeweera trivialised both the structural causes of the civil war and the geopolitics of Indian intervention in the region.

It’s interesting how things can change in the space of 50 years. Modi’s statement that Sri Lanka and India are civilizational twins – rightly critiqued by Dayan Jayatilleka in his most recent column – went unscathed and unexamined in Colombo. As a friend of mine put it, if such remarks had been made under a Gotabaya Rajapaksa or Ranil Wickremesinghe government – as they were, though not in the same words – the NPP, and JVP, would have been outraged. Today, the main, legitimate critique of Indian intervention, from the populist Left, is coming from the People’s Struggle Alliance (PSA), which has assembled a decent troupe of economists, activists, and academics. Ironically, they are echoing many of the critiques that the NPP amplified when it was in Opposition.

It’s just about the same story with its economic agenda – if the NPP has one at all. The present moment, which forebodes a near-total rupture of the supposedly “liberal” order that sustained Western hegemony for more than half a century, is rife with so many possibilities. There is little elbow room with which to negotiate for better terms with the US, but the IMF is a different story. While President Dissanayake has reiterated the importance of social safety nets, however, his government has not done enough to convey to the IMF that, with changing circumstances, there must be some room for flexibility in the overall framework of the agreement.

This is not a call for a complete exit from the IMF agreement, though I still think we should have negotiated for better terms with the IMF when we had the chance. As Swasthika Arulingam has argued convincingly in a recent piece, civil society is not entirely innocent of what we have gone through since. The need now is to insulate ourselves from the currency and market fluctuations that always hit the most vulnerable communities in countries like ours. The question, however, is whether the NPP has the breathing space required to take drastic measures.

I may be overtly optimistic, but I am still willing to give a wide berth to the government on these matters. This is the first time a JVP-dominated party has governed the country, with such extensive powers. Against such a backdrop, it can be argued that it will need more time. The counterargument to this, of course, is that it has had half a year and a five-sixths majority to do what its voters asked it to do: including repealing draconian legislation, of which the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) is one. That is has done nothing substantive, except from imposing harsh economies on itself – even on as innocuous an item as parliament lunches – underscores much disappointment, and disaffection, though in terms of corruption levels and perceptions of corruption, and ineptitude, we are in much better shape than we were under the previous administration.

Which brings me to the last, but not least, significant point. To its critics, the NPP appears to be still behaving as though it is in the Opposition. This argument is not without its merits. When Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya announces in parliament that a committee will be appointed to investigate the repealing of the PTA, one is invariably reminded of similar methods deployed by previous governments to look into reforms. Of course, there is a counterargument to this: if the NPP doubles down on legislation like the PTA, it may anger the security establishment and risk a backlash that can escalate into a standoff between the military and the civilian administration.

As the recent arrest and subsequent release of a 22-year-old Muslim should tell us, domestic and international pressure can push the government to do things differently. But this is a continuation of how things were under the NPP’s rivals when they were in power. If Harsha de Silva’s remarks about an upcoming European Union (EU) delegation having a bearing on the decision to release the youth is true – and it may well be – we are back to square one, to that predicable cycle of the government using the national security card, followed by a reversal of its decisions in the face of real or potential international pressure. The NPP may be in power, but it’s the same setup in place.

Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com. Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.