Features
POLICE PROMOTION MANIPULATION: VIOLATION OF THE LINE OF SENIORITY
Root cause of the decline of the force
(Excerpted from Merril Gunaratne’s ‘Perils of a Profession’ )
In a disciplined service, rank is sacrosanct. An officer has necessarily to aspire to higher rank through performance. If his work had been of exceptional merit and distinction, he may even be considered for a special promotion. A promotion can also be posthumous where the deceased officer had been exemplary in performance and achievement. An officer will therefore naturally like to safeguard his position in the line of seniority. He will be unhappy if a junior officer is placed over him merely because the latter wields influence. It is natural for an officer in a disciplined service to jealously protect his place in the line of seniority against encroachment.
Two matters of concern had emerged in the wake of the exacerbation of ‘interference’ that had plagued the police since 1977. Those who looked for undue favours from the police by baiting officers with assurances of recognition and promotion outside the line of seniority, had often found pliant policemen ready to do their bidding. Many have thus prospered without satisfying the required criteria for key posts and promotions. The pattern, so monotonous since 1977, had seriously demoralized the service. Some have been adept not only in the ” long jump,” but also in “hop, step, and jump”, by the acquisition of more than one rank promotion outside the ” eligibility criteria”.
The second matter for concern had been the ineptitude of IGPs to counter this pattern. The fundamental premise in leadership is the undiluted authority of the leader to reward the good and punish the errant. This foundation was uprooted in 1977 mostly because those at the helm of affairs in the police abdicated or surrendered to political demands without resistance to interference. If a united front was presented based on a cohesive policy, the political establishment may have found it formidable.
The inadequacies of those in the highest echelons to stand up and protest at the onset, enabled the entrenchment of a pernicious system. The good were often overlooked, whilst some of those with chequered careers but were favourites of patrons, found recognition. The IGP became a figurehead who watched passively. Attempts to resist such pressure and insist on the right course would have been costly. Cyril Herath alone stood up to such a demand and quit his position of IGP, rejecting a compensatory sop of a diplomatic assignment. Such honorable conduct was a noble alternative to taking the easy road, a lesson to the establishment, and an inspiration to the service.
A few instances of the violation of the line of security.
Following the sweeping victory of Chandrika Kumaratunga as the president in 1994, six police officers, after being away from the force for some time, were reinstated in the service in the rank of senior DIG. They were thereby restored to positions they enjoyed in the seniority line at the time they left the service. Of these six officers, Messrs Rajaguru, Wickramasuriya and Iddamalgoda were victims of persecution as extensions of service was denied them without valid reasons. The others did not fall into such a category, with two of them quitting on their own, while the third had been served notice of vacation of post. Those who were dislodged from their positions in the seniority line by such reinstatement had served without interruption in the most taxing and testing times. Somewhere in 2018 or 2019, three DIGs who had retired long time ago, decided to appeal for promotion to senior DIG rank. The ‘Yahapalanaya’ government promoted them through a political victimization committee. This was incredible.
Inflation of the DIG cadre when D B Wijetunga was president.
Shortly after DB Wijetunga became president, the government suddenly took a decision to introduce a radical increase in the DIG cadre. The directive came from the president, and his proposals should have been examined in depth, before being implemented. The DIG cadre increased from 19 to 30 overnight. An SSP was able to secure a DIG rank from the ninth or 10th place in the line of seniority when the number of DIGs was raised to 11. The coincidence of the enlargement of the DIG cadre and the simultaneous accommodation of this officer close to the president at the tail end of the expanded number of 11 DIGs gave rise to considerable speculation. I had dealt with this controversy in my book “Cop in the Crossfire”.
In fact if a cohesive policy with fixed quotas based on cogent reasoning was firmly in place, there may have been space and scope to explain why such a sudden increase in the DIG cadre would have been difficult to accommodate. Anyway, the president’s suggestion required a careful study to assess whether it was possible to accede to the request. I was then third or fourth in line of seniority from the IGP down but my views were not solicited. I think a study in regard to the request of the president should have included “inter alia”, the following: Did the service face additional responsibilities to warrant an expansion? Above all, did numbers in subordinate ranks – SSPs, SPs, ASPs, inspectorate, sergeants and constables, justify a sudden increase in the DIG cadre? Would the radical increase have disturbed ratios, proportions and balance? In actual fact, even if we assume that the request was to increase the cadre by one or two more, a rational decision had to depend on a proper study.
President Wijetunga was generous in interfering with, or fragmenting police ranges to placate officers. Two weeks before my promotion to the rank of senior DIG, T.V. Sumanasekara was appointed as DIG of Mt Lavinia and Kalutara divisions which actually were within my range. I promptly telephoned the president and requested him to carve out the new range after my promotion, so that I would not be embarrassed. The president agreed, and as a result, the dismemberment of my range was suspended till my promotion. Such was the level of interference at that time.
Even the cadre of senior DIGs which stood at three when president Wijetunga assumed duties, rose to five in the same manner as the increase in the cadre of DIGs. A DIG secured a promotion to the rank of SDIG shortly before retirement. The officer concerned was in a post which had, before such promotion and even after, been assigned only to a DIG. Therefore this promotion was secured despite there being no vacancies in the cadre. The cadre of senior DIGs then became five since the officer lying ahead of the officer who thus secured a promotion, rushed to the president and argued that he would lose his position in the line of seniority unless he was also promoted. The largesse of president Wijetunga bestowing promotions disregarding standards, rules and procedures of a service knew no limits.
POSTSCRIPT (this is not part of the book)
Responding to a perceptive review of the book, “Perils of a Profession” by Shamindra Ferdinando in the daily “Island” paper, veteran retired Senior DIG HMGB Kotakadeniya had pointed out in the issue of Jan. 20, 2021 that when DB Wijetunga was president, the DIG cadre was increased from 19 to over 40, and not 30, as stated in my book. He had also pointed out that such an increase in the cadre was possibly done to elevate Senior Superintendent of Police Mahinda Balasuriya who was lying 44th in the line of seniority, to the rank of DIG.
Never in the history of the police had the cadre of DIGs been increased in such a manner. This political decision was shocking. It also shed light on how a self seeking officer can abuse and bend standards at will and acquire benefits when two factors are in place: first, when enjoying a post close to the head of state/government; second, when the head of the service fails to preserve the required balance between the interests of the service and those of officers.
The usual tactic of those who aspire to steal others’ places in the line of seniority and become DIG is to overtake a few officers through the influence of patrons. Balasuriya could not adopt this ruse because he was very junior, being 44th in the line of seniority, with 25 SSPs/SPs ahead of him. Climbing over such large numbers would have earned the ire of a large number of officers facing displacement. He therefore appears to have used his position to persuade the president to enlarge the DIG cadre from 19 to 44 to reach him.
But before doing so in such a sweeping manner, President Wijetunga had first invited the views of Senior DIG Kotakadeniya whom he knew, and who was serving in a key position in police headquarters, whether DIGs could be posted to police ranges as “Welfare” DIGs. SDIG Kotakadeniya had said in all sincerity that such an arrangement would have been superfluous and therefore absurd. Had he agreed to the proposal, the president may have justified the inflation on the score that the service required a large number of DIGs to supervise welfare arrangements.
Having failed in this subtle bid, the order for the enlargement of the DIG cadre far out of proportion to necessity to accommodate Balasuriya appears to have been brazenly imposed on the police service by President Wijetunga. The most reasonable inference that could be drawn was that there was not only clear collusion between the President and Balasuriya, but that Snr DIG Kotakadeniya had apparently been victimized by being shifted out of his key post for his dissent. An honest, professional opinion had resulted in persecution. Frank de Silva was IGP when the massive inflation of the DIG cadre occurred, resulting in Balasuriya being the beneficiary. I am thankful to the retired Senior DIG for providing the backdrop to the subtle plan. They was truly “scenes behind the scenes”.
The organisation of any institution, particularly the police, has to resemble a pyramidal structure. It has to be narrow at the top, as the IGP and his deputies (DIGs) would be numerically few, being vested with the task of coordinating large bodies of men and large areas or territory than SPs and ASPs relatively junior in rank. The higher the rank, the role of coordination of work would entail far greater territory and oversight. The responsibility to determine numbers in senior ranks rests with the IGP and his deputies, and should be underscored by specific criteria and standards. As a result of what Balasuriya unjustly acquired, the cadre of DIGs enlarged to a point disproportionate to the strength of the numbers in ranks below them.
Consequently, many DIGs’ had to perform “coordination functions” of SSPs and SPs overlooking police divisions. To have called such a unit in the range of a DIG would have been a misnomer. The excess committed by Balasuriya was analogous to a bottle where the mouth was wider in diameter than the girth at it’s center. Such a distorted shape cannot be ideal to hold water or anything else. As a result of there being far too many DIGs than necessary, vacancies for promotion were also galore, and some SSPs reached DIG rank and DIGs, Senior DIG rank, without being adequately tried and tested in their previous ranks. Could this be one reason why the IGP, senior DIGS and DIGs had failed to react with responsibility and maturity in the face of intelligence received from India about plans by the NTJ to commit terror strikes on Easter Sunday in 2019? Many of those who acquired benefits also displayed greater loyalties to their patrons rather than to the service.
The sudden expansion in the DIG and Senior DIG cadre between 1989 and 1995 out of proportion to necessity may have been one of the major contributory factors toward the gradual decline of police standards. In fact the staggering increase of DIGs on a political diktat, saw implementation without even a discussion in police headquarters with officers in the highest echelons. The cornerstones or fundamental prerequisites which help any institution to prosper are first the organization’s vision, concepts and goals; second, the identification of the ideal administrative structure to run it and third, the posting of competent persons to the senior slots in the structure.
Once the structure loses shape, and corresponding postings lose meaning or purpose, the “out of shape” organization becomes far less effective. If the excess or surfeit of DIGs had an adverse impact on performance, the remedy would obviously have been a drastic reduction in the DIG cadre. But this was not possible because once promoted, an officer cannot be reduced or demoted, unless for disciplinary reasons. The harm caused to the service had therefore been irreversible. Knowing the capricious nature of humans, an institution such as the police should hold the balance between self seeking officers one the one hand, and the interests and well being of the service on the other. The interests of the service should always predominate or prevail over devious designs of self-seekers.
This balance has to be maintained by the IGP. His abdication of this responsibility would allow self-seekers to abuse standards at will. The submission and surrender by police heads to demands from the politicl establishment for arbitrary cadre increases and backdoor promotions contrasted sharply with what prevails int he the armed services. Their chiefs always held the policy in regard to senior cadre and promotions as their exclusive preserve.
The undesirable process had it’s roots in the days of IGP Ernest Perera in 1987 when the Ministry of Defence commenced holding interviews among senior superintendents to select DIGs. It was a move to wrest the authority previously enjoyed by the IGP to nominate SSPs to fill the vacancies in the DIG Cadre. Submission without a murmur to this arrangement paved the way for greater encroachment.
Features
Waiting for a Democratic Opposition
by Tisaranee Gunasekara
“The future is cloth waiting to be cut.”
Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes)
The point had been made often enough. Without a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, there wouldn’t have been an Anura Kumara Dissanayake presidency. For the NPP/JVP to go from three percent to 42 percent in four plus years, the system had to be broken from within by the very leaders entrusted with its care by a majority of voters. Gotabaya Rajapaksa achieved that feat in ways inconceivable even by his most stringent critics (who in their sane minds could have imagined the fertilizer fiasco?).
But President Dissanayake’s victory has two other fathers: Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa. President Dissanayake won because the competition was so uninspiring. It was more a case of Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe losing rather than President Dissanayake winning. While the NPP’s rise was meteoric, President Dissanayake failed to gain 50 percent mark of the vote. He is Sri Lanka’s first minority president.
As the IHP polling revealed continuously, all major presidential candidates had negative net favourability ratings; they were more unpopular than popular. The election was a contest to pick the least unpopular leader. Thus the winner’s inability to clear the 50 percent line.
This situation hasn’t changed qualitatively in the run up to parliamentary election. According to the latest IHP poll, President Dissanayake’s net favourability rating is still negative, which means more people regard him unfavourably than favourably. He and Harini Amarasuriya are at minus 10, the least unpopular of leaders. Sajith Premadasa at minus 31, Ranil Wickremesinghe even lower, lag behind not just President Dissanayake and Ms. Amarasuriya, but also the now retired Ali Sabry.
The NPP/JVP is likely to clock a bigger win at the parliamentary election even so, because the oppositional space is clogged by Mr. Wickremesinghe and Mr. Premadasa, with the Rajapaksas hanging on to the seams. The same actors representing the same unattractive futures. Compared to these prospects, a Harini Amarasuriya premiership would seem alluring to most Sri Lankans (she is an excellent choice, in any case, for the job).
President Dissanayake has avoided any obvious missteps in his first month. He is treading cautiously, especially in the economic arena, opting not even to tweak Ranil Wickremesinghe’s deal with a group of ISB holders, despite some unfavourable – and precedent-making – clauses such as giving bondholders the option of changing the law underpinning them from New York to England or Delaware; New York is about to pass a bill giving debtor nations greater bargaining power. He is no Gotabaya, at least economics.
In Sri Lanka, it is normal for the party that wins the presidency to win the parliament as well. In 2010, after Mahinda Rajapaksa won the presidential election, the opposition unity fractured. The UNP contested on its own and the JVP contested in an alliance with the defeated presidential candidate, Sarath Fonseka. In the presidential election, Mr. Fonseka had polled 4.2 million. At the parliamentary election, the main oppositional party, the UNP, polled only 2.4 million. Even after the votes for the Tamil and Muslim parties and the JVP/Fonseka headed DNA were factored in, this amounted to an erosion on a massive scale – 1.2 million votes.
In 2019, Sajith Premadasa polled 5.6 million votes. Yet his newly formed SJB polled a mere 2.8 million at the 2020 parliamentary election. Once the votes given to Tamil and Muslim parties and the UNP were factored in, this amounted to a bigger erosion, over 2 million votes.
Even the Rajapaksas could not buck this general trend in 2015. The UNP won the general election despite the much vaunted Mahinda Sulanga.
So the NPP/JVP winning on November 14 would be the norm. The only question is about the extent of that victory: would it be limited to a simple majority or something bigger, close to a two thirds?
A simple majority would be necessary to run an effective government. But a near two thirds victory would be a tragedy. Every time a Sri Lankan party won so big, disaster ensued in 1956, 1970, 1977, 2010 and 2020. Too much power not just corrupts but also stupefies. A future NPP/JVP government might be able to avoid the (financial) corruption trap. But if burdened with a huge majority the government will not be able to evade a blunting of senses, of growing blindness and deafness to public distress, of an addling of wits. Already, future ministers are shrugging off price hikes in such staples as rice, calling them normal. They might be but the dismissive attitude hints that the rot of indifference to public pain might have begun to set in already. In the absence of a strong, principled, and effective opposition, the rot will grow faster, to the detriment of all Sri Lankans, including compass enthusiasts.
Feudal ethos and tyrannical practice
To be fully functional, a bourgeois democratic system needs bourgeois democratic parties. Unfortunately, most Sri Lankan parties are feudalist in ethos and tyrannical in practice. We have a history of leaders treating their parties as private or familial property. The Rajapaksas are the most egregious example but they didn’t start the habit, merely took it to a new low. Senanayakes and Bandaranaikes preceded the Rajapaksas, both families treating dynastic succession as the norm.
When he became the leader of the UNP, J.R. Jayewardene made a clean break with that feudalist ethos. He delinked the UNP from familial politics and opened it to new blood, providing the space for the creation of a line of brilliant second level leaders. In 1977, he allowed the candidates for the upcoming parliamentary election to choose a steering committee to manage the campaign (in a secret vote). The man who topped that internal poll was made the deputy leader, Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Had Mr. Jayewardene won a simple majority in 1977, history might have turned out differently and better. But he won a five sixth majority. It didn’t take long for hubris to set in, making a man of undeniable intellect commit a bunch of avoidable mistakes and unnecessary crimes. And having obtained undated letters of resignation from all parliamentarians, Mr. Jayewardene ran the party like a dictator. Unlike the Bandaranaikes and Senanayakes, he didn’t crown his offspring. Instead, he turned himself into an uncrowned king.
Ranil Wickremesinghe opted for a dictatorial leadership style from day one. He gave himself the title The Leader, changed the party constitution to make it literally impossible to effect leadership changes, marginalised potential challengers and promoted untalented loyalists. He slowly abandoned the J.R./Premadasa UNP’s anti-feudal ethos, turning the UNP into a party where preferment was given to spouses, siblings and offspring of politicians.
As president, Mr. Wickremesinghe prevented the economy’s freefall and achieved a turn around. The NPP government’s decision to go the same route, at least for now, is a tacit admission of the success President Wickremesinghe achieved under extremely difficult circumstances. Yet, his me-or-deluge attitude to the UNP continued and continues. As president, instead of allowing a new young leadership to rebuild the party, he kept control of the UNP via discredited and deeply unpopular yes men. After his humiliating defeat, he clings to the party leadership.
Sajith Premadasa in this department is a veritable Wickremesinghe clone. He has suffered three national defeats, losing the presidency twice and the parliament once. Yet, like Mr. Wickremesinghe, he seems determined to cling to the SJB leadership even at the cost of running the party to the ground. He is also allowing his family into politics. Consequently, the SJB too has become a party unsuited to a bourgeois democratic system, feudal in ethos, dictatorial in style.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidency because the JVP understood its own un-electability and created a more electable cocoon as cover, the NPP. Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe are incapable of even such minimal evolution. Like the woolly mammoths who couldn’t adapt to climate changes and were hunted extensively, their inability to adapt to the new political climate created by the NPP/JVP victory would drive their own parties to extinction. With no opposition to keep it on its toes, the government would succumb to hubris sooner rather than later.
The rest would be history. All too familiar history.
Somethings new, one thing old
What if J.R. Jayewardene did not commit the deadly mistake of banning the JVP on totally fabricated charges?
The JVP entered the democratic mainstream in 1977. From then till about 1983, the JVP was non-racist, trying to reach out to Tamils along the lines of class solidarity. It also treated the SLFP as its main enemy, and dreamted of becoming the main opposition (thus the famous lecture series: The Journey’s end for the SLFP). The JVP leadership maintained contact with some government leaders (especially Prime Minister Premadasa). When the opposition launched the general strike of July 1980, the JVP criticised the move and stayed out of it (the strike failed and the government sacked 60,000 striking workers). At a personal level, Mr. Wijeweera got married and started raising a family. These were hardly the actions of a party or a leader harbouring insurgent intentions.
Mr. Wijeweera’s abysmal performance in the 1982 election created a crisis in the JVP. The party’s reversion to a more Sinhala-oriented line was arguably a reaction to the shock of defeat. Yet going the armed revolution path was never on the JVP’s agenda even then. Had President Jayewardene not extended the life of the existing parliament (in which his UNP had a five sixth majority), the JVP would have contested the next general election (scheduled for 1983), won a few seats and settled down into standard parliamentary existence of reform and compromise.
Not only did President Jayewardene postpone parliamentary polls. He also banned the JVP. It was that criminal error which led to the second JVP insurgency (the insurgency’s racist, brutally intolerant nature was the JVP’s choice alone).
Perhaps President Dissanayake is where Mr. Wijeweera would have been had parliamentary election not been postponed and the JVP not been banned. Unfortunately, the JVP’s commendable evolution on matters economic has not been paralleled in the ethnic problem arena. The NPP was remarkably reticent on the subject in its tome-like presidential manifesto. Listening to the JVP general secretary Tilvin Silva indicates the reason. Behind a non-racist façade, the JVP is as regressive about the Tamil question today, as it was in the past.
“After 1970, our major political parties became provincialized gradually,” Mr. Silva said in a recent TV interview when asked about the NPP’s unimpressive electoral performance in the North and the East. “This allowed new forces to come into being in the North, the East, and the plantations… Tamil parties in the North, Muslim parties in the East, plantation parties in the plantations… So these parties decided on how to vote. For example, the people of the North did not vote freely. They voted according to what the TNA decided.”
Not a word about how the supposedly national parties alienated Tamils via discriminatory policies and violence actions, nothing about the disenfranchisement of Upcountry Tamils, Sinhala Only, the race riot of 1958, the standardization of university admissions in 1971 or the brutal attack on the Tamil Language Conference in Jaffna in 1974. Nothing of that history exists in the JVP’s universe, according to Mr. Silva. He admits to the existence of a language problem. The rest is reduced to water, markets, schools and education.
Perhaps the most telling is how he explains the land issue. “During the war some left their lands. Then they couldn’t return. Those who stayed back grabbed the land. Now when the owner goes back someone else is in occupation. So there’s a fight. So the government must intervene, set up land kachcheris and solve the problem.” Not a word about the continued military occupation 15 years after the war ended, the military’s ongoing attempts to grab more land or the road closures which hamper ordinary life. So like the Rajapaksas.
Mr. Silva accuses the Tamil leaders of talking about the 13th Amendment and devolution to protect their own interests. “But people on the ground don’t want 13; they don’t want devolution of power…” Even if that argument is granted, what about the thousands of acres occupied by the military? According to the JVP’s reading, do the Tamil people want their land back from the military, or not? Do they want their roads opened or not? Do they want justice for their dead or not? If the JVP cannot understand those basic demands and yearnings, if the best solution it can offer is administrative decentralisation (under a de facto military occupation), the NPP won’t make much headway in creating a Sri Lankan nation. If Sri Lanka’s road ahead lies between a Sinhala government and a feudalist autocratic (and ineffective opposition), the next five years are unlikely to be all that different from the last 76.
(First published in Groundviews)
Features
School bags
(Excerpted from Life is a Frolic by Goolbai Gunasekara)
The lives of school going children these days is so far removed from mine that kids of today may almost be living on another planet. Customs and attitudes today are weird. I watched with open mouthed amazement as granddaughter KitKat got ready for school.
First, she put her swimsuit into her school bag. This was followed by a slightly damp towel plus an extra shirt. A board game and a cassette were flung in after all this.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” I ask somewhat bewildered by the contents.
“Oh yes,” she added her Tuck Shop pocket money. “Nothing else?” I inquired silkily.
KitKat distrusts politeness from me. She is more comfortable with a yell.
“Er… like what?”
“A school text perhaps? An exercise book or two. You DO intend to do some writing in school don’t you?”
She looks affronted but repacks her bag.
Now let’s take my day at Bishop’s far removed from the present. One never forgets the routine and discipline of parents half a century ago as opposed to the apparent laxity of today.
We were woken at 5 a.m. Bags were packed the previous night with parents reminding us of the necessary chore every five minutes.
“Have you packed your school bag?”
The answer was always yes. We dared give no other. And what went into this school bag? Only school related stuff of course. Parents checked. The parental grapevine was abuzz with the latest news that Lady ChatterIay’s Lover had been found in a grade 11 school bag. It was rumoured that Sister Gabrielle, our tall and gracious Principal, had looked at the novel and had to be revived with smelling salts. Bishop’s was an Anglican school but a few Anglican nuns were always around to be shocked by modernity.
On the dot of 6.30 a.m. if Father was in Sri Lanka in between lecture tours, he personally saw me off on my bike, from the back verandah. Su, my younger sister, was perched atop our own rickshaw parked alongside the car in the garage. Between puller Murthy and Su, was a running battle. Father knew this.
“Now, not a WORD to Murthy except a polite one,” he would caution sternly. Su tossed her pretty head. She enjoyed the rickshaw ride with two or three boys cycling alongside making appreciative comments. Murthy did not approve of silly romance. He raced from Rosmead Place to St Bridget’s at a speed Roger Bannister might have envied. Su fumed. It was just up one road and down the other after all.
Parents did not have cars on the ready to drop us. Many of us cycled – especially those who lived within a hoo gana distance from the school.
“It’s raining mother. Can Weerasuriya drop me?”
My Father did not like the thought of the car getting wet and remaining wet the whole day. He had no problem with me getting wet so the answer was predictable.
” Wait till the rain ceases and make a dash for it.”
Traffic was at a minimum. ‘Making a dash’ for anything was extremely easy. Besides which, one could always make use of a slightly damp look.
“Miss I got wet coming to school,” we would tell our Form teachers. A realistic little cough further enforced the idea that we were sickening for colds.
“Run to the sick room right now dear,” said a concerned mistress. She didn’t want us breathing germs all over the class for the next few days. Properly executed that visit to the sickroom could be dragged out to cover two periods.
Then there was the ‘bag search’. Unless they were School Prefects, girls were not considered particularly trustworthy. What am I saying. They were considered totally untrustworthy by every member of the school staff. Ergo, bags were searched once a week for ‘undesirable fiction.’
Of course, we read undesirable fiction but we had the sense not to leave these exciting tomes lying round in our school bags. There were other things – too sacred to even mention, which we tucked into our bras and discussed with bated breath. These were romantic missives which class beauties like Chereen received regularly and were delivered by help karayas like myself with no boyfriend of my own.
Granddaughter KitKat views my school days with disbelief.
“How did you stand it Achchi? Nothing happened in your time.” Ah but that’s what she thinks. We certainly had our moments.
(Life is a Frolic is available at leading booksellers)
Features
The NPP: A Month in Power
By Uditha Devapriya
It has been a month since Anura Kumara Dissanayake assumed the presidency, a month since the NPP claimed its place in history as the first party from outside of the political establishment to win a presidential election in Sri Lanka. Two weeks from now, the NPP will face another election, this time parliamentary. Depending on the results it gets, we will know whether the people approve of the NPP’s actions over the last four weeks and if they want it to continue. The NPP’s call for a powerful government is, in itself, not alarming: no government can survive without a majority in parliament. Yet it will need to convince Sri Lankans that it is the party they need – the party not of power, but of change.
Paradoxically, that it hails from a non-elite background may prove to be more a challenge than a strength – and I am not talking about the parliamentary election only. In 2022, the NPP sealed its reputation as a credible voice of the aragalaya. It received the backing of sections of civil society, the youth, and other electorates, including the Sinhala peasantry and middle-class, which had voted for the SLFP or, more specifically, the Rajapaksas. It was no easy feat weaning them away from their traditional strongholds – the JVP receiving less than 50 percent of the vote shows that they did not totally succeed at this.
Yet now that it has absorbed these electorates, it must speak to them and act in line with their aspirations. In itself, this should not be too difficult a task. The NPP’s mandate, in its simplest formulation, is to relieve the suffering of the many. How it does this is left to be seen, but over the coming months, it will have to signal to people that it is capable of seeing that task through. However, it must contend with the fact that these electorates, so to speak, do not exactly align with each other. What NGOs demands, for instance, is not what farmers in Anuradhapura or Hambantota have in mind, or prioritise.
This partly explains the government’s confused response to the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). In the run up to the election, the NPP clearly stated that the PTA had to go. It did not explain how it would do this when in power, but it indicated that it would abolish the Act. Civil society favours abolition; nationalists, including those who prioritise security, from the military, probably do not. While promises and pledges need to be kept, regardless of the consequences of certain decisions, the NPP now has several groups to satisfy. Obviously, it feels it needs to make concessions, or adjustments, to some of its policies.
The NPP’s, and the JVP’s, shift to the centre was evident even before the election. Going by some of its recent appointments, including of corporate bigwigs, it is targeting the middle ground in almost everything it does. As Ramindu Perera points out in a recent analysis, the JVP shifted course after two attempts (2010 and 2015) of supporting common opposition candidates. In 2019, it framed itself as the alternative party – to the UNP and the SLFP-SLPP. However, without the Sinhalese middle-class vote, it could not win the race. It thus had to shift course somewhat in the next few years.
It is significant that Dilith Jayaweera’s comments on the suitability of certain candidates in the NPP and his questioning of their national(ist) credentials has led, not to a blowback from the NPP, but rather a shift within the NPP over the issues he addresses. The pro-Rajapaksa nationalist crowd were fond of demeaning the JVP as unpatriotic, of depicting them a group of radicals hell-bent on erasing Sri Lanka’s Buddhist heritage. Nothing that JVP MPs have said or done over the last three, four years warranted such criticisms – and to its credit, the JVP itself struck back at them. However, upon coming to power, the NPP has disappointed those who thought it would undermine Sri Lanka’s culture and way of life.
On closer inspection, of course, none of this should come as a surprise. In 2005, the JVP backed Mahinda Rajapaksa’s candidacy based on their position on the war: like Rajapaksa, they supported a military solution. When Rajapaksa, being the shrewd politician that he is, weaned away the JVP’s electorate from the JVP, the latter positioned itself in opposition to him and his family. Towards 2010, they began rebranding themselves as the party of anti-corruption, even while fundamentally supporting the government’s campaign against the LTTE. By 2015, with an upsurge in anti-Rajapaksa sentiment among even SLFP supporters and the youth, they squared the circle by both campaigning against the Rajapaksas and not explicitly endorsing the common candidate, Maithripala Sirisena.
The latter decision benefited the NPP immensely when Sirisena, with the UNP under Ranil Wickremesinghe, undermined the yahapalana government’s mandate. However, given the upsurge in security concerns after the 2019 Easter attacks, and the Joint Opposition’s deft mobilisation of nationalist sentiment against the yahapalana regime’s supine liberalism – represented not by Ranil Wickremesinghe, but rather Mangala Samaraweera – it could not seize the moment. A few NPP supporters at the time told me that they decided to support Gotabaya Rajapaksa instead of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, for tactical reasons – not because they did not trust Dissanayake, but because they felt he could not win.
This brings up another point. Liberal civil society always had an uneasy relationship with the JVP. They had an uneasy relationship with Ranil Wickremesinghe as well, but although Wickremesinghe’s liberal credentials were suspect even during the ceasefire, they preferred to overlook his limitations and promote his peacemaker image. They were much less lenient with the JVP. English newspapers from that period, especially those aligned with the UNP, are chock-a-block with editorials and columns censuring the JVP’s stance on the war and its militant past. Indeed, the JVP was blackguarded every week, almost every day, particularly after it received ministries from Chandrika Kumaratunga.
The situation has clearly changed today. Civil society, even if one includes only NGOs and the development sector in Colombo, is not what it was back then. The older, genteel liberal intelligentsia has given way to a more vocal, articulate, bilingual activist class. They may be funded – as much of civil society is, and as the aragalaya itself was – but they are more attuned to the NPP’s radical-centrist vision than the fossils of the UNP. Yet on certain issues, they remain as steadfast as their predecessors were. And one of those issues, which the NPP has effectively blotted its copybook with, is the PTA – which young and old activists, from Colombo and elsewhere, continue to deride. For the youngest generation out there on the streets, the PTA brings back memories of arrests during the aragalaya. For older generations, including my parents’, it brings back memories of the war.
The Prevention of Terrorism Act, thus, is not something that can be magically swept aside or forgotten. One can argue that it is unfair to expect the NPP to do overnight what successive regimes have failed to achieve for the last 76 years. Yet promises on issues that unify several electorates, and several generations, cannot be backtracked – and if they are, the NPP runs the risk of losing face, as it somewhat has. Social media is of course by no means an accurate gauge of public opinion, but judging from NPP supporters who have taken to Twitter to berate the party over its communique on the PTA, it is clear that the government needs to clarify its stance immediately – or else.
The NPP, like other parties, is evolving. It has never been the governing party, but that does not mean it has no experience in governing. Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Vijitha Herath were both Cabinet Ministers under Chandrika Kumaratunga. In choosing Harini Amarasuriya as Prime Minister, they have broken several glass ceilings. I believe that if the government is to keep up this momentum, it needs to stick to its manifesto. Of course, on certain issues – notably the IMF agreement – it has room to moderate itself, as it already has. Yet on more crucial topics, such as the PTA, which after all has been used against the JVP, it will have to stick to what it said and what it pledged.
For more than 30 years, Ranil Wickremesinghe played the part of the ultimate provocateur in national politics. Today, the NPP is in power. The NPP does not have the cynicism that Wickremesinghe and the Royalist Regency do. Yet that cynicism is not the preserve of that Regency. It can be appropriated by any group, and it can be misused – as Wickremesinghe did in 2024, and John Kotelawala did in 1956. The Royalist Regency is part of the “Deep State” in Sri Lanka. If the NPP is serious about breaking it, it needs to reread its manifesto and take stock of the people who supported it – and brought it to power.
Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at .
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