Features
Politics and Administrators in the 20th Century
The Kandy Man – An Autobiography, Volume one (1939-1977),
By Sarath Amunugam. Vijitha Yapa Publications (2020).548 pages
Reviewed by Leelananda De Silva
Introduction
In two years, Sri Lanka should celebrate 75 years since independence. During this period, there have been dramatic social, cultural and economic changes. The British inheritance is fading fast, whether it be in Government and administration, politics and constitution making, in education and in foreign relations. It is time for the university academics or some others to consider writing the history of Sri Lanka these last 75 years and capture the momentous changes that have occurred. Whether that history will be written in Sinhalese, Tamil or English is yet to be seen. Sarath Amunugama’s volume is an important building block in constructing that history.
Amunugama is one of the outstanding personalities of Sri Lanka in our generation. An academic, top administrator and leading politician, he has played an important role in Sri Lankan public life. He has lived in and served the country in an era of rapid change. Amunugama is one of the very few members of the Ceylon Civil Service to have moved into high level politics after 1948. The others were C. Suntheralingam, C. Sittampalam, Walwin. A. de Silva, Ronnie de Mel and Nissanka Wijeyaratne. The volume under review is only the first part of a three-volume autobiography. Broadly, the current volume addresses three broad areas – his education at Trinity College, Kandy in the 1940s and at the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya in the 1950s; as a high level district administrator in the 1960s; and at the centre of Government as Director of Information in the 1970s. He has straddled the demarcations between administration and politics with ease and he has worked with politicians of all hues comfortably.
Trinity College, Kandy
The first chapter of this volume deals with his school days at Trinity College, Kandy. He offers us a wide ranging picture of Trinity and also of Kandy of that time. He describes College academic life, sports and cadeting and student debates with other schools, especially the girls’ schools in Kandy. Regrettably, there is no reference to the subjects they debated about. Amunugama has great admiration for some of his teachers. Hillary Abeyaratne was one of his heroes, and others were R.R. Breckenridge, Willy Hensman and Gordon Burrows. He greatly admired his Principal, Norman Walter, probably one of the last school principals of British origin in Sri Lanka. Walter wrote to the Vice Chancellor of the University requesting that Amunugama be admitted to the University although he was underage, a request that could not be granted.
Our generation, whether it be from schools in Colombo or Galle, knew of Trinity largely because of a famous Principal, A.G. Fraser and a British teacher and preacher, Rev. W.S. Senior, who wrote some delightful, haunting poetry about Kandy. Amunugama’s story of Trinity could have been better if he dealt with the history of Trinity and the influence the College had on the Kandyan middle and upper classes. Trinity was a great inheritance from British days.
The University at Peradeniya
In the 1950s, the University at Peradeniya (part of the University of Ceylon) was unique in the history of universities in Sri Lanka. It had only about a thousand students, and the faculties were almost entirely of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. There was no Physical Science, Engineering or Medicine. This lasted for only a decade. The undergraduates lived in halls of residence not far from each other. All this tended to make the university a friendly and even homely place, with friendships across disciplines and residencies.
Amunugama seems to have enjoyed the university in his four years there and was fully engaged in its academic, political and cultural life. He was active in various groups, especially with E.R. Sarachchandra and Siri Gunasinghe. This was the time of Maname, a Sarachchandra play which revolutionized Sri Lankan drama and with which Amunugama was closely associated. He offers us an excellent picture of the cultural activities of the university at that time. This was also a time when undergraduates studied in the English medium and yet Sinhala culture was flourishing.
He offers us a fascinating picture of the Sociology department at the university in its early days. S.J. Thambiah and Gananath Obeysekara were students and lecturers. Later on, they were to become world class academics, teaching at Princeton and Harvard in the U.S.A. Laksiri Jayasuriya and Ralph Pieris were other leading academics. There are engaging pen portraits of these academics. Amunugama appears to be an admirer of Ralph Pieris, who was his teacher. He tells us the story of Jennings’s hesitation in setting up departments of Sinhala culture and sociology as these subjects were strange to the Oxbridge traditions from which Jennings had emerged. He also tells us of the differences that Martin Wickramasinghe had with Jennings’ approach to Sinhala cultural studies and also of the pioneering role played by Professor Ratnasuriya who died young. The volume also offers us some insight into university politics but there is no space to get into detail here. However it must be noted that Amunugama was President of the Union Society at Peradeniya during his time there. Overall, the volume offers an engaging picture of the University at Peradeniya of the 1950s.
District Administration
Since Amunugama entered the Ceylon Civil Service in 1963 (the CCS was abolished soon after), the next seven years of his career was in district administration. He served as AGA and Additional GA in Galle, Ratnapura and Kandy districts. Amunugama’s academic background was ideal to deal with the range of issues that he had to face in the districts. His 200-page story of his engagement in district administration reminds me of Leonard Woolf’s volume “Growing 1904 – 1911” (the second volume of his five volume autobiography, published in the 1960s), which is about his seven years in Ceylon and when he was engaged in district administration. Unlike in imperial days, the district administrator in the 1960s had to deal with politicians and a democratic government. They were no longer the rulers like Leonard Woolf.
The young Civil Servant’s interests were so expansive that he was in a position to fruitfully interact in the area of agriculture and lands and irrigation, culture, the arts and the temples and with the politics of these districts. In the Galle district, where he served for nearly three years, he established a good relationship with the legendary W. Dahanayake, MP for Galle and his Minister of Home Affairs in later years. Amunugama was immersed in the cultural life of the Galle district and he had a friendly relationship with the DROs of the area. When in Galle, he became very familiar with the backgrounds of two of the great cultural figures of our time – Martin Wickramasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekara, visiting many of the villages and the scenes depicted in their novels.
In the Kandy district, Amunugama was again very involved in the political and cultural life of the district. He initiated the concept of mobile kacheries which enabled the villagers, instead of coming to Kandy, to have their problems addressed near their own villages. He also initiated a more effective approach to increase the productive capacity of farmers. Local village level officials who should assist the farmers were not living in the villages they were officially attached to, but were commuting to their own homes. Amunugama started the practice of giving these field officers lands of their own, so that they will live with the farmers and work with them. He has many stories to relate about his relationships with the politicians of the day like Anuruddha Ratwatte in Kandy. In the Ratnapura district, he was deeply engaged in land development in the Udawalawe and Chandrika weva colonization schemes.
Overall, the chapters entitled “The Ceylon Civil Service” and “Government Agent”, are in effect addressing issues in district administration. It’s a matter of some curiosity why he titled these two chapters in this way instead of making them chapters on district administration. By the time he was AGA and Additional GA and serving in the districts, the CCS had been abolished. The CCS lasted only the first year of his public service career. Since that time, he and other ex-CCS officers were members of the Ceylon Administrative Service (CAS).
I understand the hesitations of some of the ex-CCS personnel to use the new CAS nomenclature. However, difficult it is for them, to call themselves CCS after its abolition in 1963, is like Grama Sevakas calling themselves village headmen and DROs calling themselves Mudliyars. These were denominations of an imperial era. Amunugama tells us that when their batch joined the CCS, on their first day, the then Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the CCS, Shirley Amarasinghe addressed them on how to behave. Interestingly, within one year of that day, Shirley Amarasinghe (who was only 50 years old at the time) himself left the CCS and joined the Ceylon Overseas Service to go as High Commissioner to India.
Director of Information
Amunugama moved into the centre of Government when he was appointed Director of Information in 1968 when Dudley Senanayake was Prime Minister. He continued his tenure under Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike when she became Prime Minister in 1970. This is an assignment which suited Amunugama’s academic, administrative and political skills. His story of these years is compulsive reading and there are entertaining stories of politics at the highest level. At a young age, he was able to interact with the top politicians of his day. During this period, he also engaged in what looks to be his pastime – international travel – which he has done extensively over the years. In fact, the volume has many paragraphs and stories of his foreign travels including a long spell in Canada reading for a postgraduate degree.
As Director of Information, he was privy to much of the politics of his time. There are fascinating stories of the tensions between the LSSP and the SLFP when they were in coalition in the 1970s. There are engaging portraits of R. Premadasa when he was Minister of Local Government. Who could have known that Premadasa, when he was Deputy Minister of Local Government, had a very high regard for his Minister M. Tiruchelvam at the time when the UNP had formed a coalition with the Federal Party.
The writer relates the story of how the State Film Corporation was shifted from his ministry to the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs, where I had to handle its affairs. There are many other vignettes of his time as Director of Information of top politicians like Dudley Senanayake, Mrs. Bandaranaike, N.M. Perera and many others.
Conclusion
To conclude my review, let me refer to the long Preface of this book which addresses questions of writing biographies and autobiographies. Many biographies in Sri Lanka of leading politicians are largely hagiographies, praising them no end. This was the pattern of autobiographical writing too. In the early 1920s, there was a dramatic change in the art of biographical writing. Lytton Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury group (a close friend of Leonard and Virginia Woolf) wrote his “Eminent Victorians” which changed the art of biography. Of his chosen few biographical topics, which included Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, he wrote about these leading icons of that generation, warts and all, bringing them down a peg or two.
This introduced a new form of biography, which was more investigative, critical and more true to the lives of their subjects. Autobiographies can never be swallowed whole. To paraphrase Robert Burns, the great Scottish poet, no power has given us the gift “to see ourselves as others see us.” That is the inherent weakness of autobiography. Amunugama’s first volume of a three volume autobiography is an outstanding work in its field, and is a great addition to our knowledge of our contemporary times. It was a pleasure to read.
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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