Features

Turning points and dead-ends

Published

4 years ago

2021/11/21

by Uditha Devapriya

After more than a year of holding back, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya has finally showed the government the proverbial finger. This is the biggest mass rally a political party has held in a long time. That it evokes memories of the February 2015 rally in Nugegoda only underlies its significance. At a time of deep political and social crisis, such movements can only bring to the streets a sweeping tide of discontent. Sceptical comments by Colombo’s upper classes and left-liberal blocs aside, that tide can’t be stopped or held back.

It is hence up to the SJB, with other Opposition parties, to seize the momentum. Whether or not it will do this depends on how far it can revisit and challenge old ideas, adapt to the new normal, and engage with groups hit hardest by the pandemic.

In characteristic élan and aplomb, Dayan Jayatilleka calls the SJB’s rally “the turning point”, presumably of the government’s disastrous post-2019 downward spiral. The timing couldn’t have been more symbolic. This week marks not just the SLPP regime’s second anniversary, but Mahinda Rajapaksa’s 76th birthday as well as the seventh anniversary of Maithripala Sirisena’s walk-out from his second government. These do not bode well for an administration that came to power on a sweeping mandate and, at least on paper, still enjoys a two-thirds majority in parliament. It remains to be seen which way the wind will blow in the event of a local government election, but the writing is already on the wall: there’s dissent and despair smudged all over. Obviously, the government can’t be complacent forever.

What is significant is that it is the social groups and classes which the Rajapaksas counted among their strongest supporters who have turned the other way. The fertiliser imbroglio is a deeply divisive issue, and in the absence of scientific evidence it is difficult to comment on whether shifting from chemical varieties (inorganics) was a good idea. While environmentalists call it the most progressive decision the SLPP has ever made, agricultural experts are clearly opposed. We are yet to see debates between activists and agriculturalists (though the latter have had their say), but we are seeing protests by farmers, almost everywhere. Indeed, none less than Wimal Weerawansa, hardly the sort of politico you’d expect to make an incendiary statement about the government, has come out against its fertiliser policy, urging it to reconsider its decision.

It is against such a backdrop that Dayan Jayatilleka has cautioned the SJB against adopting a resistance strategy that places emphasis on urban elements over peasant interests. This is something no political analyst here has advocated, and it says a lot about liberal critics of the regime that while they fault the Opposition for not doing enough, they are quiet about what the SJB, or for that matter the JVP, must do. Dr Dayan, on the other hand, has more or less outlined tactics and strategies based on winning back electorates which a) the SLPP and the SLFP used to court, but have alienated and b) the UNP, the SJB’s parent party, alienated for a quarter-century. In other words, his argument is two-fold: get such groups on the SJB’s side, and ensure the SJB reworks its ideas and escapes its UNP past.

By all accounts, Dr Dayan’s strategy is well thought-out, even productive. No one has seriously considered the peasantry until now. This is because while the urban middle-class has figured in party manifestos, the subaltern classes – what Partha Chatterjee once called the “dangerous classes” – have remained, at best, a set of fringe groups whose relevance to mainstream political outfits crops up only during elections. The upper and middle classes, on the other hand, are more sensitive interests, whose choices determine not just the course but also the destiny of political parties and organisations. This is the same middle-class that the SLPP tapped into, and won in the hundreds of thousands, two years ago.

In the face of deteriorating economic conditions, an increasingly proletarianised middle-class is now defecting from the SLPP government. At the same time, the pauperization of the peasantry has brought farmers into the streets. While the regime has in no small part given the impression of kowtowing to big business interests, be it blue-chip companies or rice mafias and intermediate traders, the dangerous classes have banded together. That the middle-class, itself known for its hostility to radical action, has joined protesting academics, trade unions, and hungry farmers, certainly says much about the times we are in.

However, I personally believe that the radicalisation of the middle-class can go both ways. Traditionally, the UNP has always been the party of the well-to-do, the rich, the haves, the privileged, and the elite. Its programmes have appealed to Colombo’s bourgeoisie, which it lost to the Rajapaksas because of sheer incompetence. This is hardly a problem endemic to the UNP, but it is one endemic to the UNP of Ranil Wickremesinghe, and of those Third Way Centrists who, under yahapalanaya, attempted to sweeten its neoliberal heritage by shifting its ideological commitment from free market to “social market” economics.

The SJB is trying its best, through the intervention of the likes of bright, sharp, intelligent MPs like Imthiaz Bakeer Markar, to escape this past. Yet there is a section within the SJB that believes in the ideas of the past, as well as the ideology of the UNP. Radicalised though they may be, the middle-classes remain beholden to these ideas. That is what explains their confused responses to price controls: while decrying those controls, they went back on their opposition to State measures once the government chose to let go.

In other words, to recall a point I made a few weeks ago, these groups will remain radicalised and ripe for revolution only insofar as their aspirations are being threatened by the State. Recovery will kick in sooner than later, and in the event that it does, we will see sections of these milieus reverting to their old ideas: namely, the ideas of the UNP, the same ideas that have at least cosmetically been discarded by the SJB.

The dangers of being a captive of these interests should not be lost on any movement trying to dominate the resistance. To be fair, it’s not just the SJB that should be wary of such a prospect: given its past record of flirting with Colombo’s liberal intelligentsia, even the JVP has to be cautioned. Dayan Jayatilleka’s strictures against the liberal intelligentsia, that it should discard its perspectives and attitudes, may go unheeded by the intelligentsia itself, but it should not go unnoticed or unheeded by oppositional parties that think they can milk political mileage by being fellow travellers of Colombo’s civil society circuits.

I am not aware of any other analyst who has raised these points. That is why Dr Dayan’s interventions, even if one does not agree with them, are useful guides for the Opposition. More specifically, that is why his cautioning against relying on urban elements over peasant groups must be listened to, heeded to, and adhered to.

In my view, then, there are three challenges the SJB must meet if it is to seize the mood of the moment and carry forward the momentum of last week’s rally. Firstly, it has to extricate itself out of the UNP. The SJB may have officially renounced its links to the grand old party by contesting separately, but when you see its MPs not just regurgitating the ideas of that party but conjecturing whether Ranil Wickremesinghe will strengthen its hands, you tend to wonder whose ideology it is promoting: its own, or its ex-parent party’s.

Secondly, the SJB has to resolve all internal differences. Most of these differences are to do with what it must do with the UNP, but some are more personal: I am of course referring to Champika Ranawaka’s decision to organise his own troupe, the 43 Senankaya. One can very validly ask whether these troupes are part and parcel of the SJB or whether they are “a band apart.” Mr Ranawaka appeals to a suburban Sinhala middle-class, and it is likely that he can pose a formidable challenge to Sajith Premadasa’s electoral prospects.

The issue, then, is whether he will contest on his own or whether he will be with and work for the SJB. That he chose to participate at last week’s rally does show that, far from trying to sabotage the party as some of his critics claim, he is being part of it. This is, at least from Mr Premadasa’s standpoint, to be welcomed. After all, if the experience of the 1980s shows anything, it’s that a divided Opposition will always be an ineffective one.

Thirdly, and critically, it must decide whose interests it wants to privilege from within the multi-class resistance bloc it has been bequeathed courtesy of the government’s policies. The SJB, for all intents and purposes, is still seen as an offshoot of the UNP, even if in 2020 supporters voted for it and departed from the UNP en masse. How soon it can escape being demarcated as part of the “same old” will depend on how fast it can aim at and target class interests and formations which are suffering the most under the pandemic.

In my opinion, it is the SJB’s inability to focus on these class elements that has kept and is keeping it back from dominating the discussion. By failing to focus on its priorities and not heeding the call of the hour, the SJB runs the risk of ramming into a dead-end. It must hence turn away and search inward, strategising no less than a way out of the past.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

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Features

Acid test emerges for US-EU ties

Published

23 hours ago

2026/01/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday put forward the EU’s viewpoint on current questions in international politics with a clarity, coherence and eloquence that was noteworthy. Essentially, she aimed to leave no one in doubt that a ‘new form of European independence’ had emerged and that European solidarity was at a peak.

These comments emerge against the backdrop of speculation in some international quarters that the Post-World War Two global political and economic order is unraveling. For example, if there was a general tacit presumption that US- Western European ties in particular were more or less rock-solid, that proposition apparently could no longer be taken for granted.

For instance, while US President Donald Trump is on record that he would bring Greenland under US administrative control even by using force against any opposition, if necessary, the EU Commission President was forthright that the EU stood for Greenland’s continued sovereignty and independence.

In fact at the time of writing, small military contingents from France, Germany, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands are reportedly already in Greenland’s capital of Nook for what are described as limited reconnaissance operations. Such moves acquire added importance in view of a further comment by von der Leyen to the effect that the EU would be acting ‘in full solidarity with Greenland and Denmark’; the latter being the current governing entity of Greenland.

It is also of note that the EU Commission President went on to say that the ‘EU has an unwavering commitment to UK’s independence.’ The immediate backdrop to this observation was a UK decision to hand over administrative control over the strategically important Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to Mauritius in the face of opposition by the Trump administration. That is, European unity in the face of present controversial moves by the US with regard to Greenland and other matters of contention is an unshakable ‘given’.

It is probably the fact that some prominent EU members, who also hold membership of NATO, are firmly behind the EU in its current stand-offs with the US that is prompting the view that the Post-World War Two order is beginning to unravel. This is, however, a matter for the future. It will be in the interests of the contending quarters concerned and probably the world to ensure that the present tensions do not degenerate into an armed confrontation which would have implications for world peace.

However, it is quite some time since the Post-World War Two order began to face challenges. Observers need to take their minds back to the Balkan crisis and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the immediate Post-Cold War years, for example, to trace the basic historic contours of how the challenges emerged. In the above developments the seeds of global ‘disorder’ were sown.

Such ‘disorder’ was further aggravated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago. Now it may seem that the world is reaping the proverbial whirlwind. It is relevant to also note that the EU Commission President was on record as pledging to extend material and financial support to Ukraine in its travails.

Currently, the international law and order situation is such that sections of the world cannot be faulted for seeing the Post World War Two international order as relentlessly unraveling, as it were. It will be in the interests of all concerned for negotiated solutions to be found to these global tangles. In fact von der Leyen has committed the EU to finding diplomatic solutions to the issues at hand, including the US-inspired tariff-related squabbles.

Given the apparent helplessness of the UN system, a pre-World War Two situation seems to be unfolding, with those states wielding the most armed might trying to mould international power relations in their favour. In the lead-up to the Second World War, the Hitlerian regime in Germany invaded unopposed one Eastern European country after another as the League of Nations stood idly by. World War Two was the result of the Allied Powers finally jerking themselves out of their complacency and taking on Germany and its allies in a full-blown world war.

However, unlike in the late thirties of the last century, the seeming number one aggressor, which is the US this time around, is not going unchallenged. The EU which has within its fold the foremost of Western democracies has done well to indicate to the US that its power games in Europe are not going unmonitored and unchecked. If the US’ designs to take control of Greenland and Denmark, for instance, are not defeated the world could very well be having on its hands, sooner rather than later, a pre-World War Two type situation.

Ironically, it is the ‘World’s Mightiest Democracy’ which is today allowing itself to be seen as the prime aggressor in the present round of global tensions. In the current confrontations, democratic opinion the world over is obliged to back the EU, since it has emerged as the principal opponent of the US, which is allowing itself to be seen as a fascist power.

Hopefully sane counsel would prevail among the chief antagonists in the present standoff growing, once again, out of uncontainable territorial ambitions. The EU is obliged to lead from the front in resolving the current crisis by diplomatic means since a region-wide armed conflict, for instance, could lead to unbearable ill-consequences for the world.

It does not follow that the UN has no role to play currently. Given the existing power realities within the UN Security Council, the UN cannot be faulted for coming to be seen as helpless in the face of the present tensions. However, it will need to continue with and build on its worldwide development activities since the global South in particular needs them very badly.

The UN needs to strive in the latter directions more than ever before since multi-billionaires are now in the seats of power in the principle state of the global North, the US. As the charity Oxfam has pointed out, such financially all-powerful persons and allied institutions are multiplying virtually incalculably. It follows from these realities that the poor of the world would suffer continuous neglect. The UN would need to redouble its efforts to help these needy sections before widespread poverty leads to hemispheric discontent.

Features

Brighten up your skin …

Published

23 hours ago

2026/01/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

Hi! This week I’ve come up with tips to brighten up your skin.

* Turmeric and Yoghurt Face Pack:

You will need 01 teaspoon of turmeric powder and 02 tablespoons of fresh yoghurt.

Mix the turmeric and yoghurt into a smooth paste and apply evenly on clean skin. Leave it for 15–20 minutes and then rinse with lukewarm water

Benefits:

Reduces pigmentation, brightens dull skin and fights acne-causing bacteria.

* Lemon and Honey Glow Pack:

Mix 01teaspoon lemon juice and 01 tablespoon honey and apply it gently to the face. Leave for 10–15 minutes and then wash off with cool water.

Benefits:

Lightens dark spots, improves skin tone and deeply moisturises. By the way, use only 01–02 times a week and avoid sun exposure after use.

* Aloe Vera Gel Treatment:

All you need is fresh aloe vera gel which you can extract from an aloe leaf. Apply a thin layer, before bedtime, leave it overnight, and then wash face in the morning.

Benefits:

Repairs damaged skin, lightens pigmentation and adds natural glow.

* Rice Flour and Milk Scrub:

You will need 01 tablespoon rice flour and 02 tablespoons fresh milk.

Mix the rice flour and milk into a thick paste and then massage gently in circular motions. Leave for 10 minutes and then rinse with water.

Benefits:

Removes dead skin cells, improves complexion, and smoothens skin.

* Tomato Pulp Mask:

Apply the tomato pulp directly, leave for 15 minutes, and then rinse with cool water

Benefits:

Controls excess oil, reduces tan, and brightens skin naturally.

Features

Shooting for the stars …

Published

23 hours ago

2026/01/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

That’s precisely what 25-year-old Hansana Balasuriya has in mind – shooting for the stars – when she was selected to represent Sri Lanka on the international stage at Miss Intercontinental 2025, in Sahl Hasheesh, Egypt.

The grand finale is next Thursday, 29th January, and Hansana is all geared up to make her presence felt in a big way.

Her journey is a testament to her fearless spirit and multifaceted talents … yes, her life is a whirlwind of passion, purpose, and pageantry.

Raised in a family of water babies (Director of The Deep End and Glory Swim Shop), Hansana’s love affair with swimming began in childhood and then she branched out to master the “art of 8 limbs” as a Muay Thai fighter, nailed Karate and Kickboxing (3-time black belt holder), and even threw herself into athletics (literally!), especially throwing events, and netball, as well.

A proud Bishop’s College alumna, Hansana’s leadership skills also shone bright as Senior Choir Leader.

She earned a BA (Hons) in Business Administration from Esoft Metropolitan University, and then the world became her playground.

Before long, modelling and pageantry also came into her scene.

She says she took to part-time modelling, as a hobby, and that led to pageants, grabbing 2nd Runner-up titles at Miss Nature Queen and Miss World Sri Lanka 2025.

When she’s not ruling the stage, or pool, Hansana’s belting tunes with Soul Sounds, Sri Lanka’s largest female ensemble.

What’s more, her artistry extends to drawing, and she loves hitting the open road for long drives, she says.

This water warrior is also on a mission – as Founder of Wave of Safety,

Hansana happens to be the youngest Executive Committee Member of the Sri Lanka Aquatic Sports Union (SLASU) and, as founder of Wave of Safety, she’s spreading water safety awareness and saving lives.

Today is Hansana’s ninth day in Egypt and the itinerary for today, says National Director for Sri Lanka, Brian Kerkoven, is ‘Jeep Safari and Sunset at the Desert.’

And … the all-important day at Miss Intercontinental 2025 is next Thursday, 29th January.

Well, good luck to Hansana.