Features

What will the NPP do in the future?

Published

2 months ago

2025/05/18

Will it drop the NPP dress and become the original JVP?

If so what will be their JVP inspired policies? They have cleverly not told us. We have questions but no answers. Trying to understand the JVP’s policies is a hard task.

The JVP policies have been at best vague. But we know they are a Marxist Leninist party and are likely to lean towards their traditional policies . As they have not been in power as a government we have no knowledge of what they will do as a government.

The big question is why did people support the NPP when there were more questions than answers about their future policies?

A little story

I must relate a little story that sheds a little light. Many moons ago just after the first JVP uprising I was a visiting lecturer in Economics at the Colombo campus. Following traditions at Cambridge where I did my degree, I invited small groups for a drink and chat. I did not pointedly ask them whether they were JVP, but asked them why students were supporting the JVP. Their answer was simple. Our problems are not being addressed under the present system, and so we need to get rid of it and have a JVP government.

My next question was what will the JVP do when they come into power. They really had no answer ,and they shuffled their feet and shrugged their shoulders and said they will decide when they were in power. Their thinking is not far off from my reasons for supporting AKD and voting for him. Our country is riddled with corruption from the top to the bottom. We will never create sustainable growth until we purge the country of corruption. AKD is the only person dedicated to carrying out this task and so I support him and vote for him.

The face of Communism is changing

The JVP is a Marxist Leninist party. But now Communism has got a face change.

Ho Chi Minh the famous founder of Communist Vietnam said: “Socialism means ,first of all, to make sure that the people are free from misery, everyone has a job, everyone has enough to eat and wear, and has a happy life.

Socialism is to make sure that the people become rich ,and the country becomes prosperous. Socialism means to make sure that the people are increasingly happy, have access to education, are given medical treatment, can take rest when they are old, while bad customs and habits are gradually eradicated.

Socialism means to make sure that our people from all nationalities enjoy welfare and their offspring are increasingly happier. It is the aim of socialism to improve peoples material and cultural conditions, and all this must be built by the people”

Ho Chi Minh :complete works vol 10 .

The JVP/NPP are not answering key questions

The NPP is a hybrid, and not a pure Marxist party. So far they have shied away from unambiguously answering some key questions. Do they have plans to take over all land and redistribute it in accordance with their policies on land ownership? Will they take over all private industries and businesses? Do they plan to end multi-party democracy, and have a single party rule?

We wait anxiously for a clear unambiguous statement from AKD..

Lessons from other countries

Any new Marxist group that comes in to power, if they are wise, should look and learn from other countries that went down the route of capturing political power, through one means, or the other, and who were then left scratching their heads about what they should do. A good case study is Vietnam, now a booming economy.

Vietnam

A life long Communist, Ho Chi Minh is revered as the father of the nation. He was the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party until he passed away. He led two campaigns that created Vietnam. The first was to get rid of the French colonial masters in the north and then to orchestrate the bloody campaign to liberate the south, which task was fully completed only after his death. The journey of creating a communist country started in the north with a blistering campaign of land reform. The 1981 constitution formally nationalized all land.

During the period 1975 to 1985 Vietnam pursued a centrally planned model. But afterwards all was not well and the economy was struggling and in 1982 at the party congress, whilst defending central planning, a program of concessional reforms was approved. This did not solve their problems and create a booming economy, and therefore in 1986 the government introduced a major reform program.

It explicitly recognized the failure of the central planning system. The government in 1987 issued a statement “the State encourages and accepts the long term existence and positive effects of the family, individual, and private economies active in production and services; it guarantees the rights to property, to inherit, and to legal income for people active in these sectors; it accepts their legal incorporation/identity and equality before the law in their production and business activities”

The liberalization program continued and under the new law in 1988, (deemed the most liberal in South East Asia) all sectors of the economy were open to foreign investors.

State control of agriculture was reduced, farmers were free to sell their produce on the open market, import duties on industrial inputs were removed, price controls were limited to a few sectors, approval was given to privatize state firms. Progressively all vestiges of central government control of the economy disappeared. It was the end of Marxism and its derivative communism. However the most interesting feature of Vietnam was the complete dismantling of everything resembling communism.

The dominant role of the state controlling everything, steadily disappeared. However the Communist Party did not disappear and the country continued to be controlled by the Communist Party and Vietnam remains a Communist country. Interestingly all corruption did not disappear. One but the last President appointed by the Communist Party was removed for corruption. His successor also appointed by the Communist Party was also removed because of corruption.

Lessons from Vietnam

Even under a government appointed and controlled by the Communist Party there can be private enterprise, and every opportunity given for it to prosper. A communist government need not have a centrally planned and controlled economy. These early concepts of Marxism were discarded by the Communist Party of Vietnam…

Lessons from the JVP uprisings

The core of the NPP is the JVP, a Marxist Leninist group. This includes AKD. They believed in revolution. Have they changed and genuinely given up the belief that Marxism-Leninism is the compass, but also the sun shedding light on the path to final victory to socialism and communism? It is interesting to note that the NPP borrowed from communist language the word COMPASS as their political symbol.

The JVP got nowhere with their two uprisings. Has the Marxist Leninist members of the JVP, abandoned the journey indicated by the compass to communism?There is not even a whiff of Marxism Leinnism in their manifesto. There are references to past corruption – “governance will shift from the control of a few corrupt elite families to a peoples government.”

It is good to remember what Ho Chi Minh wrote “There are persons who have fought enthusiastically, have remained faithful, fearless of danger; hardships and the enemy and have rendered meritorious services to the revolution. But once they have some powers, they would become deceitful, wasteful and extravagant, corrupt and bureaucratic,and unconsciously commit crimes against the revolution.” NPP be aware!!

The NPP manifesto, “A Thriving Nation A beautiful life”sets out in 30 pages what the NPP will do. They will carry out (at a very rough count) something like 1,800 programs ,to create a “Thriving Nation, A beautiful Life.”It has clearly been written by bright clever theoretical people who have never executed any projects in their lives. Executing any project is a long and difficult process. Will the NPP manifesto have the same sad end as Gotabaya’s Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour? He had put together the Viyathmaga team of bright intelligent people to put together his Vistas of Prosperity. But the same team were not able to finish the task and execute the grand ideas. Will the same thing happen to the NPP manifesto? In all probability it will. There is no way that such a large draft of ideas/concepts/plans can be implemented.

If the opposition is on its toes it can give a number to each item in the Thriving Nation document and insist on getting a progress report from the government. Then the only option for AKD is to distance himself from the this litany of failed projects and contend that his mission is only as stated under the heading “The Country is for Anura”. Here he says “A key initiative of the NPP will be the effort to build a unified Sri Lankan nation”.

What is missing in the manifesto?

There is no overall economic vision. Every country needs one which is then divided into segments and cascaded into the country.

Arguably there are two economic visions that must be pursued regardless of the colour of the party in power. One is to revitalize all economic activity in the thousands of villages that constitute our country. The other as I said in an article many years ago, is that “Tourism is our oil well!”

We are a country of thousands of villages. That’s the heartland of our country, that’s where the poverty lies. That’s where people do not have two meals and often struggle to find one meal . They need roads for children to go to school, drinking water and economic support for agriculture and fisheries and the traditional and new industrial activity in these village areas. When we have thousands of prosperous villages we will become a prosperous country. Tourism can play a large role in the development of our villages.

Before we build more highways that are of no use to the people in the villages, we must provide cold storage facilities to prevent large quantities of vegetables and fish having to be discarded.

We have had well paid (and well connected) people rushing around the world (with no success) to bring business to this useless piece of reclaimed land called Port City .Sri Lanka with thousands of acres of land, reclaiming land at a huge cost and adding to our debt burden is a sad joke. But not withstanding our politicians continue to rush around looking for business for Port City. They are now down to giving this horrendously expensive reclaimed land for a Japanese restaurant.

They should stop this type of nonsense of rushing around doing a variety of things like building highways of no benefit to our hungry villages and start rushing around to bring economic activity to our villages. If they don’t, hungry people in villages who only see on nearby main roads streams of expensive cars, may well feel that they need to change those that govern them. That will be the third revolution!!

Tourism

Before oil was found the Middle East was sand and more sand, Bedouins and camels. Tourism can do the same thing for us. We are blessed with the sea all around us, and hills and waterfalls and jungles and wild life. We are barely scratching the surface of the opportunity. It has been strangled by bureaucrats, whose knowledge of marketing could probably be described on the back of a stamp.

Our garment industry is a good example of what can be achieved if it’s left to the business people who know the industry. It’s high time a similar approach is taken with tourism. It has been strangled by a combination of politicians and bureaucrats ,whose prime motive was to sniff out an opportunity to make a few bucks.

The opportunity!

Thailand had 28 million tourists, and even little Singapore had I believe 12 milion. It can become our oil well.

There are two economic objectives that should be pursued. Develop the thousands of villages and develop tourism. Do not be distracted with the hundreds of things to create a beautiful life.

(Lalith de Mel was a main Board Director of Reckitt Benckiser plc.and the first Sri Lankan on the main Board of a top 100 company in the UK. He also lived many years in Singapore and was responsible for developing their business in Asis and the far East.)

by Lalith de Mel

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Features

BRICS’ pushback against dollar domination sparks global economic standoff

Published

14 hours ago

2025/07/10

Sahan Weerasooriya

BRICS leaders at the recent Summit in Brazil. /United Nations

If one were to look for a ‘rationale’ for the Trump administration’s current decision to significantly raise its tariffs on goods and services entering its shores from virtually the rest of the world, then, it is a recent statement by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that one needs to scrutinize. He is quoted as saying that tariffs could return ‘to April levels, if countries fail to strike a deal with the US.’

In other words, countries are urged to negotiate better tariff rates with the US without further delay if they are not to be at the receiving end of the threatened new tariff regime and its disquieting conditions. An unemotional approach to the questions at hand is best.

It would be foolish on the part of the rest of the world to dismiss the Trump administration’s pronouncements on the tariff question as empty rhetoric. In this crisis there is what may be called a not so veiled invitation to the world to enter into discussions with the US urgently to iron out what the US sees as unfair trade terms. In the process perhaps mutually acceptable terms could be arrived at between the US and those countries with which it is presumably having costly trade deficits. The tariff crisis, therefore, should be approached as a situation that necessitates earnest, rational negotiations between the US and its trading partners for the resolving of outstanding issues.

Meanwhile, the crisis has brought more into the open simmering antagonisms between the US and predominantly Southern groupings, such as the BRICS. While the tariff matter figured with some urgency in the recent BRICS Summit in Brazil, it was all too clear that the biggest powers in the grouping were in an effort ‘to take the fight back to the US’ on trade, investment and connected issues that go to the heart of the struggle for global predominance between the East and the US. In this connection the term ‘West’ would need to be avoided currently because the US is no longer in complete agreement with its Western partners on issues of the first magnitude, such as the Middle East, trade tariffs and Ukraine.

Russian President Putin is in the forefront of the BRICS pushback against US dominance in the world economy. For instance, he is on record that intra-BRICS economic interactions should take place in national currencies increasingly. This applies in particular to trade and investment. Speaking up also for an ‘independent settlement and depository system’ within BRICS, Putin said that the creation of such a system would make ‘currency transactions faster, more efficient and safer’ among BRICS countries.

If the above and other intra-BRICS arrangements come to be implemented, the world’s dependence on the dollar would steadily shrink with a corresponding decrease in the power and influence of the US in world affairs.

The US’ current hurry to bring the world to the negotiating table on economic issues, such as the tariff question, is evidence that the US has been fully cognizant of emergent threats to its predominance. While it is in an effort to impress that it is ‘talking’ from a position of strength, it could very well be that it is fearful for its seemingly number one position on the world stage. Its present moves on the economic front suggest that it is in an all-out effort to keep its global dominance intact.

At this juncture it may be apt to observe that since ‘economics drives politics’, a less dollar dependent world could very well mark the beginning of the decline of the US as the world’s sole super power. One would not be exaggerating by stating that the tariff issue is a ‘pre-emptive’, strategic move of sorts by the US to remain in contention.

However, the ‘writing on the wall’ had been very manifest for the US and the West for quite a while. It is no longer revelatory that the global economic centre of gravity has been shifting from the West to the East.

Asian scholarship, in particular, has been profoundly cognizant of the trends. Just a few statistics on the Asian economic resurgence would prove the point. Parag Khanna in his notable work, ‘The Future is Asian’, for example, discloses the following: ‘Asia represents 50 percent of global GDP…It accounts for half of global economic growth. Asia produces and exports as well as imports and consumes more goods than any region.’

However, the US continues to be number one in the international power system currently and non-Western powers in particular would be erring badly if they presume that the economic health of the world and connected matters could be determined by them alone. Talks with the US would not only have to continue but would need to be conducted with the insight that neither the East nor the West would stand to gain by ignoring or glossing over the US presence.

To be sure, any US efforts to have only its way in the affairs of the world would need to be checked but as matters stand, the East and the South would need to enter into judicious negotiations with the US to meet their legitimate ends.

From the above viewpoint, it could be said that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the most perceptive of Southern leaders at the BRICS Summit. On assuming chairmanship of the BRICS grouping, Modi said, among other things: ‘…During our chairmanship of BRICS, we will take this forum forward in the spirit of people-centricity and humanity first.’

People-centricity should indeed be the focus of BRICS and other such formations of predominantly the South, that have taken upon themselves to usher the wellbeing of people, as opposed to that of power elites and ruling classes.

East and West need to balance each other’s power but it all should be geared towards the wellbeing of ordinary people everywhere. The Cold War years continue to be instructive for the sole reason that the so-called ordinary people in the Western and Soviet camps gained nothing almost from the power jousts of the big powers involved. It is hoped that BRICS would grow steadily but not at the cost of democratic development.

Features

Familian Night of Elegance …

Published

14 hours ago

2025/07/10

Sahan Weerasooriya

The UK branch of the Past Pupils Association of Holy Family Convent Bambalapitiya went into action last month with their third grand event … ‘Familian Night of Elegance.’ And, according to reports coming my way, it was nothing short of a spectacular success.

This dazzling evening brought together over 350 guests who came to celebrate sisterhood, tradition, and the deep-rooted bonds shared by Familians around the world.

Describing the event to us, Inoka De Sliva, who was very much a part of the scene, said:

Inoka De Silva: With one of the exciting prizes – air ticket to Canada and back to the UK

“The highlight of the night was the performance by the legendary Corrine Almeida, specially flown in from Sri Lanka. Her soulful voice lit up the room, creating unforgettable memories for all who attended. She was backed by the sensational UK-based band Frontline, whose energy and musical excellence kept the crowd on their feet throughout the evening.”

Corrine
Almeida:
Created
unforgettable
memories

Inoka, who now resides in the UK, went on to say that the hosting duties were flawlessly handled by the ever popular DJ and compere Vasi Sachi, who brought his trademark style and charisma to the stage, while his curated DJ sets, during the breaks, added fun and a modern vibe to the atmosphere.

Mrs. Rajika Jesuthasan: President of the UK
branch of the Past Pupils Association of
Holy Family Convent Bambalapitiya
(Pix by Mishtré Photography’s Trevon Simon

The event also featured stunning dance performances that captivated the audience and elevated the celebration with vibrant cultural flair and energy.

One of the most appreciated gestures of the evening was the beautiful satin saree given to every lady upon arrival … a thoughtful and elegant gift that made all feel special.

Guests were also treated to an impressive raffle draw with 20 fantastic prizes, including air tickets.

The Past Pupils Association of Holy Family Convent Bambalapitiya, UK branch, was founded by Mrs. Rajika Jesuthasan née Rajakarier four years ago, with a clear mission: to bring Familians in the UK together under one roof, and to give back to their beloved alma mater.

As the curtain closed on another successful Familian celebration, guests left with hearts full, and spirits high, and already counting down the days until the next gathering.

Features

The perfect tone …

Published

14 hours ago

2025/07/10

Sahan Weerasooriya

We all want to have flawless skin, yet most people believe that the only way to achieve that aesthetic is by using costly skin care products.

Getting that perfect skin is not that difficult, even for the busiest of us, with the help of simple face beauty tips at home.

Well, here are some essential ways that will give you the perfect tone without having to go anywhere.

* Ice Cubes to Tighten Skin:

Applying ice cubes to your skin is a fast and easy effective method that helps to reduce eye bags and pores, and makes the skin look fresh and beautiful. Using an ice cube on your face, as a remedy in the morning, helps to “revive” and prepare the skin.

* Oil Cleansing for Skin:

Use natural oils, like coconut oil or olive oil, to cleanse your skin. Oils can clean the face thoroughly, yet moisturise its surface, for they remove dirt and excess oil without destroying the skin’s natural barriers. All one has to do is pick a specific oil, rub it softly over their face, and then wipe it off, using a warm soak (cloth soaked in warm water). It is a very simple method for cleaning the face.

* Sugar Scrub:

Mix a tablespoon of sugar with honey, or olive oil, to make a gentle scrub. Apply it in soft, circular motions, on your face and wash it off after a minute. This helps hydrate your skin by eliminating dead skin cells, which is the primary purpose of the scrub.

* Rose Water Toner:

One natural toner that will soothe and hydrate your skin is rose water. Tightening pores, this water improves the general texture of your skin. This water may be applied gently to the face post-cleansing to provide a soothing and hydrating effect to your face.

* Aloe Vera:

It is well known that aloe vera does wonders for the skin. It will provide alleviation for the skin, because of its calming and moisturising effects. The application of aloe vera gel, in its pure form, to one’s skin is beneficial as it aids in moisturising each layer, prevents slight skin deformity, and also imparts a fresh and healthy look to the face. Before going to bed is the best time to apply aloe vera.

* Water:

Staying hydrated, by drinking plenty of water (06 to 08 cups or glasses a day), helps to flush toxins and its functions in detoxification of the body, and maintenance the youthfulness of the skin in one’s appearance.