Why political crises are inevitable in Sri Lanka

The mathematical probability is that this government too will be a government of crisis management if not conflict management, and like all the others will have an endgame and an exit that is nothing like the bold, brisk, breezy beginning – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

I cannot remember a single government in this country that did not end in crisis. I was born in 1956 and have no memory of the assassination of SWRD but we know that’s how it ended. I do recall every other government though, and each of them was governing in a situation of crisis fairly shortly after it commenced its term. 

Several had internal crises as well. Many had violent conflict and worse on their watch. In my lifetime there were no exceptions. In the history of Independent Sri Lanka there was only one, and that was the first post-Independence government of D.S. Senanayake.

The mathematical probability is that this government too will be a government of crisis management if not conflict management, and like all the others will have an endgame and an exit that is nothing like the bold, brisk, breezy beginning. 

If every government we have had, barring one, and that too in the infancy of our post-Independence life as a country, ended in a situation of national crisis, and many experienced violent conflicts, then surely the crisis was common to all governments and was older and larger than any single government. To re-state, if all but one post-independence government experienced crisis then the chief causation could not have been each government. 

Crisis combo

Each of our governments got into a different type of crisis, while there were some conflicts that continued under several governments. The difference in the crises of each government reveals that in addition to a common crisis there were specific crises, unique to each administration. 

So, either the common overarching crisis took different forms, mutated, or in addition to the common crisis enveloping every government and into which every government is born, there are individual crises. It’s a combo: there is a common crisis, and within that there are individual crises specific to each government. The interface ignites conflict.

This is easier to understand if we take as an example, Marx’s notion of the capitalist system in which there is an underlying contradiction lodged within the system and its logic as a whole – that between the famous ‘relations’ and ‘forces’ of production—as well as the specific smaller crises of the business cycles and their ‘boom-bust’ rhythms.    

Each Sri Lankan government has its specific ‘boom and bust’ cycle, but every one of them, barring, arguably, that of DS Senanayake, were enveloped in a circumambient crisis: ‘meso’ (medium-scale) or ‘micro’ crises within a ‘macro’ or ‘mega’ crisis.

The two types of crises are probably related, with the macro/mega crisis being the deeper, underlying causative one, and the crises of the individual governments being manifestations of this underlying crisis. Each government, though different from the other given their specific cyclical or situational crises, all wind up in crisis and often in conflicts because they are enveloped in the matrix of a larger, longer crisis.If this explanation sounds intelligent, I have to say it’s not mine, and if the explanation sounds complicated, I have to say it is the simplest rendition of which I am capable, of a far more complex model which is hardly mine. 

The credit goes to the thinker who made the finest contribution to political theory and political science in the 20th century, namely Antonio Gramsci. He opined that some societies find themselves in a crisis that lasts for several decades, which means that the crisis is ‘structural’. However, political players react to this structural crisis in various ways, trying to survive it, intervene in it and change it this way and that to their benefit, and these situational reflexes and initiatives often trigger crises of their own which are episodic, have a specificity and shorter life cycle, or to use his words, are ‘conjunctural’. 

You have two dimensions of crises then: longer term, general, ‘structural’ and shorter term, specific, situational or ‘conjunctural’. The “conjunctural” dimension of the crisis operates in the here and now, creating the concrete situation which is currently dominant, while the “structural” dimension operates as the determinant (as distinct from the immediately dominant) factor but that too only in the final analysis. 

When applied to Sri Lanka we can deduce the existence of the ‘structural’ crisis by the fact that it has lasted for decades and successive governments have invariably, almost inevitably, found themselves in deep crisis, however promising their beginnings. The specific nature of the crises of each government, readily traceable to their individual policies and practices, provides us with the ‘conjunctural’ crises, which when taken together with the structural, have often ignited political conflict and even violent political conflict leading to ‘complex political emergencies’ (as they are classified).

Asymmetric political architecture

Here is what I regard as the most lucid definition of the crux of the crisis by the most cerebral political leader we ever had, while he was still in his late 20s, and had just founded the attractively-titled but short-lived Progressive Nationalist Party. Though we are aware of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s early prescription of federalism, what is omitted or forgotten is his far more impressive diagnostic reasoning that led to that incorrect prescription. 

Addressing a special meeting of the Jaffna Youth Congress in late 1926 on the federal form of government, the young SWRD said: “If one considers past history, one would see that the three communities, the Tamils, Low country Sinhalese and the Kandyan Sinhalese, have lived for over a thousand years in Ceylon and had not shown any tendency to merge. They preserved their custom, language and religion. He would be a very rash man who would pin his faith on the gradual disappearance of the differences. The moment they began to speak of taking the government into their own hands then the differences that are lying dormant smouldered forth. A centralised form of government assumed a homogenous whole. I know no part of the world where a government was carried on under such conflicting circumstances as would be experienced in Ceylon.” 

As the young SWRD predicted and warned, our political architecture is very wrong. The LLRC Report identified the resultant deep deficit and deficiency of our political system and how to bridge it, but our new leadership is looking in exactly the opposite direction. This renders inevitable the recurrence of political crisis, which will arrive faster in what Thomas Friedman calls ‘The Age of Acceleration’

Obviously SWRD was in error on a secondary point, when he refers to the “Low country Sinhalese” and “Kandyan Sinhalese” who did merge for all intents and purposes, but they were divided only by one—and the most mutable -- of his three markers, namely “custom”. Going by the two ‘structural’ markers in this text, of those “language and religion”, the Tamils will never merge into the Sinhala community, and by the same token, nor will the Muslims, though they may both fully integrate into the Sri Lankan community provided they do not face discrimination and have adequate, irreducible political space. 

Young SWRD was arguing that he knew of no communally heterogeneous society anywhere which had successfully sustained a centralised form of political rule or state (which he called ‘government’) and conversely, no centralised form of political rule which had coexisted successfully with a communally heterogeneous society. The operative conceptual point in the passage is “…A centralised form of government assumed a homogenous whole. I know no part of the world where a government was carried on under such conflicting circumstances as would be experienced in Ceylon.” He proved prophetic.

What SWRD was warning about was a huge flaw in the blueprint of the political architecture. He spotlighted the need for the social/demographic “base”, i.e. the domestic geopolitical substructure, and the political “superstructure”, i.e. the structural form of political rule, to fit as closely as possible. This required a political system or structure that was not excessively “centralised”. 

That a pluralist societal base cannot sustain a monist form of rule and a monist form of rule cannot successfully, sustainably govern a pluralist society, was a dialectical insight of genius.

The same diagnosis as that of the young SWRD was articulated later by an even more refined and consistently progressive mind, fully acquainted with Ceylon-- Leonard Woolf. Bandaranaike and Woolf shared a common perception of the problem looming in Ceylon and its similarity to that which had been resolved in Switzerland. “…Circumstances very similar to those in Ceylon, i.e., the coexistence in a single democratic state of communities of very different size, sharply distinguished from one another by race, language or religion.” (Woolf, 1938)

In his 1938 memorandum to the Labour Party on the independence of Ceylon, Woolf “recommended that provision be made for the protection of minorities” and suggested that “consideration be given to the possibility of introducing a large measure of devolution or even of introducing a federal system on the Swiss model...”

Folded away in SWRD’s early remarks obscured by his strident advocacy of federalism, was his argument for “autonomy for the provinces”. He would develop this theme in later years and it formed the basis of the non-federal Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact (1957) which overlapped completely with one of Leonard Woolf’s two suggested options—the non-federal one, namely “a large measure of devolution”. Significantly, Frederic Spotts, the editor of The Collected Letters of Leonard Woolf, identifies in a footnote in that volume, the congruency between Woolf’s recommendations and the content of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 which made for provincial autonomy and thereby vindicated Woolf. The B-C Pact of 1957 and the Indo-Lanka Accord (plus 13th amendment) of 1987, exactly thirty years later, were on a continuum. 

Blocked exits 

Sri Lanka had a series of real chances to exit the long labyrinthine crisis once the war had been won. These were the rapid fulfilment of the promise to India to implement the 13th amendment and build it up to 13+ by adding a Senate; resume and continue the process of negotiation with the TNA suspended in 2011; the promise to both India and the TNA after the swearing in the new Northern Chief Minister in 2013 to replace the ex-military Governor with a (Sinhala) civilian at the end of the incumbent’s first term; leverage South African President Jacob Zuma’s appointment of ANC star (presently the country’s President) Cyril Ramaphosa as facilitator on political reconciliation with the TNA. 

If this last option had been activated, Sri Lanka would have been buffered from calls for federalism and self-determination by the fact that South Africa itself had a non-federal model of autonomy, and that the very considerable international and diplomatic “soft power” of South Africa worldwide (BRICS, NAM, Commonwealth), would have shielded Sri Lanka and legitimised a ‘final status’ political settlement facilitated by that pivotal power. 

The players who resisted all these exit options due to their ideological allergy to any devolution of political power, are no longer behind the scenes fighting a rearguard action as in the immediate postwar years, but are today in positions of dominance. Their mentality and perspective of denial/obstruction/rejection of political devolution is now hegemonic in Sinhala society and the ruling coalition. The old centre-left no longer exists as a politico-ideological space. The ruling coalition has shifted or surrendered to the ideological, if not yet the politico-organisational, hegemony of the nationalist New Right, a networked power-elite which now occupies the commanding heights of the state apparatuses, and which does not regard the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact as a tragically lost opportunity which should be revisited and pushed through, but is glad and proud that it was thwarted by the ultranationalist religious Right of the day (led by the UNP).  

Each of our governments got into a different type of crisis, while there were some conflicts that continued under several governments. The difference in the crises of each government reveals that in addition to a common crisis there were specific crises, unique to each administration. So, either the common overarching crisis took different forms, mutated, or in addition to the common crisis enveloping every government and into which every government is born, there are individual crises. It’s a combo: there is a common crisis, and within that there are individual crises specific to each government. The interface ignites conflict

More than three decades of waste by the Tamil leadership of the space provided by the Indo-Lanka Accord and the system of Provincial Councils, when it could have occupied, dug in and developed the devolved institutional base as did the Sinn Fein and SNP, but in its colossal folly chose not to, has now left the field open for an ultraconservative restorationist reshaping of the postwar political order, extrapolated and generalised from the military ‘command model’.For the first time we have a leadership which openly espouses a paradigm which had hitherto been a fringe perspective at least since post-July 1983 because the political mainstream had outgrown and abandoned it, shocked into realism by Black July and its external repercussions. The current leadership holds that the Tamil problem is not primarily or at its root, political, but economic, and the solution to that problem is security, development and modest decentralisation, not political dialogue and consensus. 

The new official doctrine negates the conclusion and definition arrived at after considerably thorough and transparent effort by the blue-ribbon panel of high officials with considerable experience in managing the political, legal and diplomatic aspects of the war, appointed by the war-winning President Mahinda Rajapaksa to comprise the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC). Its Chairman, CR de Silva, a long standing and trusted friend of MR, was not only the Attorney-General during the war years, but also a veteran of the defence of Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council and its predecessor the UN Human Rights Commission. 

The LLRC’s identification of the crux of the problem is in the Report’s core segments entitled ‘Grievances of the Tamil Community’ ‘The Historical Background relating to Majority-Minority relationships in Sri Lanka’ and ‘The Different Phases in the Narrative of Tamil Grievances’ (pp. 291-294, 369-370):

“The Commission takes the view that the root cause of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka lies in the failure of successive Governments to address the genuine grievances of the Tamil people. The country may not have been confronted with a violent separatist agenda, if the political consensus at the time of independence had been sustained and if policies had been implemented to build up and strengthen the confidence of the minorities around the system which had gained a reasonable measure of acceptance. A political solution is imperative to address the causes of the conflict…” (p 291, articles 8.150, 8.151)

The path to sustainable stability is in the Report’s Preamble:

“… To this end, the success of ending armed conflict must be invested in an all-inclusive political process of dialogue and accommodation so that the conflict by other means will not continue…” (Preamble, pp.1-2)

As a political scientist familiar with comparative politics, I would add that “I know of no part of the world” (SWRD’s 1926 phrase) from Nigeria to Nicaragua, Russia to the Philippines, Canada to Vietnam, Ireland to China, Switzerland to Ethiopia, in which a problem generically related to/ homologous with the Tamil problem has been solved or successfully managed by a policy based purely or primarily on economics and an appeal for assimilation/integration, and has not had at its very core, an autonomy-based political settlement. 

As the young SWRD predicted and warned, our political architecture is very wrong. The LLRC Report identified the resultant deep deficit and deficiency of our political system and how to bridge it, but our new leadership is looking in exactly the opposite direction. This renders inevitable the recurrence of political crisis, which will arrive faster in what Thomas Friedman calls ‘The Age of Acceleration’.

[Dr. Jayatilleka is the author of ‘Long War, Cold Peace: Crisis and Conflict in Sri Lanka’ (2014, Vijitha Yapa, Colombo) and ‘Sri Lanka: The Travails of a Democracy: Unfinished War, Protracted Crisis’ (1995, Vikas Publications, New Delhi).]