ABC of Ranil rule: High-risk partner, bad investment for international community

President Wickremesinghe is under the delusion that he has the support of the majority 

“…This means we need 25 years from now to 2048.”

– President Ranil Wickremesinghe (in London) –

Sri Lanka faces a substantive resolution in the UN Human Rights Council. Dealing with it should have been easy-peasy for a post-Aragalaya President, but it won’t be, because he decided to send in the military in a pre-dawn raid to beat up and disperse Aragalaya activists who had already begun their evacuation of occupied government buildings days earlier

The ‘international community’ is divided at least into two spheres. Call it ‘liberal democracy vs. illiberal democracy’, ‘West vs. East’ or whatever. But on good days and some issues, there are realities and interests which transcend these divisions, whether or not the contending segments know it. Here’s one. The incumbent Wickremesinghe administration is a bad bet for anyone in the international community. 

Whether you belong to the ‘people’s sovereignty’ camp or the ‘state sovereignty’ camp, President Ranil Wickremesinghe is nowhere close to being the best partner for the international community as a whole or anyone in it. Sri Lanka’s ethos being what it is, its democracy and universal suffrage being older than its independence as a state, the pre-requisite for viable partnership is the legitimacy of being popularly elected. 

That’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition as Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s political denouement proved. Since Independence, this island has witnessed two assassinations of its leaders, two radical youth insurrections, a 30-year civil war, suicide terrorism, and two massive peaceful popular protests (1953, 2022) that ousted two leaders. The only thing that remains rooted is democracy. It is not only that Sri Lanka’s youth are “the wrong generation to mess with”, it is that Sri Lanka’s (social) democratic sensibility makes it the wrong place and people to mess with. President Ranil Wickremesinghe is arrogantly messing with all the above.       

The R-word

President Wickre-mesinghe is popularly unelected, reckless, polarising and confrontationist—all in the context of an unprecedentedly deep economic crisis. His popularly elected partners, the Rajapaksas, are utterly unpopular even in their own home districts.   

Ranil recently told Samantha Power that he would go for a referendum in six months if Parliament didn’t agree on electoral reform. That’s specious argumentation because disagreement on electoral reform doesn’t stop national elections as we saw in 2019-2020. It is also a scam; the constitutional equivalent of the Central Bank bond scam. A referendum on electoral reform, if carried, would mean a postponement of national elections until the new system, including re-zoning of electorates, is up and running. That could take years, with the Rajapaksa-run SLPP and President Ranil filibustering.  

We’ve been here twice before. Madam Bandaranaike’s United Front government used the promulgation of a new Constitution and pushed back by two years a general election scheduled for 1975. Police shooting of an undergraduate (my Peradeniya batchmate), a nationwide students’ strike segueing into a railway strike and a general strike, broke the regime’s back, pre-empting further postponement of elections. 

The second time caused a descent into hell. The Cabinet of which Ranil Wickremesinghe was a hawkish young Minister decided on a Referendum in December 1982, denounced by the Paul Sieghart report of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) as coercive and fraudulent, which postponed for six years the Parliamentary election scheduled for early 1983. The Parliament lost its legitimacy. Black July 1983, the framing and proscription of the JVP, two civil wars and a foreign intervention followed. 

Whether you belong to the ‘people’s sovereignty’ camp or the ‘state sovereignty’ camp, President Ranil Wickremesinghe is nowhere close to being the best partner for the international community as a whole or anyone in it

Another delusional president

President Wickre-mesinghe is under the delusion that he has the support of the majority. He has no proof that he is supported by a majority or even by a minority. He wasn’t even elected to Parliament.  

He makes decisions and pronouncements as if he has a mandate. He is about to make big decisions which could be classified as economic-existential, drastically impacting the geo-economy, direction and destiny of the nation, which he has no mandate and therefore no legitimacy to do.   

As China discovered with Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a politically delusional leader is a lousy partner, especially when it comes to economic relationships.   

The current Sri Lankan Parliament is no more viable a partner of the international community than is the unelected President. The Parliament continues to be dominated by the pet party of the Rajapaksa oligarchy widely regarded as the major cause of the economic collapse. 

Sri Lanka faces a substantive resolution in the UN Human Rights Council. Dealing with it should have been easy-peasy for a post-Aragalaya President, but it won’t be, because he decided to send in the military in a pre-dawn raid to beat up and disperse Aragalaya activists who had already begun their evacuation of occupied government buildings days earlier. 

The new President showed that he was worse in at least one respect than the old, popularly elected and popularly ousted one, by affixing his signature when he had a clear choice to do otherwise, on a detention order under the notoriously draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) against the country’s most popular student leader—the charismatic Wasantha Mudalige, -- who has not been even falsely accused of armed violence of any sort, let alone terrorism. On his birthday this week, he remained in solitary confinement, which must have broken his Adivasi (‘Veddah’) mother’s heart.    

ABC of Ranil’s rule

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Foreign Correspondent program on Sri Lanka, a 30-minute documentary entitled ‘From Palace to Prison’, was so truthful in its reportage, so impressive in its camerawork and editing, that it deserves awards. (https://youtu.be/kfxhiqWwtfM)

The outstanding reportage is by the ABC’s South/South East Asia correspondent Avani Dias, an award-winning, third-generation journalist of Sri Lankan origin, whose mother Muditha worked for SBS and ABC, and grandfather S. Piyasena was a Sri Lankan journalist and diplomat serving in Delhi. 

President Ranil Wickremesinghe was waspish with her in the interview segment. It didn’t work. When he was most arrogantly aggressive, she cocked her head and kept looking at him unblinking, unintimidated, with bemused scepticism. 

The program covered the tail-end of the Aragalaya, the crackdown by President Wickr-emesinghe, the role and spirit of Wasantha Mudalige, Fr. Jeewantha Peiris and human rights lawyer Nuwan Bopage. Best of all, it permitted President Ranil Wickremesinghe to drop his mask and reveal himself to the world. 

A glimpse of his return to his old form would come as no surprise to his cousin and critic Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha or those who have known him from the late 1970s and 1980s. Ranil sneeringly told the journalist that he knew exactly whom she had been meeting, and accused her of wishing to foist the views of that ‘minority’ on him, who represented and was supported by ‘the majority’. 

He claimed the Aragalaya activists represented a minority. It is false. If the Aragalaya represented only a minority, then there would have been counter-demonstrations from March to July everywhere or somewhere in the country, but there weren’t. 22 million people weren’t participants in the Aragalaya but felt represented by it or felt no antipathy towards it. 

I’m unsure whether President Wickremesinghe was using the terms ‘majority’ and minority’ in the conservative US Republican sense of ‘the silent majority is with us’ or whether he was borrowing Gotabaya’s (religio-racist) dog-whistle. His ‘majority/minority’ reference was made cutting into Avani Dias’ mention of Fr. Jeewantha Peiris.   

He said the majority is with him because he was the first to call for outreach to the IMF. There’s no evidence that they are, with two public opinion polls—those of the CPA and the IHP/SLOTS tracker—showing him way behind the JVP’s Anura Kumara Dissanayake. 

Anyway, he wasn’t the first to call for an outreach to the IMF. Well before Wickremesinghe entered Parliament through the National List, Opposition leader and SJB leader Sajith Premadasa was on the record in the legislature, calling for the Government to reach out to the “international financial institutions”. During the November 2019 presidential election campaign Sajith had pledged the convening of a global conference modelled on the Sri Lanka Aid Consortium to assist postwar Sri Lanka’s recovery.   

If Ranil is quite so sure that the Aragalaya represented a minority while the majority stands with him, why not put that proposition to the test by having an election? As TV host Asoka Dias asked pointedly while interviewing Prof. G.L. Peiris, if the President can threaten the Parliament with a Referendum in six months, why can’t he hold a national election in six months?

He claimed the Aragalaya activists represented a minority. It is false. If the Aragalaya represented only a minority, then there would have been counter-demonstrations from March to July everywhere or somewhere in the country, but there weren’t. 22 million people weren’t participants in the Aragalaya but felt represented by it or felt no antipathy towards it

Won’t fly 

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary shed light on the insidious strategy of the deep state, as signed-off on by President Wickremesinghe. 

Arrest, detain and tie up in litigation, the non-party Aragalaya activists who have shown themselves to be spirited in their social media posts. Put pressure on their parents and families, and paralyse their activism.

Use the PTA against the leadership of IUSF, which is more committed ideologically and as students of residential universities, freer from their parents. The IUSF leader who was nowhere near Parliament on 13 July is detained under the PTA while others who were there are out on bail.

Leave the JVP alone for now, except for its student wing leadership. Encircle the FSP, IUSF and the trade unions, and provoke a pretext to pounce. Isolate and suppress the JVP afterwards as in the 1980s, when the anti-racist Southern radical Left linked to the Northern Left was suppressed as a strategic priority, before pivoting to the JVP.  

All this sounds clever in a typically nasty way but it actually isn’t. The Wickremesinghe administration faces a huge pair of scissors closing on it. The blades are composed of what Antonio Gramsci (building on Benedetto Croce) called the ‘moral-ethical’ and ‘ethico-political’.

The citizenry is asked to share the burden of a crisis stemming from economic decisions it didn’t even know about and certainly did not agree to or request. Those decisions were made by the Rajapaksas and by Ranil Wickremesinghe respectively when in office, and they now share power.  

The citizenry is asked to share the burden of a crisis stemming from economic decisions it didn’t even know about and certainly did not agree to or request. Those decisions were made by the Rajapaksas and by Ranil Wickremesinghe respectively when in office, and they now share power

Thus, those who are innocent of economic crimes will be asked to serve a sentence of daily material hardship and downward social mobility, which they can least afford to, while those who are guilty will continue to rule over them. 

The country’s ruler who is making the decisions that will pass on the hardships, repeal labour laws, shrink the public sector and give national assets and whole areas to foreign companies, was never chosen by the citizens to lead the nation or even represent them in Parliament, while the party he led couldn’t elect a single legislator.  

The present Parliament is alienated from the citizenry, which is why provincial crowds set fire to the houses of many ruling party legislators, perceived in the areas (fairly or unfairly) as robber-barons. So far there has been no evidence of a Left hand in the rash of arson attacks of 9 May. 

No IMF or foreign creditor-driven package of cutbacks which further burdens the citizens will be accepted if it comes through this unelected President, unpopular Cabinet and discredited Parliament. ‘Bitter medicine’ forced down the throats of the public will be vomited out. 

When the local socio-political trends are taken together with the UN Human Rights High Commi-ssioner’s report, the resolution of the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee of the powerful US Senate, the zero-draft of the Core group, and the joint statement of the main international human rights organisations, the reality is clear. Sri Lanka just cannot be rescued and recover as speedily and completely as it otherwise might, due to a constellation of three reasons:

The international profile of the still-powerful Rajapaksa clan is dreadful and distorts the global profile picture of Sri Lanka. The Ranil Wickremesinghe presidency’s main enabler and political prop is externally perceived as responsible for the ‘economic crimes’ that have sunk Sri Lanka’s economy. Who will enthusiastically cut slack for, still less bail out a country in which the Rajapaksa cartel still calls the shots? Which legislature would allow that country’s government to throw its full weight behind Sri Lanka with the governance profile it has? 

The best publicity that Sri Lanka has got, the greatest fund of ‘soft power’ that it has accumulated, is the narrative of the Aragalaya, the people’s largely peaceful protest movement that threw out an autocrat. Instead of leveraging that soft power, President Ranil Wickremesinghe has criminalised it and is persecuting its activists. 

The country has, for the first time, an unelected leader who, instead of playing an interim transitional role, is pledging to push through an IMF program and sub-regional economic integration, but doesn’t have a smidgeon of a public mandate to do so. Why should the world community throw good money after bad? Why wouldn’t it hold back until Sri Lanka has a popularly elected government and leadership which can make good on its pledges without a violent explosion?   

In sharp contradistinction, a newly elected Parliament and President will be far more reflective of the composition and consciousness of the anti-autocratic people’s protest movement, the Aragalaya. They will have the credibility to obtain consensus for economic reform and recovery measures, while ensuring that those are sustainable by being equitable. An appeal by an Aragalaya-aligned, youthful democratic President and new Parliament to world opinion, legislatures and global institutions for maximum solidarity with Sri Lanka would resonate powerfully.       

Those who are innocent of economic crimes will be asked to serve a sentence of daily material hardship and downward social mobility, which they can least afford to, while those who are guilty will continue to rule over them

Options and fusions 

Who do we trust to best represent us in negotiations with the IMF and the creditors? Those who regard themselves the BFFs of the IMF, the most enthusiastic advocates of rampant privatisation, and (to borrow a sardonic Latin American labelling) “more fundist than the Fund”?  Or a party that would most robustly champion the interests of the socioeconomic majority of the Sri Lankan public in negotiations with the IMF and the creditors and in piloting Sri Lanka through this crisis? 

This latter could be the AKD-JVP-JJB option. But it has a pair of Achilles Heels, not just the one:  A go-it-alone political mentality and strategy allergic to Left unity or even a coordinating committee with the FSP, i.e., the opposite of the formula for success of Latin America’s Left. 

JVP Poli-tbureau member Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa’s recent rejection on a TV panel discussion (‘Satana’), of the 13th amendment and the Provincial Councils while offering no alternative autonomy arrangement for the Tamils. 

This factor is a particularly serious policy deficit on the part of the JVP-JJB just when the Tamil political parties are rightly alarmed at the alleged move by the Governor of the Eastern Province (whose militant Sinhala chauvinism covers well over half her life) to initiate an Israeli-style unilateral territorial change by administrative means, which would tilt the demographic balance in the Eastern Province against the minorities.  

There is a third, progressive-centrist option: A social democratic Sajith Premadasa administration fully committed to a neo [Ranasinghe] Premadasa-ist ‘growth with equity’ model, with the Dullas-GL group, SLFP, TNA and SLMC as partners. 

Meanwhile, President Ranil’s confrontationist performance on ABC TV’s Foreign Correspondent program was followed by an unprecedented in-gathering of Opposition forces at Hyde Park. The SJB’s Chairman, Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka, the JVP’s Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa, the FSP’s Duminda Nagamuwa and Pubudu Jayagoda, the Freedom People’s Congress’ Wasantha Yapa Bandara, the TU movement’s Joseph Stalin, and the convening IUSF’s representative were among the speakers. The Resistance will continue to consolidate.