Anura against post-1977 economy, dodgy on devolution, can’t resolve crisis

Anura in Jaffna

While AKD and the JVP-NPP have changed, they haven’t metamorphosed into enlightened economic modernisers. A key marker in a brand-new document confirms that. Without a rectification on this fundamental issue contained in what the NPP designates as a ‘Framework’, it would be very dangerous to the economy to vote for Anura as President this month. That key issue is the attitude to the economic transformation of 1977, i.e., Sri Lanka’s adoption of an Open Economy --before Thatcher and Reagan did

“…This trend was exacerbated after 1977 due to unplanned and unwise economic policies & corruption…”

– Framework for ECONOMIC RENAISSANCE, Business Forum 2024,  National People’s Power-NPP, p 03.

You cannot have ‘system-change’ and economic stabilisation/recovery/growth, together, as a package. Gorbachev and Yeltsin tried and Russia experienced catastrophic economic collapse. China learned the lesson: never attempt economic and political macro-change at the same time, unless you want anarchy. China embarked on its economic miracle while maintaining its political system. So too Vietnam. However, both countries changed their national political leaderships many times. 

System-change may sound a good idea but let’s unpack what is meant by its advocates. 

What ‘system’ are they talking about? The capitalist system? The market economy? The democratic system? The democratic capitalist system? The social system? The political system? 

What ‘change’ are they talking about? Total or partial? Revolution or reform? Instant or incremental? 

Let’s not invoke the Aragalaya here. Like Hartal 1953, the Aragalaya was quite specific in its objectives as the vast majority of participants were concerned: get rid of Gota the autocrat whose loony economics was blowing-up people and arrogant rhetoric was enraging them. That’s why most of the crowd numbering half a million if not more went home after dusk once Gotabaya had been ousted, leaving around 15,000 at Galle Face by nightfall on 9 July. 

The slogan of “system-change” came from a minority, and even they weren’t clear about what it meant. The ‘Aragalaya Manifesto’ was issued during the ebb of the Aragalaya not its high tide. 

Change is imperative, but those are changes in leadership, policies and structures. 

Structural change, ‘structural reform’, is needed but not ‘system change’. Certainly not if we want to successfully address the intertwined debt crisis and poverty pandemic. 

Like Hartal 1953, the Aragalaya was quite specific in its objectives as the vast majority of participants were concerned: get rid of Gota the autocrat whose loony economics was blowing-up people and arrogant rhetoric was enraging them. That’s why most of the crowd numbering half a million if not more went home after dusk once Gotabaya had been ousted, leaving around 15,000 at Galle Face by nightfall on 9 July. The slogan of “system-change” came from a minority, and even they weren’t clear about what it meant

AKD: No, he can’t 

Every important domain of activity and the body of scientific knowledge devoted to it, has certain ‘fundamentals’. This is acknowledged whether you are a capitalist or a socialist, especially in the realm of economics. 

While AKD and the JVP-NPP have changed, they haven’t metamorphosed into enlightened economic modernisers. A key marker in a brand-new document confirms that. Without a rectification on this fundamental issue contained in what the NPP designates as a ‘Framework’, it would be very dangerous to the economy to vote for Anura as President this month. 

That key issue is the attitude to the economic transformation of 1977, i.e., Sri Lanka’s adoption of an Open Economy --before Thatcher and Reagan did. 

“…However, all regimes up to now have destroyed the economy and failed to provide even basic human needs, mainly due to a corrupt political culture, an undemocratic way of handling the economy, and the self-serving interests of politicians and their close aides in corrupt networks. This trend was exacerbated after 1977 due to unplanned and unwise economic policies & corruption, which were driven by petty political agendas that served the interest of the very few at the expense of a large majority of people simply ignoring robust economic evaluations. These destructive policies and deep-rooted corruption led to a collapsed economy…”

INTRODUCTION, Framework for ECONOMIC RENAISSANCE, Business Forum 2024, National People’s Power-NPP, P03.

It is not my contention that Anura Dissanayake should embrace the 1977 Open Economy uncritically. Its social downside was contributory to the second Southern Insurrection. That downside had already been publicly criticised and cautioned against by R. Premadasa as early as his acceptance speech as PM in 1978. 

Anura’s conversion to an uncritical adherence to the 1977 model is not what I am looking for at all, and I would be among the first to criticise him had he done so. My points are far more basic: 

(i) The 1977 Open Economy had a downside and an upside, but any rational economic assessment would say that the upside was greater than the downside, while the downside itself was rectifiable (as President Premadasa proved). 

(ii)The 1977 Open Economy was a qualitative improvement on the Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) ‘closed economy’ model of 1970-1977 that it replaced, and the semi-colonial plantation economy that prevailed since Independence. 

My perspective is not only one of political economy. It is the long-standing view of the citizenry, which is why the LSSP-CPSL was wiped out at the 1977 General Election, the SLFP under the leadership of Madam Bandaranaike was kept at bay for 17 years, and finally re-elected to office only after Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga ruptured with the pre-1977 economic doctrine and adopted an ‘Open Economy with a Human Face’ as her economic policy.

Anura’s latest document conclusively proves that he considers the 1977 Open Economy: 

(a) To have been more bad than good. 

(b) To have been an overall worsening (“exacerbated after 1977”), rather than an overall improvement on the pre-1977 economic model. 

(c) As one of the factors that “led to a collapsed economy”.  

This is hugely dangerous for three reasons: 

1)It is blind to the fact that the resilient Open Economy kept us going through the Thirty-Years War and the 2008 global crisis at an average growth-rate approximating 5%.

2)AKD-NPP regards the 1977 Open Economy as part of the problem, not part of the solution. 

3)Since Anura doesn’t regard the 1977 economic shift to have been more good than bad, and better than what preceded it, he is perfectly capable under the pressure of external shocks and internal JVP decisions, of abandoning the basic 1977 model and shift back to a pre-1977 model. This is all the more probable since AKD and his party regard the post-1977 Open Economy as a causative factor leading to the current collapse.

Lanka’s economic crisis and ensuing IMF austerity have had such a shock effect precisely because it was a vertical crash. Experts who signed the Debt Justice statement on Sri Lanka’s debt crisis, including world-famous radical economists like Thomas Piketty, have dated it to roughly 2014. But Anura and the JVP-NPP date it back 76 years. This ignores all the post-Independence achievements that made Sri Lanka better than most of the global South and ahead of some places in the global North (free education and healthcare would be a huge advance in the USA). 

Thus, Anura Dissanayake and the JVP-NPP:

Cannot rebuild a nation, armed with their attitude of nihilism towards to its tangible, comparative international achievements. 

Cannot cure a disease diagnosed by international experts as of recent origin and duration, with their unscientific homegrown diagnosis that it was an inescapable birth defect (from 1948) lasting 76 years. 

Cannot cure an economic disease when their diagnosis is that it was primarily non-economic in causation (“political culture”, “governance”).  

Cannot reform the “political culture” when they haven’t repented and renounced their contribution to its distortion, degeneration and militarisation through: 

(a) Armed rebellion against a freshly-elected Government (1971) 

(b) The practice of Pol Pot-type political cannibalism of slaughtering fellow leftists including their own former heroes (1986-1989).

Anura Dissanayake rejected accommodation of Dullas Alahapperuma, a progressive immune to attack by the Aragalaya, saying Dullas “remained silent” during “corrupt” Rajapaksa rule. Anura joined the JVP in 1987 months after Colombo University student leader Daya Pathirana was butchered by a JVP ‘Balakaaya’, and stayed obediently in the party through the horrific JVP-DJV murders of ex-1971 heroes Nandana Marasinghe and Jamis Athugala and Left-populist superstar Vijaya Kumaratunga. 

Tilvin Silva and the JVP deny murdering Vijaya, but that fails to explain why Wijeweera (whose interviews were run by the Irida Lankadeepa) or any other JVP leader didn’t issue a single statement from clandestinity and the party didn’t plaster posters countrywide, condemning Vijaya’s killing—when they were being publicly denounced for it. 

Even during his decade as party leader AKD has not expressed repentance about the most barbaric savagery by the JVP. China’s Communist Party did incomparably better, denouncing the ultraleft deviation of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four. Unrepentant Anura is hardly suitable to de-toxify the political culture. Even while fighting the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Communists undertook self-criticism and “rectifications of line” and published them. Not so the JVP even under Anura’s long leadership.   

Lanka’s economic crisis and ensuing IMF austerity have had such a shock effect precisely because it was a vertical crash. Experts who signed the Debt Justice statement on Sri Lanka’s debt crisis, including world-famous radical economists like Thomas Piketty, have dated it to roughly 2014. But Anura and the JVP-NPP date it back 76 years. This ignores all the post-Independence achievements that made Sri Lanka better than most of the global South and ahead of some places in the global North (free education and healthcare would be a huge advance in the USA)

Dishonest on devolution

The axial problem we have faced since 1948 is not ‘corruption and bad governance’ as Anura Dissanayake and the JVP-NPP would have it, but the unresolved ethno-national or ethno-nationalities question—the NPP manifesto simply calls it ‘ethnic’--which led to a protracted high-intensity war, suicide terrorism and an external intervention which included a military presence on Sri Lankan soil. It is the main axis of fissure which threatens and can threaten the Sri Lankan state; Sri Lanka’s existence as a single, independent country.

Therefore, it is quite revealing, and not in a good way, that this central problem and subject constitutes the very last segment of the JVP-NPP’s 129-page manifesto, namely 4.9, ‘A Sri Lankan Nation-The Universal Citizen’. It runs to merely two (2) pages, 128-129.

On the one hand it significantly commits to the formal process of Constitutional change of 2015-- which was driven by Ranil Wickremesinghe as PM in the Yahapalanaya government. 

On the other hand, it has but a single mention of ‘devolution’, but makes no mention of either the minimum content or the parametric limits of that devolution. 

“This initiative will build on the constitutional reform process started in 2015 which remains incomplete. The proposed constitutional reforms will guarantee equality and democracy and the devolution of political and administrative power to every local government, district and province so that all people can be involved in governance within one country.” (128)

It must be recalled that the 2015 Constitutional reform process deleted the definition of the Sri Lankan state as “unitary” in the English language, retained “ekeeya” (unitary) in Sinhala only (pun intended), and proposed a redefinition in Tamil as “orumittanadu” (meaning single, undivided—but not unitary—country). 

The 2015 Constitutional reform process under Yahapalanaya auspices which Anura and the JVP-NPP is committed to reviving, also pledged the removal of the executive Presidency, which Anura does too:

“Abolishing the executive presidency and appointing a president, without executive powers, by the parliament.” 

(‘A Thriving Nation, A Beautiful Life’, NPP, 04. A Dignified Life, A Strong Country, 4.1 A Newer Constitution-A United Sri Lankan Nation, p 109)

‘Devolution’ is mentioned once in a nonspecific way, while the reactivation of the Provincial Councils is promised. But what are the Provincial Councils without the 13th amendment or some such constitutional granting – devolution--of power? Empty shells, cars without engines. 

Devolution with no mention of the actually existing law, the 13th amendment, means that the PCs could enjoy powers below or beyond the existing 13th amendment. 

Going by the NPP manifesto the PCs will exist in a system without the overarching roof of an executive Presidential system in which the country’s leader is elected by a majority of the citizens of the island as a whole and therefore symbolises a unity superior to purely provincial bodies. 

Anura’s non-specific, free-floating pledge of devolution to Provincial Councils could either be a dud cheque or a blank cheque: 

Dud cheque: Devolved powers could be much less than what is contained in the 13th amendment. 

Blank cheque: Devolved powers could go beyond the 13th amendment and the unitary state itself. 

Leaving things that open, without parameters, is completely irresponsible. It makes a presidential mandate for Anura a big ask. 

Consumed by an old elitist’s rancorous social resentment at Sajith, the son of the man that the UNP, the democratic capitalist System and society are so deeply indebted to for their survival -- President Premadasa-- Ranil Wickremesinghe will sacrifice democracy, market economy and social equilibrium. Ranil should exit the unwinnable race, urging his voters to switch to Sajith. JR would insist

Ranil wrecks moderate centre 

President JR Jayewardene, no fan of his Prime Minister Premadasa, conceded the UNP’s presidential nomination to him in 1988, overriding suggestions from India’s High Commissioner JN Dixit that JR amend the Constitution and run for a third term. JR did so despite the fact that Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathmudali who were closer to him were hoping for the slot. 

JR had tasked hardnosed UNP General Secretary Ranjan Wijeratne with ascertaining who had the best chance of winning, and Ranjan reported back that the sole chance of sheer political and physical survival in the face of the JVP-DJV offensive was Ranasinghe Premadasa.  

Ranjan may have been unaware but he had recommended a time-tested strategic option: tilt to a moderate progressive to countervail and prevail over a hardcore Left. 

In 1956, it was a rebel from DS Senanayake’s Cabinet and founder of a progressive-centrist party the SLFP, SWRD Bandaranaike, who beat both the rightwing UNP government and the world’s biggest Trotskyist party the LSSP. 

More famously, it was the Social Democratic party of Mario Soares and not the discredited Conservative Right that Dr Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, Republican, and scholarly ‘grand strategist’, turned to as electoral alternative when the strong Communist Party of Portugal and the country’s military-backed Far-Left made a serious bid for power in 1975-76, which if successful would have opened a fissure in NATO and altered the European and Western balance of power. 

When the US Democrats wished to fend of the Socialist candidacy of Bernie Sanders, they withdrew from the primaries and serially endorsed centrist-progressive Joe Biden, just as this year they eased out Biden and rallied around Kamala Harris. 

The Realist strategy underlying all these cases is well-known: support the Populist or Social Democratic, moderate-progressive, centrist option to countervail the potentially destabilising non-Social Democratic Left. Antonio Gramsci grimly discerned the prospect of a “Passive Revolution” from above, pre-empting and countering a (Communist-led) class revolution from below.

Ranil is splitting the moderate centre which Sajith has revived as a viable, credible competitor to the JVP-NPP by giving it a populist turbo-boost, as his father (much more dynamically) did in 1988 and SWRD Bandaranaike did in 1956. 

Delaying Sajith’s nomination, Ranil helped Gotabaya win in November 2019. Gotabaya gifted Ranil the Prime Ministership in April 2022. The Rajapaksas picked Ranil as President in the parliamentary vote. 

No poll has Wickremesinghe running ahead and no scenario projects him as winner. He can only split the vote of the moderate-centrists, i.e., those who share the view that on balance: 

The 1977 Open Economy model was more positive than negative. 

The JVP’s two insurrections were more negative than positive. 

Ranil’s irrationally irresponsible recklessness comes genetically. In 1956, Ranil’s father was backer and advisor of Sir John Kotelawala whose social profile facilitated the ‘Sinhala Only’ backlash and SWRD Bandaranaike’s ‘Silent Revolution’. 

While DR Wijewardena’s Cambridge-educated son and personal choice as Chairman, Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. (‘Lake House’) did his best to balance all considerations and navigate Lake House through the choppy seas of Ceylonese politics, Ranil’s hawkish parents forfeited through provocative political confrontation, one of Asia’s oldest privately-owned newspaper empires to state ownership. Even UNP President JR Jayewardene didn’t return it. He also grabbed the first private TV station owned by Ranil’s family. 

Consumed by an old elitist’s rancorous social resentment at Sajith, the son of the man that the UNP, the democratic capitalist System and society are so deeply indebted to for their survival -- President Premadasa-- Ranil Wickremesinghe will sacrifice democracy, market economy and social equilibrium. Ranil should exit the unwinnable race, urging his voters to switch to Sajith. JR would insist.