Aragalaya and Hartal-2: The military must stay out

The Sinhala word ‘Aragalaya’ will assume the same place in the bilingual Lankan lexicon that the subcontinental term ‘Hartal’ does, referring as it does to the mass uprising of 8-9 August 1953. The difference is that the Hartal was a dramatic spike, an ‘event’, while the Aragalaya looks like it will be a process. The Hartal was called off in two days by those who organised it: the traditional Left parties, the LSSP and CP. The Aragalaya/Hartal-2 won’t and cannot

The new consciousness is of a new pluralist Sri Lanka, without division and dominance; a society without sectarianism and hegemony. The Sri Lanka that should have been born when the war ended - Pic by Ruwan Walpola

“…But this struggle…will be waged by the masses, will be carried out by the people; the people are going to play a much more important role now than then, the leaders are less important and will be less important in this struggle than in the one before...For this great humanity has said, ‘enough!’…” – Fidel Castro, Second Declaration of Havana, 4 Feb. 1962 

When there are many non-lethal means of crowd control available, there is no justification whatsoever to carry, let alone use, lethal weaponry such as T56 assault rifles in a situation in which protesting citizens are unarmed.

The appointment of Prasanna Ranatunga as Public Security Minister following his blood-curdling evocation and implicit justification of the Rathupaswela massacre, cast a large shadow of violent repression over the future. That future arrived swiftly, with Police gunfire killing unarmed protestors in Rambukkana the day after the new Cabinet was sworn-in. 

The BASL, the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission and investigative journalists should probe the possibility that the Rambukkana shootings could have been a deliberate provocation to disrupt the burgeoning rapport between the Police and the citizenry in many places, turn the citizens—especially the youth—against the Police, and create a situation in which the Police ‘calls upon the military for assistance’ (as in Rathupaswela), thereby providing a portal for an interventionist military role in the crisis. A military role may result in military rule. 

Avoid unwinnable civil war

Over a year before the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa as President and his appointments of Gotabaya Rajapaksa as Secretary/Defence and General Sarath Fonseka as Army commander, Colombo’s Sunday papers of 17 October 2004 carried a piece by me entitled ‘Why Prabhakaran Will Lose’.

My present prognosis is that if the military intervenes coercively in the political crisis, it will set off a civil conflict which may become a civil war which it cannot win for the following reasons:

1.It had a secure supportive rear area during the anti-LTTE war. It had a passive rear area during the anti-JVP war. It will have an actively hostile rear-area during any conflict that arises in the Southern part of the island today.

2.It had the benefit of an economy that grew steadily or remained stable, during earlier conflicts. It will have the problem of a collapsing economy in any contemporary conflict.

3.During earlier conflicts the military had only the task of fighting while the experienced civilians handled governance, economics and diplomacy. The Rajapaksas have failed in these domains and the military does not have the capacity to manage the country and fight a civil war.

4.The military fought against a terrorist force based on an ethnic minority and two rebellions based on the youth. If the military uses force, the resultant rebellion would have for the first time, the active support and participation of the workers, peasants, women, clergy of all religions, the professional middle classes, small and medium industrialists and even elements of the upper classes. It would be the military versus the masses; the military encircled by the masses.

5.The military would be overstretched and divided within, with the rank-and-file sympathising with the peasants and youth, and the officers finding their children turning against them. Sandwiched between a hostile South and North, the military would have no borders across which a safe area awaits; no supportive rear; and no secure supply lines. Railway lines cannot be guarded all night. There would be international condemnation, sanctions and citizens’ boycotts.

Strict neutrality, well above the fray, is in the strategic interest of the security forces.  

This youth-led rebellion in blue-jeans and black shirts/T-shirts has begun the most difficult revolution of all: the revolution of consciousness. The young people acted, proving that example is indeed better than precept. The new consciousness appeared not as theory or ideology but as practice, in the very existence of the Galle Face commune—GotaGoGama—and in solidarity as a way of being among its inhabitants

Aragalaya+Hartal-2 

Hartal-2 is about to erupt (as this column has long predicted). Middle-aged men in sarongs pulling logs across the tracks and then parking a petrol bowser blocking rail traffic after the fuel price spike, is significant not because it is new but because it’s a replay. During the August 1953 Hartal, women in ‘chintz cloth and jacket’ played ‘raban’ (drums) and baked hoppers on rail-tracks to stop trains. Eight people were shot dead. The incumbent UNP administration evacuated to a US ship, replaced its PM with a tough ex-military man, Sir John Kotelawala, but never recovered social legitimacy and was swept out of office at the first General Election that followed. 

In November 1976 the Police shot and killed Weerasuriya, a freshman student at Peradeniya University. He was my batchmate in the Arts Faculty. Student protests erupted, catalysing a Railway strike and a General Strike. The struggle by the worker-student alliance broke open the Government, which did not survive even a year after the shooting. 

The Sinhala word ‘Aragalaya’ will assume the same place in the bilingual Lankan lexicon that the subcontinental term ‘Hartal’ does, referring as it does to the mass uprising of 8-9 August 1953. The difference is that the Hartal was a dramatic spike, an ‘event’, while the Aragalaya looks like it will be a process. The Hartal was called off in two days by those who organised it: the traditional Left parties, the LSSP and CP. The Aragalaya/Hartal-2 won’t and cannot. 

The Aragalaya (The Struggle) has seized the public imagination. That young, engaging and incredibly accomplished Hiran Abeysekara, winner of the Laurence Olivier award, the pinnacle award of British theatre, flew back to Sri Lanka to participate in the protest at Galle Face Green, shows that the Aragalaya is by far the more persuasive story, with romantic resonance and heroic appeal, in contrast to the stale, paranoid conspiracy theories of the ruling clan, the latest example of which was the official release after the meeting of hardline pro-regime lawyers with the PM. 

The citizens of the country “are as mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore!” (Peter Finch in Network, 1976). That’s what it’s all about; not some conspiracy. Fully conscious that they are the source and repository of sovereignty in a democratic republic while the President and his Government are mere caretakers of that sovereignty—caretakers appointed by the people—the appointing authority, the people want them to go and will keep trying to kick them out if they don’t. 

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa said that the ban on chemical fertiliser was a mistake, but didn’t admit it was his personal mistake. If one may adapt Churchill, never in the field of Lankan politics has an elected leader done so much damage to so many, so soon. 

TV newscasts show that the sparks of anger and sporadic physical violence on the streets come from wage-earning or self-employed/informal sector men aged roughly 25-50, with dependent families, in suburbs and provincial towns, stuck for long stretches in interminable queues for fuel and gas, boiling with legitimate despair and rage. 

In this national and social context, GotaGoGama is by contrast, therapeutic. What could be more cathartic than the cleverly irreverent lightshow on the old Parliament building turned Presidential Secretariat? Hence, my belated wish for the Sri Lankan New Year – ‘May the whole island become one GotaGoGama’—which I carried around in Sinhala translation on a cardboard. 

Of the many things that constitute the medium that you are immersed in at Galle Face, such as the density and diversity of the crowd, the ubiquity of young families and couples, the flowing energy and creativity, the proliferation of nodes of public expression, the democratic radicalism of the banners and slogans, and the determined outspokenness of young women as much as of young men, that which struck me the most was the good-naturedness, humour and healthiness of the militancy of the multitude. 

Those who deride this carnival atmosphere as evidence of upper-middle class or middle-class youth dilettantism, have not read the famous remark of the most serious revolutionary strategist of modern history, Lenin, who observed that “Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited.” (‘Two Tactics’ 1905) 

This youth-led rebellion in blue-jeans and black shirts/T-shirts has begun the most difficult revolution of all: the revolution of consciousness. The young people acted, proving that example is indeed better than precept. The new consciousness appeared not as theory or ideology but as practice, in the very existence of the Galle Face commune—GotaGoGama—and in solidarity as a way of being among its inhabitants. 

The new consciousness is of a new pluralist Sri Lanka, without division and dominance; a society without sectarianism and hegemony. The Sri Lanka that should have been born when the war ended. 

About to drop out of my doctoral studies and Fulbright program into revolutionary political activism back home, I marched to New York’s Central Park on 12 June 1982 for the Anti-Nuclear rally, one of the biggest protests ever –a million people—and wrote it up for the Lanka Guardian magazine and the Colombo newspapers. Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and Rita Marley were among those who played at Central Park that day. 

If a documentary is made of GotaGoGama, the credits should roll with Arjuna Rookantha Senanayake’s exceptional rendition at Galle Face Green of the Amaradeva classic Sasara Wasana Thuru, which this young singer with a pirate beard and acoustic guitar turns from traditionalist classic to soaring lyrical tribute to the island suffused with the enveloping, uplifting spirit of the struggle. 

If you can’t get rid of the autocrat, get rid of the autocracy, i.e., what makes him an autocrat: not the Executive Presidency, but the 20th amendment. If you cannot unseat the rider, drop the horse from under him

Rajapaksa recalcitrance

Nine months after the August 2020 landslide election victory for the Rajapaksas, and 11 months before the March 2022 protests including at Mirihana, the 28 May 2021 issue of my regular column in these pages read ‘Rajapaksa Arc of Political History Begins to descend’. I predicted that: “Though the Rajapaksas surpassed Jayewardene, Premadasa and the last Bandaranaike in office by winning a war against a historic foe, the Gotabaya Government’s ‘voodoo economics’ will cause agrarian ruin and urban food shortages (for which neither COVID nor China are to blame) ...The combination will create a crisis which makes the Bandaranaikes and all post-1948 heads of state and government look comparatively wiser than the Rajapaksas. 

The 2020s are to the Rajapaksas what the 1970s were to the Bandaranaikes: the transitional time of exaltation and exit. The Rajapaksa arc of contemporary political history has begun to bend. Hardship, injustice and chaos will be the hallmarks and abiding public memories of this Government. The electorate will want neither repetition nor return. Recovery may take over a decade.” (Rajapaksa arc of political history begins to descend | Daily FT)

At his instinctive best, MR would have figured out that the smartest move for the Rajapaksas would be to move out of office and put their political opponents into bat on a wicket that will turn pacier as the IMF austerity program and the creditors’ conditionalities start to bite. Instead, the Rajapaksas have decided to cling to power. 

This also means that as in the case of the Philippines where Ferdinand Marcos’ son Bongbong has taken 35 years to make a comeback, it will be decades before Namal has a real shot at the title. He doesn’t have what Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga had, to make the comeback in 17 years, half the time it is taking Bongbong Marcos. The recent interview given by Namal to the Indian media shows that he is sticking to the family line with only the slightest of wiggles. 

By contrast, when the new Government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike faced the JVP insurrection of April 1971, Sunethra and Chandrika Bandaranaike (and, more substantively, their cousins Senaka Bandaranaike and Susil Sirivardhana), were dissenting publicly in London and Paris against the massacre of the youth during the repression launched by their mother’s administration. The young Bandaranaikes behaved like the dissenting, radicalised offspring of a feudal family they were, while the Rajapaksas as a whole and with zero exceptions have turned their back on their family’s track record of rebellious populism (e.g., Lakshman, George and later Mahinda Rajapaksa) and are behaving with the conformism of a Sicilian clan or Colombian cartel. 

There are at least three major reasons that make the Rajapaksas continue to occupy the seats of power. 

Firstly, they believe they cannot be overthrown because they were elected to office. So were Marcos, and of course, Adolf Hitler (a firm favourite of the GR hardcore), who weren’t overthrown by elections. 

Secondly, they believe that the Galle Face ‘liberated zone’ is an urban, cosmopolitan, Western-funded manifestation infiltrated by the radical left FSP and JVP while the Sinhala-Buddhist rural heartland and the majority of the people remain essentially loyal to the same values as the Rajapaksas and will therefore stick with the latter. But if they listened to their own parliamentarians they would know that the first fissures appeared in precisely the rural heartland with the President’s policy atrocity of the overnight ban on fertiliser. The first march on Medamulana (blocked by a court order wielding police) preceded by months, the candlelight pickets and the manifestation at Mirihana. 

Thirdly, the Rajapaksas think they have the support of the military, the STF, the Police, and the bureaucracy. They may be wrong in thinking they have the support of these institutional blocs, but they certainly do retain control of the state apparatuses, especially of the repressive machinery—the men with the guns. 

The BASL, the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission and investigative journalists should probe the possibility that the Rambukkana shootings could have been a deliberate provocation to disrupt the burgeoning rapport between the Police and the citizenry in many places, turn the citizens—especially the youth—against the Police, and create a situation in which the Police ‘calls upon the military for assistance’ (as in Rathupaswela), thereby providing a portal for an interventionist military role in the crisis. A military role may result in military rule

Neutralise military counter-revolution 

The Sri Lankan military has to be neutralised and deterred from moving against the protestors and the struggle for democracy. The impact of any repressive action by the military on IMF support should be a dissuasive factor. 

If the military is to be delinked from the Rajapaksa regime, the democratic forces should be Realists and not ignore the redlines the armed forces may have regarding the Sri Lankan state. 

The armed forces must be assured that no centrifugal weakening of the state will be risked through irresponsible constitutional changes (e.g., abolishing the presidency while retaining provincial councils), and that appropriate guardrails will remain. 

Anxieties regarding foreign personnel in accountability hearings have to be allayed, with a clear understanding that wartime accountability will be purely a matter for a non-20A independent national judicial system. 

The counter-revolutionary snapback of the Arab Spring must be averted, or someone may play El Sisi to Gotabaya’s Mubarak. 

The Sri Lankan military has to be neutralised and deterred from moving against the protestors and the struggle for democracy. The impact of any repressive action by the military on IMF support should be a dissuasive factor

Target, take out 20A

The 20th Amendment is the centre of gravity of Rajapaksa rule. The centre of gravity should strategically dictate ‘the direction of the main blow’. If 20A is targeted and taken out, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s untrammelled control over the state machine is cut. 

If you can’t get rid of the autocrat, get rid of the autocracy, i.e., what makes him an autocrat: not the Executive Presidency, but the 20th Amendment. If you cannot unseat the rider, drop the horse from under him. 

Taking out 20A must precede an Impeachment motion or No Confidence Motion because it will weaken GR’s grip and ability to influence outcomes.

Like the kaputas hit the plane, the parliamentarians must hit the 20th Amendment.

Its successor provision must ensure the possibility of snap Presidential, Parliamentary and PC elections. As the civil war of the late 1980s proved, a rapid cascade of elections at all levels (1988-9) constitutes the only real means of systemic decompression.