At 74: This crisis is post-war, not post-independence

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the 74th Independence Day celebration

There is a right way and a wrong way to defend the country and/or the government. Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to Canada, Harsha Navaratna, showed the right way in a fact-based and reasoned rebuttal—yet, open to dialogue—of the wholly ludicrous ‘genocide’ resolution passed by the Ontario legislature. By stark contrast, the Foreign Ministry’s aggressive and slyly sinister attack on Ambika Satkunanathan impacts GoSL’s case in Brussels for GSP+, at the UNHRC and on Capitol Hill more negatively than anything Ambika said, while tarnishing the image and credibility of the Foreign Ministry itself. 

Sad at 74

The Independence Day parade was impressive and entertaining, but also saddening. It is not, as some nihilists say, that there is nothing to celebrate. There are comparable places in Asia and the global South which are far worse off, with militias, drug cartels, military juntas, massacres and refugee camps. There are also plenty of comparable places – in Asia, even South Asia—to live, that are far better.

What made our 74th Independence Day a sad one, is the huge gap between legitimate public sentiment and the event. Never have I noticed such glumness at best and frustrated anger at worst, manifested about the ceremony. The expensive fly-past came in for particular stick, given the fuel crisis. The public mood reflected the unprecedented alienation of the citizenry from the regime, and by unfortunate extension, the state. 

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s address to the nation worsened matters. Seeing ex-President Mahinda Rajapaksa in his trademark shades on stage reminded me of what an intuitive, sensitive, responsive reader of public sentiment he used to be (and perhaps still is). He would never have made the stern, testy declaration that President GR did. 

President GR’s speech displayed a dangerous disconnect. There was not a single mention of the economic crisis. He was tough on those who refuse to change, and on foreign and domestic forces who he thought were out to thwart him. He declined to acknowledge the unprecedented and growing material suffering of the people and to empathise with them. He failed to recognise that the strongest public criticism of his policies come not from foreign and domestic vested interests but from the Sinhala Buddhist peasantry in the island nation’s rural heartland.

One of Winston Churchill’s finest speeches was during the retreat to and evacuation from Dunkirk. What if he had made a speech without any reference to that great setback? That is what President Gotabaya Rajapaksa did. If a leader is to mould public opinion, he/she has to first mirror it. This, GR totally failed to do. 

The President’s state of denial is bad for the State itself. Under his rule and with his discourse the state alienates itself from the citizenry. The feedback loop has been severed. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa just isn’t listening. He has exited political conversation and communication; ended politics. 

No one, anywhere, has successfully converted overnight to organic agriculture or even tried to. President GR may wear the uniqueness of his ‘double-o’, i.e., Organic Overnight policy, as he does his military decorations—but it is no mark of distinction. He never even sought to emulate the successful agricultural techniques and scientific thinking of the two countries he feels closest to: Israel and China. 

American scholars had a term for similar behaviour on the part of President Trump: solipsism/ solipsistic. Simply put, solipsism is a state of subjectivism in which you dwell in the reality of your own thoughts and opinions, rather than recognising the material reality of the world outside yourself. Solipsism is the very opposite of scientific rationality. 

That said, there was something very real about the 74th Independence Day parade: it displayed the President’s real power-base, the military. He was flashing his military machine at the discontented citizenry. 

The economic crisis is fissuring President GR’s circle of civilian loyalists though: pragmatic Sinhala nationalists High Commissioner Moragoda and Minister Gammanpila are strongly for the Trinco tank farm deal while ultranationalist Ven. Prof Medagoda Abeytissa spoke shrilly in Trincomalee against the deal, the 1987 Accord and the Exchange of Letters, solidarising with Eastern Province Governor Anuradha Yahampath, another hardcore ultranationalist. 

As a crisis-management option, hawks prefer constrictive military closure to expansive economic engagement. 

73 years or 10? 

Even while we seek to understand why we have fallen behind many countries, if we do not appreciate what kept us better than many places and still keeps us—if only barely—above the fate of many places, we shall fall even below where we are now.

Surely most of us did not feel this uniformly bad about things in the country, throughout the decades? 

Colin Wilson wrote a breakthrough essay on ‘peak experience’ derived from an idea of the iconic psychologist Albert Maslow, that in the understanding the phenomenon of mental ill-health, the analyst should not dwell upon the long downswings, but is better served studying mentally healthy people and periods of peak experiences, to isolate the factors that make for mental health, the absence of which make for ill-health. 

Could we have talked of a crisis of Sri Lankan cricket in 1996, the year we won the cricket World Cup? Obviously not. Understanding the contemporary crisis of Lankan cricket would necessarily focus on the question of why we have never repeated that ‘peak experience’. 

The same goes for our post-independence history. Recall how the vast majority of the country’s citizenry felt in May 2009. On 19 May, we conclusively won a 30-year war over a powerful enemy, and on 27 May, while national television audiences watched the proceedings live, we decisively won the vote at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva against a group of powerful countries. 

Granted, a significant minority of the population mourned those twin victories, but war fought to a finish is a zero-sum game and the 6 January riot on Capitol Hill showed there are still those who mourn the defeat of the secessionist Confederacy in the American Civil War. Overall, May 2009 was a historic ‘peak experience’. 

This helps us locate and periodise our current crisis. We didn’t feel this bad until the Gotabaya Presidency, because things got this bad for so many citizens only under this presidency; not before. 

Never mind the clichetic contrast between then, when the (Sinhala) youth painted (kitschy) Sinhala nationalist murals upstream of the GR presidency, and now, when they are crowding the exits as that presidency’s policy consequences carry downstream. 

The real ‘then/now’ contrast is between Influx and Efflux; between the moment many who lived abroad, including youngsters who had grown up and been educated overseas, streamed back to Sri Lanka to make a life here after President Mahinda Rajapaksa had made the country safe again by winning and thus ending the war, and the moment when they and a great many others who had always lived here, started swarming out. 

Our last peak experience was in May 2009 in which we caught up with, compensated for and overtook many of our errors and follies since 1948. There was a rebirth of hope and the sense of a possibility of a new morning, a new beginning, even a re-founding. That feel-good factor plateaued till early into MR’s second term.

Now we can see and understand the downward spiral into the abyss. It is not the crisis of 73 years of Independence. It is the crisis of post-war Sri Lanka. We got the war right (finally) and the peace wrong. That’s why I titled my 2013 book ‘Long War, Cold Peace’ (Vijitha Yapa).  

Unlike war, peace need not and should not be a zero-sum game. It has to be a multiple-sum game in which there are win-win solutions. Barring episodes in 2011-2013 (abortive talks with the TNA, holding of Northern PC elections), every administration in post-war Sri Lanka played zero-sum games. 

All it took between the new morning and the fall of darkness, was a single decade. But that means this crisis is only a decade (plus) long—which is good news. It is much easier to dig yourself out from under a mountain of 10 years of detritus, than out from under one of 73 years.

To pull the crisis further back in one’s periodisation is to brush Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s end of politics as we have known it, under a 73-year-old rug of political continuity and tradition. This also obscures the danger of emergent presidential-militarist autocracy. 

Open economy, executive presidency 

Another trap is sourcing the crisis in the open economy and/or the executive presidency. This crisis is characterised by scarcity. Things were far better for the citizenry when the open economy was functioning. 

Without the overarching, centripetal executive presidency bearing the legitimacy of direct election by a majority of the people, the centrifugal divisions in our society contained in the cockpit of Parliament will generate such volatility that the stability vital for economic recovery and growth will be absent, resulting in chronic anarchy. 

Correctly identified, the problem is: “Which models of Open Economy and Executive Presidency? How to reformat and rebalance each so that their interface is optimal?” 

My preference of political model is France: direct national election to the presidency (no electoral college); separation of powers/checks-and-balances; unitary (not federal) system; and now, with the Covid-shock, the revival of post-WWII ‘planification’. 

To attribute our travails to a 73-year-long crisis is to opt for amputation when keyhole laser-surgery will do. 

PCR as Presidential bet? 

The Gotabaya Rajapaksa period of Sri Lankan politics has rendered contagious the idea that 74 years of independence have led us to the present impasse and consequently we need a total change. 

When that idea was first surfaced, it mentioned 70 years of independence, and the articulation came from Gotabaya project’s Viyath Maga speakers as a denunciation of politics as it existed. It was a call for a new politics and style of leadership – that of (patriotic) command, not (pluralist) consensus—different even from Mahinda Rajapaksa. Though a conscious echo of the Trumpian Alt-Right discourse, it was more extreme: in actuality it was a call for the end of politics and for rule without politics, over the citizenry. 

With the meltdown of the hope vested in the Gotabaya presidency, the Viyath Maga slogan and project, this time updated to ‘74 years’, has been taken over by the anti-regime camp, in two variations. The leftwing avatar of the ‘GR genie’, is JVP-NPP leader AKD. The rightwing avatar of the ‘GR genie’ and the New Right’s AKD, is PCR (Patali Champika Ranawaka). They are two sides of the same coin. 

Papa was not only a rolling stone (on any given day), he was also a gambling man. I inherited his instinct, not his habit. Anyone who bets on PCR as a viable presidential candidate has just got to be kidding. 

It is far more difficult to get from 5th place in Colombo to the presidency than to get from the 1st place in Colombo and 42% of the national vote, to 50%+ and the presidency. 

It almost impossible to do so with a backstory (quite unlike Sajith Premadasa) as a Godfather of divisive ethnoreligious extremism, with a long history of pre-BBS Islamophobic agitation: the aftermath of Ven Soma’s death, the Shah Rukh Khan show, Digamadulla/Digavapi, the Halal issue, the Maharagama BBS meeting etc., not to mention wartime and post-war obstructionism of the implementation of the 13th, amendment.

Left alternative or counterweight? 

The AKD-led JVP-NPP portrays itself as occupying a moral high ground unlike the corrupt establishment. The consistent view of the JVP leadership, of the party’s barbaric second uprising of the late 1980s, as reiterated in the speeches of AKD at the official commemorations even last year (2021) is as follows: the party was framed and unfairly banned by the Jayewardene government after Black July 1983 which the JVP had nothing to do with; the Indian intervention took place in 1987; there was a patriotic uprising which the JVP joined and led; there were some regrettable mistakes (unnamed) made. 

Mostly true but none of it explains the triple horrors that (a) the first killings of unarmed victims by the JVP began way before the Indian intervention; (b) they were of unarmed Leftists, not of the ruling party that unfairly banned it; and (c) the later killings of those who supported the Indo-Lanka Accord because of devolution, included leftists who had been prominent in the campaign against the JVP’s unfair proscription. 

The first JVP killing that made national news was on 15 December 1986 when the leader of the radical Independent Students Union (ISU) of Colombo University, Daya Pathirana (from the deep south), was abducted together with a university friend on a city street close to the campus, taken to Piliyandala, stripped and had his head bashed in and throat slashed. It was Poya and only the visibility from the light of the full moon and the passage of pilgrims stopped the buddy (nicknamed ‘VC’) from having his throat cut too (though the act had commenced). He survived to give a full statement to the police, identifying the perpetrators from the interrogation that preceded the gruesome execution. 

Since the JVP killings started before the Indian intervention, its option for barbaric lethal violence cannot be attributed to that landmark. Subsequent killings included a hero of the JVP’s first insurrection, Nandana Marasinghe, and Vijaya Kumaratunga who had stood at the head of the campaign to lift the JVP’s proscription. If their crime, stemming from their support for devolution, was support of the Accord and the 13th amendment, they could have been politically denounced, isolated and defeated, not slaughtered. 

The propensity to lethal violence against unarmed persons is the very crux of the definition of terrorism and even barbarism. Transparently sincere self-criticism, contrition, should come easier to the present leadership which did not give the orders in the late 1980s. However, up to the very last anniversary (13 November 2021) the current JVP-NPP leadership registered no remorse or repentance over those cannibalistic intra-left atrocities as well as slayings of uninvolved, unarmed civilians. 

Such a party and leadership cannot be regarded the most enlightened, let alone the healthiest, safest alternative in the contemporary crisis. 

In politics, I stand for multipolarity and a policy of balance. In international politics a counterbalance is needed, facilitating global equilibrium, because all states act in accordance with their perceived interests, while my primary concern is the enlightened national interest of Sri Lanka which lies in the widening of international space and strategic autonomy.

In national politics there are a few leaders whom I repose varying degrees of trust and have hope in (Sajith first), but there is no single political party that can be trusted to represent by itself, the interests of the people, without strong checks-and-balances. 

As a Realist rather than a Constitutionalist, I would not rely solely or primarily on institutions. As in international politics, in national politics too I would rely instead on the balance of forces. The Left can play a positive strategic role as balancer.