Between autocracy and anarchy: Thinking the Sri Lankan revolution

By the excessive counterviolence of 9 May and the narrowly averted tragedy at Temple Trees, the Aragalaya lost some part of its romance; its halo of idealism. The Revolution lost some part of the moral-ethical high-ground it occupied

Somewhere in the lower circles of Hell, Prabhakaran must be laughing. Had Mahinda Rajapaksa been unprotected by the military when the protestors broke through the gates of Temple Trees, he would have had his Nandikadal or Ghaddafi moment, which would have triggered another 30-year cycle of shame, bitterness and violent conflict, with the successor dispensation of liberators demonised in its turn and yesterday’s villains becoming day-after-tomorrow’s heroic martyrs

“…If you’re any kind of gentleman, you’re sorry if your adversary has been assassinated…” – Fidel Castro (Face to Face with Fidel Castro: a Conversation, Tomas Borge, 1992, p. 83)

This is an Intifada, a nationwide uprising, unarmed but hardly non-violent any longer, which can only end or begin to end with the exit of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. That is likely to be delayed unless the exit is negotiated. A titanic revolutionary, Mao Zedong, cautioned that an enemy must never have its back pushed to the wall and an avenue for retreat must be provided. Batista, the Shah of Iran and Marcos all flew out of their countries and died in exile. Most democratisations in Western and Eastern Europe (e.g., Spain, Poland) and Latin America were negotiated transitions. 

By the excessive counterviolence of 9 May and the narrowly averted tragedy at Temple Trees, the Aragalaya lost some part of its romance; its halo of idealism. The Revolution lost some part of the moral-ethical high-ground it occupied. 

Resembling Trump’s hardcore supporters, Mahinda Rajapaksa’s thugs attacked peaceful protestors. Mercifully, nobody died. However, eight people died in the retaliatory rioting that ensued. There has not been any expression of condolence and condemnation by any Aragalaya personality, just as there has been no condemnation of the attack on Kumar Welgama, the earliest opponent of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, or on Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa, an Aragalaya ally in Parliament.  

By stark contrast, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet staked out the moral high-ground: “I am deeply troubled by the escalation of violence in Sri Lanka after supporters of the Prime Minister attacked peaceful protestors in Colombo yesterday 9 May and the subsequent mob violence against members of the ruling party… I condemn all violence and call on the authorities to independently, thoroughly and transparently investigate all attacks that have occurred. It is crucial to ensure that those found responsible, including those inciting or organising violence, are held to account.”

Murdering Mynah

Al Jazeera told the world the story about the near-lynching of Mahinda Rajapaksa. 

“Heavily armed troops have evacuated outgoing Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa from his official residence in Colombo after thousands of protesters breached the main gate in the worst violence in weeks of protests over an unprecedented economic crisis. Protesters who forced their way into the Prime Minister’s official Temple Trees residence then attempted to storm the main two-storey building on Tuesday where Rajapaksa was holed up with his immediate family. “After a pre-dawn operation, the former PM and his family were evacuated to safety by the army,” a top security official told AFP news agency. “At least 10 petrol bombs were thrown into the compound.” (Army evacuates former Sri Lankan PM from besieged residence | Protests News | Al Jazeera)

Jean-Paul Sartre most memorably articulated what philosophers of earlier ages had tried to say: what matters is not what others do to us, but what we do with what others have done to us. I disagree that people should have turned the other cheek or practiced Gandhian non-violence when a mob of pro-Mahinda thugs stormed in and mauled protestors. However, burning Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family alive in Temple Trees or pulping them to death is neither proportionate retaliation nor justice.

Somewhere in the lower circles of Hell, Prabhakaran must be laughing. Had Mahinda Rajapaksa been unprotected by the military when the protestors broke through the gates of Temple Trees, he would have had his Nandikadal or Ghaddafi moment, which would have triggered another 30-year cycle of shame, bitterness and violent conflict, with the successor dispensation of liberators demonised in its turn and yesterday’s villains becoming day-after-tomorrow’s heroic martyrs.  

Even today, the irony is that the demonstrators baying for Mahinda Rajapaksa’s blood outside the Trincomalee Naval Base would as children have been in hiding with their parents, from the LTTE’s guns and blades, had the war not been won under his political leadership.    

Had the mob rampaged through and lynched Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family members, there would have been an indelible stain on Sri Lanka in the eyes of the world. While live footage was being relayed no leader of the Aragalaya/Hartal, nor of the JVP or FSP, appealed for restraint. The “wrong generation” to be “f****d with”, would have been responsible for having done the wrong thing or permitting the wrong thing to be done in its name, incurring a huge moral burden and passing on the legacy.

We’d have been living under Martial Law and military rule on the morning after. 

Endgame: Scenarios, parameters

What will be the endgame? 

1. Ouster of Gotabaya and a snap double-election? 

2. Descent into a Purge-like anarchy fuelled by what Nietzsche called ‘ressentiment’ (resentment)? 

3. Intervention by the armed forces which have performed with impressive professional skill and discipline in this crisis (the Army chief having matured into a media-savvy figure of measured authority), to impose a Hobbesian stability, order and basic functioning of the economy in the face of calamity and chaos? 

4. Intervention by an external power (as in 1987) or concert of powers? 

All these options are open. The parameters that can be identified are: 

(A) The sustainability of the status quo, let alone the restoration of the status quo ante, can be ruled out.

(B) Anarchy is a fate worse than the State. 

Reasons for revolution

There are many reasons for the unfolding revolution.

Sri Lanka has a richly diverse, complex, dynamic and opinionated society which bears no correspondence to the hyper-centralised system of governance (post-20th Amendment) and six-member family oligarchy, that were imposed upon it. 

The country experienced steady growth, clocking an average of 5% during the war, and suddenly plunged under Gotabaya, creating the classic J-curve that is identified as an underlying factor of revolution.

The economic recipe for revolution historically, huge foreign debt and a fiscal crisis of the state, is present.  

There is an acute sense of absolute as well as relative deprivation where even the well-to-do are feeling the pinch but have reason to believe that a family oligarchy and its hangers-on have been living it up, ripping off the country. 

Sri Lanka’s educated youth and professionals, a crucial stratum, felt more alienated under the Rajapaksas than ever before. 

All the classic factors that define a revolutionary situation are present. Lenin famously listed a combination of three: the ruling class cannot rule in the old way; the masses cannot live in the old way; and the ruling classes are split, providing a fissure through which mass energies can push through.

Wrong line, agenda

The Aragalaya/Hartal has its Dantons and Robespierres. The road from Robespierre led to Napoleon Bonaparte. 

What was initially a clear agenda very lucidly and ably articulated by a leading Aragalaya personality Rathidu Seneviratne aka ‘Ratta’ (and Bharatha Tennakoon from Paris), namely the ouster of the autocratic Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has now become a wish-list which includes everything and the kitchen sink, ranging from the ‘74 years curse’ and rejecting ‘all 225’ (parliamentarians) to ‘taking the power out of the Diyawanna’ and ‘overthrowing the System’. 

Whether that System is the political system (unitary state/executive presidency/multiparty electoral democracy), the economic system (capitalism/market economy, Open Economy or neoliberalism) or the social system (class hierarchy), or all of the above, one doesn’t know. 

Wasantha Mudalige of the IUSF, a courageous, natural-born leader with fire in his belly, added the prevention of any members of parliament entering parliament and the “abolition of Parliament” (“parlimenthuva ahosi karanava”) to the agenda, giving 17 May as the date for closure. It reminded me of the radical-populist rightwing MAGA crowd’s 6 Jan. uprising on Capitol Hill and the Gotabaya crew’s 2020 slogan of “we don’t need a parliament”. In a subsequent speech he said that if the state of emergency brought repression, “the hartal would be taken to the homes” of the political leaders. That’s happened.

One cannot ‘abolish’ parliament, even if it were desirable to do so, by demonstrations, however militant and massive. Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly only after seizing power. In 1917 Lenin hit the brakes hard during the July Days, aborting an uprising which he deemed premature.  

People’s Councils or assemblies are a good idea, but for Rosa Luxemburg herself, such organs of ‘direct democracy’ were not substitutes for representative democracy i.e., parliament, but reinforcements or parallel structures.  

Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Che Guevara were convinced, literate Marxists years before the Cuban revolution triumphed in January 1959 and yet it took till April 1961, and that too in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion, to declare the ‘socialist character’ of the Cuban revolution. If they had declared – as the Aragalaya Left has –a program proclaiming ‘overthrow the System’ when they were fighting Batista, they would never have been able to build the broad, cross-class 26 July Movement to successfully overthrow him. 

When leftists were leading the world in the fight against Hitler and Nazi fascism, they didn’t talk about ‘75 years’ of German capitalism, though it encompassed the bloody repression of 1918 and 1921, including the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. 

The broadest alliance can be secured by emphasising the exceptionality of the autocrats/ autocracies or dictatorial regimes/rulers. This holds true for Gotacracy too. 

All the classic factors that define a revolutionary situation are present. Lenin famously listed a combination of three: the ruling class cannot rule in the old way; the masses cannot live in the old way; and the ruling classes are split, providing a fissure through which mass energies can push through

Revolution or reform?

Studying the collapse of the USSR, Chinese and Western scholars identified as the main folly, the simultaneity of drastic economic and political reform. China avoided that blunder and achieved the greatest economic miracle in history. 

Sri Lanka has quadruple imperatives: order and stability, economic adjustment, rapid revival of growth and swift addressing of equity issues and poverty reduction so as to circumvent further sociopolitical turmoil. 

Each of these requires the executive presidency as an instrument, and the total package certainly does. Any attempt to undertake this quadruple task with all its tensions and volatility while the state framework is decapitated or de-centred by the abolition of the executive presidency, would amount to “state suicide”. 

If the political and civic leadership press the button of abolition of the executive presidency rather than stopping with the button of reforming it by repealing the 20th Amendment, it risks plunging the country into a long conflict, or conflicts of many kinds along many axial routes.

The JVP-NPP and FSP emphasise the need to abolish the executive presidency while leftists the world over celebrate Brazil’s Lula’s entry into the Presidential contest as a front-runner in the race. Recently elected President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, is a former student leader of the left who came to prominence during the massive street protests against neo-liberal economic policy. 

Austin Fernando recently listed in these pages, the main “non-negotiable” demands of GotaGoGama after an extended visit:  

“Gotabaya Rajapaksa should leave office; The Rajapaksa clan should be removed from the Government; The 20th Amendment must be repealed and an upgraded version of the 19th Amendment brought in as the 21st Amendment, and All stolen national assets should be traced and returned while the culprits are punished severely.” 

This list amply proves that the demand for the abolition rather than the democratisation of the executive presidential system does not arise organically from the ongoing democratic revolution; it is not a political superstructure of the Aragalaya. It is an interpolation by ideologically-driven groupings of the Left and the liberal Right. Meanwhile the neo-conservative Gotabaya camp balks at reforming the executive presidency and immediately removing the 20th Amendment. 

What is lacking is the policy of an enlightened, Realist centre; a progressive-centrist political paradigm. 

 

BASL blunder

The 20th Amendment –not the executive presidency—is the problem. It is one extreme. Abolition of the executive presidency rather than only the 20th Amendment is not a solution, only the inversion of the problem. It is the opposite extreme; the antipode of the 20th Amendment. The executive presidency without the 20th Amendment is the solution or centrepiece of it. It is the Middle Path and the Golden Mean. Departure from it inevitably triggers a new cycle of crisis and conflict.  

Revolutions are broadly divisible into those that look backward and those that look forward. This division tends to coincide with those that are purely national and those that are derived from and attempt to represent the universal. 

The so-called English revolution(s) represent the first category of harking back to a presumed pristine past. The American Revolution inaugurated the second category. 

The Founding Fathers had every reason to look to the English parliamentary tradition as a model but chose not to, studying instead the political thought of ancient Greece (mainly Aristotle’s pioneering categorisations) and the Roman republic (overthrown by Caesarism). They opted for a mixed, balanced system as suggested by Aristotle and the later historians of the Roman Republic, commingled of course with the theories of Locke and Montesquieu. 

The elected Presidency, refracted through the electoral college due to the federal nature of America, was the result. 

The second major model of a democratic presidency was that of France. Given the extreme political and ideological volatility of French society and history, and following the dark days of Petain’s collaborationism, General de Gaulle inaugurated the Fifth Republic with its directly, nationally elected French presidency. One can imagine what the stability of France would’ve been had there been no executive Presidency when the Yellow Vests protests swept the country. 

Both the American and French presidencies are quite conscious expressions of the spirit of republicanism. By contrast, the Westminster model coexists with a monarchy and the absence of a written constitution. Britain is no republic. Thus, the US-French presidential model is a far more advanced product than the Westminster model so beloved of Lankan liberals. 

Why should Sri Lanka which has a presidential system arising out of the great democratic struggle against an earlier model of closed economy combined with family rule, that of Madam Bandaranaike’s ‘seven-year curse’, be abandoned instead of being reformed? 

Why abandon an advanced universally adopted system in favour of a return to a parliamentary model which gave us the disenfranchisement of the hill-country plantation workers, Sinhala Only, the abolition of the independent Public Service Commission, district-wise and media-wise standardisation of university entrance, the hegemonistic Constitutional privileging of Sinhala and Buddhism, the adoption of separatism, the founding and first rebellion of the JVP, the birth of the Tamil Tigers and the beginning of guerilla war in the North?    

There is a Sinhala children’s tale about a pundit who advised that the problem of a goat whose head was accidentally stuck in a clay pot should be solved by decapitating the goat. The point of the satirical tale was of course that the obvious and rational solution of shattering the clay pot was not recommended by the pundit. What is true of the goat is also true of Gota. The proposal of the BASL and the drafters of the SJB’s gazetted 21st Amendment that the executive presidency be abolished, is similar to the solution of decapitation proposed by the pundit, rather than the win-win solution of cracking the clay pot, i.e., the autocratic 20th Amendment.