Deep cuts, pain and PTA: President Ranil’s de-stabilising dogma

President Wickremesinghe will fail, and that will not be due to anyone’s inimical actions. It will be due to his own

President Ranil Wickremesinghe is using the flamethrower of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in a witch-hunt against the student activists of a recent civic uprising in a country where generations have graduated from state universities, comprising ‘imagined communities’ of solidaristic emotive reflexes and bonds of consciousness more organic and tensile than the old school ties of Colombo colleges. He is setting himself up for powerful social resistance and recoil

Of the six times that Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister, he had saved the best for the last. Bereft of any company from his party the UNP, he was a non-party PM, stepping into the breach to bring his considerable experience to bear on the task of managing the economic crisis. He struck the right note. He seemed to have changed for the better—into a mature pragmatist. Sadly, both for him and the country, that was episodic and ephemeral. He has snapped-back to his quintessential self. As President, Wickremesinghe has returned to the persona never liked or trusted enough by the public to be elected leader of this country, or re-elected as Prime Minister for almost 15 years after his early stint in that post (2001-2003), or indeed re-elected to Parliament after his last stint as PM (2015-2019). He should have adhered to the old adage and cut his coat according to his cloth. He has not. His cloth as it were, is his political base, that is to say his actual political support-base rather than his institutional one as President by virtue of parliamentary selection as distinct from direct, nationwide, popular election. This limited bolt of cloth permits only a certain type of coat: that of crisis-management and consensus building. That however, is far from the coat that President Wickremesinghe is seeking to have bespoke-tailored for himself.

Ranil’s wrong choice

President Wickremesinghe will fail, and that will not be due to anyone’s inimical actions. It will be due to his own, in a confirmation of the Buddha’s wisdom that “by oneself is one defiled”. He could very well have positioned himself as the moderate outcome or by-product of the popular uprising, the Aragalaya, carving out a centre-space between it and the political and institutional forces that had inducted him as PM and later voted him in as President. The Presidency is ideal for ‘Bonapartist’ balancing between contending forces, interests, etc. That would have achieved equilibrium which would have greatly facilitated stability. 

Wickremesinghe chose not to take that path. Choice reveals character said the ancient Greeks, and many others afterwards. He chose instead to take the path of unprovoked, brutal state violence on Aragalaya activists who had voluntarily vacated the state buildings they had occupied, hauled down the banner atop the Presidential Secretariat and announced the time of their withdrawal. 

President Wickremesinghe has chosen to become the leader of a power-cartel of rabid ultra-Right reactionaries, bringing together the Rajapaksa clan and its political Rottweiler, the Pohottuwa; the Deep State and ex-military brass; and neoliberal market fundamentalists of all shades and stripes. Ideologically it is a combination of the two wings of the Right: The Neoconservatives (law-and-order hawks, majoritarian religious chauvinists, militarists) and the Neoliberals (UNP, corporate fat cats, advocacy think-tanks, Oppositional ‘economic Ranilians’ and ‘Bitter Medicine’ pharmacists).

Ranil Wickremesinghe is the commander-in-chief of the Ancien Regime, with ex-President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Godfather of the Rajapaksa C, and classmate Dinesh Gunawardena as PM, at precisely the wrong time in history, when the status quo all around the globe has been and is being challenged from below, by waves of civic resistance and left-inflected populism. 

Ranil is the ultimate Establishment leader, trying to turn the clock back to pre-Aragalaya and restore a conformism that cannot be revived. 

Historically, the Ranil presidency is out of joint with the zeitgeist. Running up on a downward moving escalator, he cannot possibly prevail, let alone sustainably succeed. He will fail because he, like Sir John Kotelawala, the post-Hartal UNP Prime Minister advised by his father, is a reactionary fossil in a time of dramatic change and social assertion. 

Roadmap, game-plan

The Ranil Wickremesinghe roadmap is rolled-out in the recent interview he gave The Economist (London). Key extracts follow. 

“RW: We need a public-finance bill on the new taxes, then on state-owned enterprises [soes]. My idea is to do a deep cut and make a legislative framework for a highly competitive export-oriented economy, and then ensure the recovery takes off by 2024. It’s not worth dragging this out. Take a deep cut, but ensure that you can get recovery going so…



TE: What do you mean by deep cut?

RW: So that when you make changes, make it deep, make all the changes you have to make and then allow it to come up…



TE: Apart from Sri Lankan airlines, what are some of the marquee soes that could be privatised?

RW: Well, you can sell Sri Lanka Insurance, there’s telecoms. What we do with the petroleum corporation is another question.



TE: With some of the things you’re talking about, it sounds like you’re not just dealing with the immediate situation, but ensuring that Sri Lanka has a strong foundation.

RW: A strong foundation. And we won’t be around then, but we’ll become an upper-income country one day.

RW: There are many lessons. For instance, you can’t subsidise items every day, you will run out of money. 



TE: In terms of what you were talking about earlier, making decisions to make the economy more competitive, cutting the debt and deficit, all of these are going to be painful decisions. How do you intend to take Sri Lankans with you after this period of political unrest?

TE: But it’s a hard message, isn’t it? I mean, after everything over the past six months, 12 months, to tell people, “You know what, things are going to be even tougher now for a little while”?

RW: People know that, I mean, basically, we tell them the truth, tell them that we are going through a hard time.



TE: What’s your experience been when telling people about this?

RW: I’ve been losing some elections.



TE: With soe restructuring, in particular, the unions have been very hostile.

RW: I don’t worry about unions, what matters is people. People are going to stand it if they think things can get better.



TE: Do you have a prediction to make: at what point does Sri Lanka return to, say, 2018 levels of prosperity? What can Sri Lankans look forward to?

RW: Maybe about 2024, 2025? Initially we thought 2024 but it looks like 2023 is going to be a bad year globally, so it can be 2024, 2025.



TE: And for Sri Lankans, will 2023 be a better or a worse year than 2022?

RW: I would say the beginning will be tough. But the ending will be better, we’re trying to reduce the period of pain. If the revenue keeps coming in, we’ll know in the next three months, then the end will be better.



TE: Some of the laws you’re going to bring to parliament are going to cause a lot of pain for people. Are you confident you can push them through?

RW: We have already said that if you don’t want the IMF, you must come up with alternative plans.”

(https://www.economist.com/asia/2022/08/16/how-sri-lankas-new-president-plans-to-revive-the-economy)

What this clearly proves is that President Ranil Wickremesinghe is going for what he calls “deep cuts” and hopes to do so in a compressed time-frame. Both decisions are questionable. Why “deep” and where? Surely, that the cuts should be “deep” is far less important than making the cuts “smart”?  

The President’s interview in The Economist shows the return of his old propensity for unilateralism, a dangerous characteristic in a political leader who presides unelected, over a restive citizenry at a time of grave economic crisis. 

When you insist that the people put up with “pain”, they will wonder why they should put up with more pain than they already have, so as to manage a crisis that they didn’t create but you certainly contributed to

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

As the veteran JVP Politbureau member K.D. Lal Kantha said pithily, “The answer to loss making state enterprise is profit-making state enterprise”. 

There is great value and utility in the ILO’s tripartite model of deliberation, bringing together private enterprise, trade unions and governments. As a former Chairperson of the ILO, I know this at first hand. 

What Sri Lanka needs in this crisis is the equivalent of laser-surgery, but what President Wickremesinghe is offering seems more like involuntary organ-harvesting at best and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre at worst. 

The interview brings into sharp view the two dimensions of President Ranil’s economic ‘reform’ agenda: (a) ‘deep cuts’ and (b) breakneck speed. 

He hopes to go beyond the immediate requisites for crisis-management (“it sounds like you’re not just dealing with the immediate situation” notes the Economist interviewer) which is all that he has the (parliamentary) mandate for. He is intent on painful deep cuts for which he has a zero-mandate. 

He is well aware that such measures have cost him elections before (“I’ve losing some elections”). So why would he take the risk now while he is walking a tightrope below which there is a chasm? His confidence can only come from the fact that he is now the Defence Minister and commander-in-chief, and has forged bonds with the military brass and the ex-military brass comprising the ‘securocracy’.  

President Ranil comes across as intemperate and imprudent; a speed-freak: 

“It’s not worth dragging this out. Take a deep cut, but ensure that you can get recovery going so…when you make changes, make it deep, make all the changes you have to make and then allow it to come up…”

When you make “deep cuts” admitted to be “hard” and “painful” and are committed to “making all the changes” in one go, without the prerequisite of an electoral mandate, you are creating the conditions for a sociopolitical tsunami. 

When you are in discussion with a despot deposed by a popular uprising and allegedly arranging his return, while you arrest almost 3,500 participants of the heroic anti-autocratic uprising and incarcerate its most dynamic young leader under harsh anti-terrorist legislation, you forfeit the moral high ground

Caught in a contradiction

The contradiction that Ranil Wickremesinghe has chosen to be caught in, is that between, on the one hand, the cold fact that his policies were never acceptable enough for the country to elect him President even once, and on the other hand, his determination to use the current crisis to ram-through without a popular mandate, the entire policy package of radical-Rightist transformation that he always wanted to and strove to implement when he was elected Prime Minister, with disastrous consequences (the last time around, neither he nor anyone from his party were elected to parliament).  

There are moments in history when the policies of a man/woman rejected by the electorate over a long period are finally accepted and he/she is elected to office. This is not such an occasion. There are also times when it is parliament rather than the national electorate that turns to such a politician, but those personalities have been elected to the legislature. This is not such an occasion either. 

Wickremesinghe is neither Reagan nor Thatcher but is hoping to replicate the policy packages of both. He isn’t Pinochet either – and 21st century Sri Lanka is not a conducive stage to play an aged wannabe Pinochet—but he is trying to download the Pinochet package as well.  

Ranil’s wrong-headed resolve will breed polarisation, resistance and revolt; not consensus, de-radicalisation and stability. 

When you are in discussion with a despot deposed by a popular uprising and allegedly arranging his return, while you arrest almost 3,500 participants of the heroic anti-autocratic uprising and incarcerate its most dynamic young leader under harsh anti-terrorist legislation, you forfeit the moral high ground.

When you insult and threaten State officials closest to the grassroots while you are prominently associated with something called the Central Bank Bond Scam, you will meet resistance from within the State system.

When you insist that the people put up with “pain”, they will wonder why they should put up with more pain than they already have, so as to manage a crisis that they didn’t create but you certainly contributed to. 

With his name associated with the Central Bank bond scam, a mountain of foreign borrowing several times the size of indebtedness incurred under Mahinda Rajapaksa, and no popular mandate undergirding him, President Ranil has no moral right to make tough demands of the citizenry. The citizens have every moral right to refuse—it isn’t as if they elected him the country’s leader. 

President Ranil Wickremesinghe is going for what he calls “deep cuts” and hopes to do so in a compressed time-frame. Both decisions are questionable. Why “deep” and where? Surely, that the cuts should be “deep” is far less important than making the cuts “smart”?

PTA-packing President

President Ranil Wickremesinghe deserves worldwide recognition for his innovation: ‘Unarmed Terrorism’. 

Let alone an unarmed demonstration and/or an occupation, even a riot is not classifiable as an act of terrorism. 

Not every act of homicide or manslaughter is one of terrorism. 

More: not every act or project of armed violence by a non-state actor constitutes terrorism. 

Indubitably, no unarmed act, mobilisation or political project, however forceful in terms of kinetic energy, constitutes or can be considered in the category of terrorism. 

Ever heard of an act of terrorism which did not involve lethal weaponry and/or munitions? 

Ever heard of a terrorist against whom there isn’t a shred of evidence or testimony that he/she had anything to do with illegal weapons or was around them, consorted with anyone who did, or expressed any interest in procuring weapons? 

President Wickremesinghe who is also the Minister of Defence, endorsed the detention for 90 days under the notoriously draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act, of Inter-University Students’ Federation (IUSF) leader Wasantha Mudalige, a student leader with a large national name recognition factor well outside the campus constituency. 

Cabinet spokesperson Minister Bandula Gunawardena disclosed that the Minister of Defence, i.e., the President had briefed the Cabinet that Wasantha Mudalige had conspired to do a Guy Fawkes (or ‘V for Vendetta’) on Parliament. 

Then how come Mudalige, the IUSF and the FSP had nothing to do with the call for agitation, and the demonstration itself on 13 July, and were nowhere near Parliament on that day of the scuffle with the Army? 

This triggers my memories of the incarceration of Vijaya Kumaratunga as a Naxalite (Naxalites were Indian Maoist guerrillas!) in late-1982, and proscribing the JVP as perpetrators of the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983. 

President Ranil Wickremesinghe is using the flamethrower of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in a witch-hunt against the student activists of a recent civic uprising in a country where generations have graduated from state universities, comprising ‘imagined communities’ of solidaristic emotive reflexes and bonds of consciousness more organic and tensile than the old school ties of Colombo colleges. He is setting himself up for powerful social resistance and recoil. 

The contradiction that Ranil Wickremesinghe has chosen to be caught in, is that between, on the one hand, the cold fact that his policies were never acceptable enough for the country to elect him President even once, and on the other hand, his determination to use the current crisis to ram-through without a popular mandate, the entire policy package of radical-Rightist transformation that he always wanted to and strove to implement when he was elected Prime Minister, with disastrous consequences (the last time around, neither he nor anyone from his party were elected to parliament)

There are millions of us, of which many were in the student movement, student activists, members of elected student associations. The IUSF was born in 1978 – and banned by the UNP administration—when I was a Peradeniya undergraduate and activist. My father, Mervyn de Silva, in the first batch to enter Peradeniya University having transitioned there from Colombo Uni, led the first ever strike at Peradeniya (according to legendary civil servant Neville Jayaweera’s reminiscences) and burnt a copy of the Ceylon Daily News while standing on the roof of the bungalow of Vice Chancellor Ivor Jennings (whom he and my mother had high tea with at Cambridge in 1964).

In addition to arresting the head of the IUSF, the authorities have also arrested leading activists of the Revolutionary Students Union (RSU) and the Socialist Students Union (SSU), the respective student wings of the rival FSP and JVP. The top leaders of the JVP and FSP should recognise the obvious: if the repression is common and shared, so too must be the resistance.