Gota Classic and politics in the crucible of crisis

 President Gotabaya Rajapaksa

For someone who was a citizen of the USA, Gota is mixed up about a mixed system. Does the US President have “full powers”? Is he not contained and constrained by the separation of powers which provide checks-and-balances? Is the USA not a “mixed system” with a presidency, a strong judiciary, and bi-cameral legislature? Gota obviously hasn’t learned that after much deliberation, the Founding Fathers explicitly adopted a “mixed system” as commended by Aristotle and taken up by the Roman republic and its historians

Gota Classic is back on the market! After weeks of Gota Lite, a welcome interlude of lucidity, Gota of ‘Go Home Gota’ fame has returned. That’s great news for the Aragalaya. For Sri Lanka’s nose-diving economy, not so much. 

In a Bloomberg interview, President GR says he will not re-contest but does not wish to be a failed president and intends to finish his term. Good luck to him with that. (Sri Lanka’s Gotabaya Rajapaksa Vows to Finish Term, Won’t Run for Re-Election – Bloomberg)

“…The president said he wanted to replicate his previous successful stints serving the nation…The president reiterated his controversial goal to push through “natural agriculture,” a short-lived move to ban chemical fertilisers that caused crop output to slump.” (ibid)

“Gotabaya Rajapaksa was also skeptical about the success of a planned amendment to the constitution, which seeks to contain the executive presidency.” 

“You can’t have a mixed system,” he said. “I experienced this and now know. People may blame me when I tell this but that’s the truth.”

“…What is this executive (powers) of the president? My personal opinion is that if you have a presidency, he must have full powers. Otherwise abolish executive presidency and go for full Westminster-style parliament.”

‘Full powers’ presidency

What does Gota think he had/has with the 20th Amendment? He had the fullest powers of any Lankan president and he performed far worse than any president or leader this country had since Independence. He’s a terrible advertisement for a ‘full powers’ presidency.

If Gota thinks a presidency must have “full powers” he’s hardly going to permit the 21st Amendment. 

For someone who was a citizen of the USA, Gota is mixed up about a mixed system. Does the US President have “full powers”? Is he not contained and constrained by the separation of powers which provide checks-and-balances? Is the USA not a “mixed system” with a presidency, a strong judiciary, and bi-cameral legislature? Gota obviously hasn’t learned that after much deliberation, the Founding Fathers explicitly adopted a “mixed system” as commended by Aristotle and taken up by the Roman republic and its historians. 

Gota’s comeback interview is a full-on disaster. 

1. He already is a failed president and is seen as such globally—his only chance of not leaving as a failed president would be/would have been, to successfully pass a substantive 21st Amendment, instead of which he has just signalled backtracking.

2. Renouncing a chance to run again is no biggie; it is a sick joke because he doesn’t stand a chance of re-nomination let alone re-election. 

3. His chances of finishing his full term aren’t so good that any bookmaker will give it decent odds. 

4. His Bloomberg exhibition of renewed disconnect from reality isn’t likely to inspire the confidence of the international system and secure us a bailout, let alone investment. No country or institution wants to subsidise his continued incumbency.

5. Violating the dictum of helping one’s allies help you, he has just shelled the ground on which Prime Minister Wickremesinghe stands, thereby damaging the latter’s chance of effecting reform, stabilising the political situation and securing economic help.

The Bloomberg story confirms the hugely negative signals of Gota’s interview: 

“This is unlikely to placate protesters who are calling for his immediate resignation,” said Patrick Curran, an economist at Tellimer. “With presidential elections more than two years away, Rajapaksa’s decision to see his term through will contribute to heightened political uncertainty over the next couple years and could hamper reform efforts.” (ibid)

Everyone but Gota knows what Gota did with “full powers” and because of them. An FT (London) Editorial notes: “There is much to Sri Lanka’s travails that is singular. In 2019, a new government tried to build popular support with a cut to income tax and value added tax.” (https://www.ft.com/content/28fb24be-cf79-40eb-8fc6-228d328acb09) 

A Bloomberg report by Opinion Editor Ruth Pollard observes: 

“The president’s decision to flick the switch to organic farming overnight…irrevocably harmed those in the agriculture sector in the family bastion. The ban was lifted six months later, but by then, the damage was done — yields were decimated, and the country had plunged into a food and foreign reserve crisis that ended with its default on May 19.” (In Sri Lanka, even the Rajapaksa heartland Is broken)

A piece in TIME magazine by Ian Bremmer, political scientist, founder-President of Eurasia group, one of the world’s foremost political risk analysis and consulting outfits, raises and replies the ‘how did we get here?’ question:

“Sri Lanka is not a poor country. When adjusted for purchasing power, per capita GDP in this nation of 22 million people is higher than in South Africa, Peru, Egypt, or Indonesia. But…the currency is collapsing, and the government can’t afford imports or to make its debt payments. 

How did we get here?

…Gota, as the president is widely known, then named his older brother, Mahinda, a former president, as prime minister. A landslide election victory in 2020 gave the Rajapaksas a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which then allowed them to rewrite Sri Lanka’s constitution to give the president extraordinary new powers.

Then hubris kicked in. Family and friends were given important posts in government. A series of economic mistakes, including populist tax cuts, deprived the government of revenue and made it much harder to borrow money abroad.

External shocks have also played a big role in Sri Lanka’s troubles…” (https://time.com/6184189/sri-lanka-crisis/) 

Readers would note that the role of external shocks, the standard excuse trotted out by the Rajapaksas, especially the President, is an add-on or secondary factor (“external shocks have ALSO”), not the primary one in Bremmer’s analysis. The primary factor is the Rajapaksa clan’s policy follies. 

Note also that there is zero-attribution to a “74-year curse”. All expert analyses contradict such a dangerously nonsensical diagnosis (JVP, FSP). The whole point is that Sri Lanka was a success, and the world’s experts are scrutinising the sheer verticality of its fall. 

Renouncing a chance to run again is no biggie; it is a sick joke because he doesn’t stand a chance of re-nomination let alone re-election

Recommendation to Ranil

I have a suggestion for Prime Minister Wickremesinghe. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike invited Sir Nicholas Kaldor to head up a commission on economic policy—a commission which included the soon-to-be-legendary Joan Robinson. A decade later Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s father commissioned B.R. Shenoy (a polarising maverick economist) to draw up an economic platform for Ceylon. A decade later, President J.R. Jayewardene requested Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to send a top expert to advise the post-1977 UNP government on economic policy, and Premier Lee sent his economic wizard Goh Keng Swee. 

The crisis cries out for the best international brains that Sri Lanka can tap. If money is the problem, perhaps the UNDP or ILO can fund it just as the ILO commissioned the landmark report ‘Matching Employment Expectations and Opportunities’ by Dudley Seers of the IDS, Sussex, in 1970. 

Three options come to mind. One is Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner for Economics and former chief economist of the World Bank. The PM knows him personally because he visited Colombo in 2015. Stiglitz’ equity-laden perspective would help at a time when there is a strong, left-propelled upsurge of mass protest. (Conversely, to help the JVP win or the FSP-IUSF overthrow the system, one could invite Ricardo Hausmann instead, given the leftwing Latin American administrations he has assisted into office because their predecessors practiced his policies.)

The second and third options are India and China, or if that is acceptable to both, a joint Asian economic expert panel. China and India being economic superstars, their top specialists could draw up a surgical strategy for Sri Lanka’s survival and recovery.   

Meanwhile, one of the few positive signs in these polarised times is the widespread sharing on pro-Opposition and pro-Government social media, of Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar’s scintillating Q&A performance at the Bratislava conference. Jaishankar’s performance resonated across Sri Lanka’s political and ideological spectrum, because of his unflappable defence of India’s growing trade with Russia and steadfast refusal to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine war, his deconstruction of European ‘constructs’, and confident counter-assertion of Delhi’s independent perspective guided by its enlightened self-interest. 

The cross-party blowback in Sri Lanka over the Aeroflot issue confirms South Asia’s immunity (or acute allergy) to Russophobia.  

21A and SLPP

The choice for the SLPP is de-Rajapaksa-ise or die. SLPP neoconservatives who hold fast against the 21st Amendment, will be remembered as defenders of the calamitous 20th Amendment and the Gotabaya Presidency in its autocratic armour. 

SLPP politicians who are enlightened or pragmatic enough to push for 21A will be those who survive the next election, though not all will. 

The struggle for 21A could be the common ground on which the SLFP, SLPP reformists and the nine smaller parties may converge and crystallise into a centre-left. An election would shipwreck such a bloc, but a chunk will survive, just as the SJB emerged from the wreck of the UNP.  

This would strengthen the eclipsed but vital centre-space of Sri Lankan politics, supplementing the presence of the SJB which is leaning to the liberal/neoliberal right, with a competitor or counterpart which constitutes the centre-left. 

The choice for the SLPP is de-Rajapaksa-ise or die. SLPP neoconservatives who hold fast against the 21st Amendment, will be remembered as defenders of the calamitous 20th Amendment and the Gotabaya Presidency in its autocratic armour

Opposition’s errors

Appearing on TV Derana’s Aluth Parliamentuwa last week, M.A. Sumanthiran damned Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe’s draft 21A as an attempt at a Middle Path (accompanying his denunciation with an explicit double-palm pointed gesture) which evaded abolishing the executive presidency in a Big Bang, referendum and all. Sumanthiran obviously rejects the maxim inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi– “nothing in excess” – as well as the Aristotelian ‘Golden Mean’. 

The SJB, the main opposition party will have to choose whether it is a responsible mainstream party of the progressive centre, positioned on the continuum from the US Democrats to Australia’s and New Zealand’s Labour parties, or whether it has been captured by what Western intellectuals such as Prof. Michael Lind term “wingnuts”, i.e., ideological fundamentalists, be they legalist ultra-liberals or evangelical rightwing populists, or both. (Wingnuts vs. Factions – Tablet Magazine)

On ‘Aluth Parliamenthuwa’ SJB spokesperson/ideologue Eran Wickramaratne stridently urged the abolition of the executive presidency, albeit with a deferred referendum. If the Opposition is so zealously convinced of the pristine virtue of its own 21A, it could have accepted the chance for power-sharing by occupying the post of Prime Minister and moved its turbo-charged proposal for decapitating the executive presidency, preceded by drastic dismemberment, through the Cabinet, because it would have been driving the government. 

Ironically, ideological extremes converge. Gota does not budge from his position and hardcore support-base, nor does the Opposition. Gota and Opposition ideologues agree that there are only two options, it is a zero-sum game: either a presidency with “full powers” or a Westminster model. Gota stands for the former, the Opposition for the latter. 

Global politics shows a vastly different truth and reality: the swathe of democratic, republican presidencies extending from Washington to Santiago, Paris to Pretoria, Seoul to Manila.  

Renouncing the American and French ideas of the presidency (which J.R. Jayewardene introduced and Ranasinghe Premadasa deployed for development) and lurching back to parliamentarism can only be understood as a colonial hangover, with the Commonwealth as comfort zone.  

Overnight conversion to the abolition of the executive presidency is the political equivalent of overnight conversion to organic fertiliser. 

Responsible, realist democratic political reform must recognise and operate between two parameters:

1. Necessity for reform: Absence of speedy, sufficient structural reform, rolling-back the 20th Amendment, will reveal rigid immobility and brittleness that dooms the democratic system to the default option of change by popular uprising. 

2. Necessity for retention: Abolition of anything more than the 20th Amendment, i.e., of the executive presidential system, in the context of an economic depression with the need for a recovery drive, dooms the system to endemic instability and volatility.  

If the Opposition is so zealously convinced of the pristine virtue of its own 21A, it could have accepted the chance for power-sharing by occupying the post of Prime Minister and moved its turbo-charged proposal for decapitating the executive presidency, preceded by drastic dismemberment, through the Cabinet, because it would have been driving the government

Politics, anti-autocracy, national crisis

No autocrat or autocracy in contemporary history was ever defeated (by war, revolutionary uprising or peaceful protest) without alliances, the broader the better. 

Sometimes it takes a power-sharing mechanism to displace/transition-out an autocracy. In conditions of severe crisis, autocracies show signs of plasticity, in which power-sharing has real potential for transformation. 

One may acquire only a share of power at a given time, but it is that share, that foothold, that political space, which must be established and expanded. The state itself is a site of contestation (Nicos Poulantzas) in which a progressive party must intervene, shifting power-balances within the state. 

Any political line that disdains broad alliances and declines power-sharing, objectively buttresses the autocracy/autocrat. 

The ability to make alliances and to be able to shift or pivot to do so, is a vital attribute of successful politics. It is crucial to win over the intermediate strata, not merely inhabit one’s own enclave. One is almost never able to govern alone and even if one can, it is always preferable to have a broader base of support, especially during a national crisis, which requires consensus and the capacity for outreach. 

For Antonio Gramsci, political success (‘hegemony’) was contingent upon folding a particular interest within the general interest. He therefore considered politics as entailing ‘permanent persuasion’.

No serious-minded political formation should fail to intervene in a particular conjuncture or concrete situation in order to secure or change an outcome, be it in one move or a series of moves. 

Politics requires the capacity for mobility and complex manoeuvre on the political battlefield, not static deployment and linear advance.

Conditionality for intervention, presence and participation must be realistic, deriving from an exact calculation of the prevailing balance of forces, neither overestimating nor underestimating oneself or one’s foe. 

The North Vietnamese did not insist that Nixon resign, or US troops withdraw before they signed the Paris Peace Accords; it is the Accords that secured the withdrawal. Mandela did not insist that de Klerk step down as a precondition, nor did the IRA insist that the monarchy be replaced by a republic or British troops withdraw before it agreed to a power-sharing equation. 

Machiavelli says that when fortune (‘Fortuna’) smiles, the Prince, i.e., the aspirant political leader, must seize the chance ‘by the forelock’, but in order to do that he must have cultivated virtue (‘Virtu’). Virtue is not a quality meant to prevent or detain one from seizing the moment, but to discipline oneself to cultivate the instinct to spot the moment –even anticipate it--and the political will and determination to seize upon the moment and ride it. 

Crucial to politics is what Louis Althusser (in his late, ‘aleatory materialism’ phase) calls ‘the Encounter’, tracing the concept through Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes and Rousseau to Machiavelli. Crucial to the Encounter is the moment of the ‘swerve’ of the atoms. The challenge is to anticipate and better still, cause the swerve and then to ride it, like a hobo jumps on board a moving freight train (the imagery is Althusser’s).  

Politics is not about absence, abstention, or abdication. It is about presence, participation and the praxis of intervention. In a time of national crisis, politics must palpate with “the fierce urgency of now” (ML King, Barack Obama).