Operation Yukthiya, trade union action, and the stability state in Sri Lanka

This highly-publicised law and order operation was viewed by critics as an attempt to gain political mileage by the President and privileges by relevant ministers and public officials

On Monday, 8 July, a local businessman, Surendra Wasantha Perera alias Club Wasantha, was murdered by two gunmen. The incident brought the issue of law and order to the forefront of the public discourse and news cycle. These developments have imparted more purchase for the ‘Yukthiya’ operation, a war on drugs spearheaded by Minister of Public Affairs Tiran Alles. 

Minister Alles had promised a few days before, at the Uva Provincial Community Police Committee members’ empowerment workshop “A Law-Abiding Country” at Wellawaya, that he would ensure Sri Lanka is free of drugs and the underworld by December 2025, under the leadership of President Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Minister Alles stated further, “When I advocated the Police for not merely holding the gun, but using it for the right cause, the lawyers urged my removal from the ministry. Despite these challenges, we pressed forward. The media attacked us, assisting our critics to stop us. Yet, we did not retreat. I promise today that we will continue this operation.” While it is not unusual for a sitting President to convert their incumbency privilege into political advantage, Minister Alles’ implied suggestion that Wickremesinghe will remain President until December 2025 can be interpreted as a political statement made at a Government meeting. The President, at the same event, said that some human rights lawyers also represent drug-related criminals after their arrest.

These comments should be viewed in light of developments in April, when the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) passed a resolution demanding the resignation of Minister Alles, citing his appeal to extrajudicial conduct by the police. The Minister’s framing of civil society, including lawyers and media, against him and the police attempts to show the latter as compromised and obstructing law and order. In the aftermath of the Wasantha Perera shooting, the appeal to a larger role for the police continues. The Minister and police are deploying narratives that emphasise the threat of narcotics and the underworld, and makes narcotics and criminal activity ever present threats in the public discourse.

The politics of ‘moral panics’

Operation Yukthiya is this Government’s anti-drug initiative, launched in December 2023 under the leadership of Tiran Alles and (at the time) Inspector General of Police (IGP) of Sri Lanka, Deshabandu Tennekoon. The rationale for this initiative is to combat the prevalence of drugs in society, especially among youth and schools, and to counter increasing crime rates in the aftermath of the economic crisis. The rhetorical function of ‘Yukthiya’ is also important, as the word translates to ‘justice’. It taps into the sentiment for extra-democratic justice, where the function of the judiciary is overridden by a role that is now delegated to the police.

This highly-publicised law and order operation was viewed by critics as an attempt to gain political mileage by the President and privileges by relevant ministers and public officials. Furthermore, this is not the first time that the country has declared war on drugs. The Temperance Movement during British colonial rule was against alcohol consumption, and popularly perceived as a liberation movement of the oppressed. These anti-colonial and anti-elite sentiments continued to have traction after independence.

In recent decades, President Mahinda Rajapaksa launched the ‘Mathata Titha’ (End to Alcoholism) program aimed to ensure abstinence from intoxicants. Subsequently, in 2018, President Maithripala Sirisena launched the ‘Anti-Drugs Campaign’ promising to eliminate drugs in the country. Portraying the drug menace as an existential threat to the country has been a go-to trope to reclaim political legitimacy by many leaders around the world, such as the highly publicised anti-drug campaign in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte.

The anti-drugs campaign is one among various moral panics constructed and mobilised by Sri Lanka’s political elite over the decades. The othering of the Tamil minority created the necessary conditions for civil war in the country. In the post-war context, anti-Muslim politics were mobilised by several actors, most significantly during the 2019 Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidential campaign. In the aftermath of the 2019 Easter attacks, Rajapaksa rode the narrative of restoring national security, manifest in slogans such as ‘one country – one law’. 

Coded in these slogans was the moral panic of a Muslim terrorist threat to the Sinhala Buddhist civilisational state. While this agenda was arguably seen in the pandemic policy preventing burials (mandatory in Muslim final rites) and appointing a ‘One Country – One Law’ presidential commission headed by one of the most outspoken proponents of anti-Muslim narratives, the Bodu Bala Sena’s Ven. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, it was interrupted by the 2022 forex crisis. This created the space for new moral panics.

Governments’ attempts to construct moral panics often coincide with appeals to subjugate democracy and civil liberties, such as the right to legal representation and fair trial. Today, the Sri Lankan Government’s moral panic of choice is anything which derails the ongoing efforts to achieve economic stability, even and often at the expense of democracy. Somewhat similar to the aftermath of May 2009, when President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared his ‘war’ for economic development, the present Government is seen to co-opt this language (with lesser success). One meme of the President circulating social media reads ‘Aarthika yuddayen galawaagath wiruwaaneni, kalaguna dath siwu helayin siyalla oba samagay’ (To the hero who rescued us from the economic war, the Sinhalese are with you in gratitude). 

However, the appeals to panic over potential loss of economic stability, to result in an economic crisis as in 2022 or worse, have two weaknesses. First, as the SLPP secretary-general Sagara Kariyawasam recently said, eliminating the threat of terrorism by ending a 30-year war is not comparable to ending fuel queues that lasted a couple of months. Second, existential threats such as terrorism or cultural erasure seem to loom larger on the collective consciousness of the people. As the key proponents of stability recognise these inherent drawbacks of their chosen narrative, efforts to buttress it with other threats to peace and security by the underworld, narcotics, and trade union strikes can be observed.

Blurring law and order and justice

Since the Wasantha Perera shooting incident, there has been a rise in calls among the establishment elite for ‘assertive’ handling of criminal networks, including what can be interpreted as extrajudicial measures by the police. In Parliament, a new acolyte of the President, Minister Prasanna Ranatunga, made an impassioned plea to support police to eliminate the criminal underworld who are disrupting the peace and safety of innocent people in the country. On 15 July, a Lankadeepa news report said that a group of ministers made a strong request to the President for a strict program to be implemented to suppress the underworld. 

By underscoring the threat of the underworld and the exclusive ability of the police to tackle a threat of this nature and scale to restore ‘peace and stability,’ these appeals by the establishment elite create a pretext for intensification of policing, often including increased police intervention in everyday life, such as spot checking of public transport. The call for extra-judicial conduct of the police in the anti-drugs campaign of Minister Alles and IGP Tennakoon ironically echoes the name of the program for this effect—’Yukthiya’, which means justice—the idea of taking justice into the hands of the police. In doing so, the boundaries between law and order and justice get increasingly blurred and securitisation becomes the dominant narrative. 

As the recent mediatised interrogation of an arrested suspect in the Wasantha Perera shooting by the police shows, the police’s approach to the Yukthiya operation borders heavily on optics. Like this shooting incident, highly publicised criminal incidents generally entail slow progress in bringing culprits to book, including the killing of drug kingpin Madush Lakshitha, alias ‘Makandure Madush’ when in police custody, in October 2020.

The underworld, if the currently emerging information about transnational criminal networks are true, poses a formidable threat not only to the institutions of law enforcement in Sri Lanka but to democracy itself. Moreover, the underworld is not monolithic and has various factions linked to different networks of illicit supplies. The emergence of synthetic drugs (such as ice), as an alternative to existing illicit drugs, has created new drug networks around the world, leading to market share disputes and challenges at a global scale. These developments may play out in inter-group conflicts in Sri Lanka’s underworlds and drug dealer networks too. The underworld in Sri Lanka is widely considered to have links and patronage of various and competing factions of the political class as well. These complexities will manifest themselves and shape how these developments unfold.

Trade union action as ‘anti-stability’

The stability narrative of the Government and crackdowns on any threats to it, such as through Operation Yukthiya, have also been extended to legitimise crackdowns on trade union action and strikes. The recent spate of trade union strikes and actions in July have been countered by the Government through a largely non-zero-sum approach. The Government and anti-trade union strike sections of society frame trade unions as self-centred and unthinking of public convenience, and importantly, derailing economic reforms such as SOE privatisation and digitisation, which would improve efficiency and limit the avenues for corruption. By portraying these strikes as politically motivated (that is, controlled by the JVP/NPP and/or FSP), various ministers and supporters of the Government have questioned the timing and intent of these trade union actions. For them, the strikes are a bad faith attempt to cripple the Government and gain political mileage in the lead up to elections this year.

Trade union actions are a key labour right constitutionally enshrined in Sri Lanka. In the current context, where trade unions could not reach consensus and pushback sufficiently on important matters that adversely affected the lives of the working class and the poor, such as the increase of indirect taxes and sudden transfer of losses of utility SOEs to the public, the recent attempts to heighten trade union action in the build up to elections have been received by the public in a highly negative note.

A major reason for this negative reception is the politicisation of many trade unions. Links between trade unions and political parties have meant that trade union actions have been used to obtain electoral outcomes. Some politically-motivated trade unions have, in the past, disrupted public service delivery, portraying incumbent Governments as incapable of delivering public goods.

Trade unions have also not been very successful in adopting demands and narratives that win the public on to their side. In the present context, people are under immense economic stress, and this has partly enabled the Government to divert the resulting anger over trade union strikes onto the trade unions by framing their struggles as self-motivated. The recent retrieval by the JVP/NPP from trade union actions till elections are over, as expressed by JVP/NPP trade union leaders, reflects this disconnect of trade union action with public sentiments. 

The Government’s stability narrative is now deployed to legitimise crackdown on trade unions, trying to hype a momentum akin to Operation Yukthiya. A Lankadeepa news article which had reported that a group of ministers had requested the President for strong action on the underworld, also reported that the President had been asked to take strict action against trade union leaders and strictly implement the essential services law. These developments are significant, as a few days later, IGP Tennakoon likened trade unions to a cancer, arguing that they contribute to the destruction of institutions and broader society.

While the slowdown of trade union actions may be celebrated as a victory for the Government and some sections of the society, these developments portend the increasing political purchase the Government is trying to manufacture for heavy-handed and definitive measures. For a public that is frustrated and under economic stress, strict government action may provide an outlet for popular anger at a time when nothing seems to work, and redirect this anger in support of the stability narrative that the Government is trying to build. So far, it is the NPP that has been the sole political beneficiary of the breakdown in 2022. In its attempt to regain some of its lost political legitimacy, the Government is paving the way for an increasingly anti-democratic state— the ‘stability state’.

(Harindra B. Dassanayake is a researcher and policy analyst at Muragala | Centre for Progressive Politics and Policy, Sri Lanka. Dr. Rajni Gamage is a researcher in political science at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.)