What’s next for Sri Lanka’s talented debaters?

From left: Technical Coach Sanjit Dias, Janul De Silva (Royal College), Rahul De Silva (CIS), Shalem Sumanthiran (Royal College), Chanidu Ratnayake (Ananda College), Jasmine Markandu (CIS), Reiha Wimalasekere (Ladies College), and Head Coach Kithmina Hewage

Lacking funding and exposure, how Sri Lanka debate rallied against the odds to nearly win it all

By Madushka Balasuriya 

It was in the third preliminary round of the World Championships that Kithmina Hewage knew his team was on the cusp of achieving something remarkable. 

They had just outdebated China, the 2018 world champions and semi-finalists last year. And lost. Narrowly, sure, but lost nevertheless. But as he looked into the eyes of his team after the bout, he sensed something had clicked. This team, he now knew, wouldn’t take setbacks lightly. 

“Personally I thought, and everyone who was watching thought, that we had won very clearly. China were the champions in 2018, they were the semi-finalists last year, they came with a reputation. One of the judges who gave it against us said, ‘good job on making it close against one of the favourites’ and that really annoyed this team,” recalled Hewage.

Hewage, a Research Economist at the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS), has been part of Sri Lanka’s debating culture since 2010 – when he was an active debater – to more recently taking on the role of Head Coach (alongside Technical Coach Sanjit Dias). Over the years he has seen many teams and debaters come and go, but this set of youngsters he felt had a little something more about them.

“I could see it in their eyes that they were up for a fight. That is when I knew that this team could go far. Usually when you lose a debate like that, a lot of previous Sri Lankan teams have kind of felt sorry for themselves. This time I could see that that their mentality was, ‘our performance is what’s important, we’ve controlled it, if you don’t want to give us the debate that’s fine, we’re going to get the next one’.”

The team would eventually go on to be runners-up to an impressive Canadian outfit. But with the tournament, which was originally slated to be held in Mexico, having been shifted online following the global outbreak of COVID-19, the Sri Lankan team received a hitherto-unheard-of level of support as the tournament became accessible to a wider audience.

Silver linings

The team itself is a blend of youth and experience – though that is purely relative considering the gap between the youngest (15) and oldest (19) is just four years – and one that has been picked through an increasingly-refined selection process. 

At the moment this process sees 10 inter-school tournaments held every year to help narrow down a national pool of the top 20 debaters in the country. This list is finalised by the Debaters’ Council, a volunteer organisation that pretty much oversees organised school debate in Sri Lanka. The national pool then train for about two months before the top six are selected.

As such, this year’s final team of Shalem Sumanthiran (19), Chanidu Ratnayake (15), Janul De Silva (17), Jasmine Markandu (17), Rahul De Silva (16) and Reiha Wimalasekere (16), have been practicing together since November 2019.

Practice in general consists of varied sessions focusing on different areas, starting from two to three sessions a week for the first few months before eventually culminating in more intense sessions closer to the tournament.

This year, however, was understandably an outlier, in that sessions closer to the tournament were held via Zoom owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, though in many ways it was this disruption that set team Sri Lanka on the path to their best-ever finish in a world championship.

In a Facebook post after the end of the tournament, Hewage wrote: “It’s difficult to find a silver lining to COVID-19 when so many are losing their lives and livelihoods. But our team was probably one of the biggest beneficiaries of tournaments going online this year.”

Indeed, silver linings are very much in short supply these days, but Hewage’s point holds up. Under normal circumstances, Sri Lanka simply does not possess the resources to take part in international tournaments outside of the WSDC, with the lack of sponsors, donors, or any real Governmental support a massive handicap. When you take into account visa fees, registration fees, and flight and accommodation costs, the expenses all add up. 

“Fortunately, thanks to so many tournaments going online and the barrier to access drastically reducing, the team was able to grow exponentially more. This resource constraint is probably one of the biggest impediments to our growth in the future,” the post went on state.

Exposure breeds success

In a Zoom conversation between Daily FT and the entire team, this point was eloquently captured by team captain Shalem.

“We usually don’t participate in lots of international tournaments purely for the reason that we don’t have funding. Every single year that I’ve debated I have always had to pay for my own trips abroad for various tournaments out of my parents’ cash. I don’t have any donors or sponsorships,” explained the 19-year-old Royalist.

“We usually participate in maximum one other tournament before the world championships and it’s kind of because of that that Sri Lanka doesn’t have exposure at that level.”

This time around though Sri Lanka was able to take part in three international tournaments prior to the WSDC, while also arranging practice debates against several international outfits. Those three tournaments brought about exceptional results – one quarter-final, one semi-final, and one outright victory – especially considering Sri Lanka’s previous best in the world championships had been a top 16 finish. 

“Out of the top 24 last year, we had debated 13 of them this year going into the world championships. That sort of exposure helped us understand how other teams think,” added Anandian Chanidu, the team’s youngest member.

This exposure, like in any other discipline or sport, proved to be extremely helpful – both in helping the team build an understanding of how to win, as well as allowing them room to learn from their mistakes.

“At the world championships they’re all foreign judges, so because of that it’s important to understand how those judges see the world,” noted Hewage. “The way an American judge would see things is very different from how Europeans see things, and that itself is vastly different from how Asian judges tend to see things. They vary across regions.”

This understanding, says Hewage, helped the team cater their argument generation to a wider audience. And while there would be tough lessons and setbacks throughout the course of their journey, these would only serve as a platform for future successes – something highlighted by the story of how a defeat to Hong Kong in the latter rounds of a tournament in the build-up to the world championships would serve as a catalyst for a role reversal in the quarterfinals of the WSDC.

“We had an international tournament right before the World Championships, which was hosted by the Vancouver Academy. We lost to Hong Kong in that tournament and we learnt something called ‘framing’. We lost because they did that really well. So we practiced that and got really good at it,” explains 16 year-old Rahul from Colombo International School (CIS).

“Then we met them again in the quarter finals of the World Championships and we did the exact same thing they did to us and we beat them.”

On a topic debating the merits of distributing emergency and humanitarian aid through non-state groups linked to terrorism, team Sri Lanka was able to characterise non-state groups linked to terrorism in a more favourable light, taking the win 5-2.

A boon for the education system

Such real world topics are common place in the world of debating, and in my conversation with the team it’s clear to see that these ‘kids’ are far more open-minded and knowledgeable about the world than I ever was at their age – on indeed many adults at my age now.

The group as such is unanimous in their praise for the merits of taking up debate, by way of both training their minds to think critically while also keeping them abreast of current affairs – both aspects missing in the current education syllabi in the country.

According to Shalem: “The fundamental skill that we’re taught is critical thinking – that’s something that’s a bit missing from the education system, especially locally. It’s rote memory that’s needed in most instances, where you memorise and regurgitate on to your exam paper. That exists to some extent across all education syllabi and it is necessary to an extent, but what debating does is that it takes you to that next level of having to just question everything and I think that’s a really important skill that most people if not all can benefit from.”

Jasmine, the captain of the CIS debate team, echoed this sentiment: “You think that one thing is right and you would normally think that the opposite of that would be completely wrong, but I guess through debating you’re able to understand why certain people have certain views.”

Added 16 year-old Reiha Wimalasekere from Ladies College: “Even looking at something like a peaceful protest versus violent protest – initially you would think peaceful protests wouldn’t really do as much as violent ones would, but over the course of debating it really helped see the pros and cons of so many different things. It just makes you so aware, which is something that I don’t think I would have previously got if I didn’t have this much knowledge through debating.”

What next?

The above points simply add fuel to the fire in the sense of Sri Lanka as a whole needing a more vibrant debating culture. For Hewage, the next step is in sourcing funding so that kids from across the country, not just Colombo, can participate and compete at a high level.

This, he hopes, will also enable this team to continue at the high standards they have now set themselves.

“Even though we’ve made the finals, we can’t rest on our laurels. Even though we’re now amongst the best, we need to be consistently amongst the best. I hope that this year’s performances by the team will help us get the support we need. This is not just about sending a team for WSDC and other tournaments though. We need to do a lot more to develop English debating outside Colombo and until we have a vibrant truly representative national circuit, our job is not done!”