A State out of sync

All branches of the Sri Lankan State are clearly out of sync with its people. This may not be a phenomenon without precedent but there is hardly a moment in living memory that it has been expressed so distinctly where the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary have become so far removed from the will of the people. 

Since 1931, Sri Lanka has been a continuous democracy with universal adult franchise. Unpopular governments have been in place but never has an administration lost total public confidence and yet managed to scrape by without seeking a new mandate as the Ranil Wickremesinghe Government is doing today.

Unlike in the past, today there is a President who not only does not have a people’s mandate, but has been comprehensively and without a shadow of a doubt been rejected by the people. His monumental loss, personally and as the leader of the United National Party at the last general election in 2020 is without parallel. A man who received less than 30,000 votes now sits in the office of President. 

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who obtained a clear peoples’ mandate, appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe as his Prime Minister in May 2022. The former has now fled the country when it was clear that he no longer could govern. If he who received 6.9 million votes had lost the mandate from the people to govern, then his handpicked deputy and the man who was defeated in the last general elections has even a lesser mandate.

The Aragalaya, or struggle was not one definable political entity but a conceptual creation of the times where people of different political shades came together for a cause that sought the end of the corrupt Rajapaksa family rule and a system-wide change of the State. 

These included addressing the social and political flaws of the State, including the discrimination against minorities, lack of representation of their political aspirations, the addressing of systemic corruption and the disparities and injustices based on social strata. This was the soul of a nation finding expression on the streets across the island in a unique moment of reckoning after seven decades of post-independence State failure.

Instead of giving voice to this national clamour, the people’s representatives in Parliament have once again placed their personal and narrow party interests above those they claim to represent. Along with the Rajapaksa’s, their new party the Sri Lanka Podujana Peremuna (SLPP) has lost its mandate and legitimacy. 

Instead of reflecting this reality, the SLPP has managed to retain power through a proxy in the form of Ranil Wickremesinghe. The members of Parliament who have been appointed into the Cabinet of Ministers are a who’s who of the shadiest characters in politics that the mass movement wished to dispose. They are the very opposite of the system change demanded and needed at this moment.

The judiciary and the criminal justice system have become a mockery through all this turmoil. Today, protesters and leaders of the Aragalaya are being arrested for what would even on a normal day be called petty crimes. The individual who took the President’s official flag during the protest, an Aragalaya leader who blocked the exit of the Presidential Secretariat supposedly delaying a meeting with IMF officials and even the individual who handed over millions of rupees found at the President’s official residence to the police are now in custody and many more, including clergy, are being hounded. 

This is in glaring contrast to the political leaders who instigated the 9 May violence against the peaceful protestors and politicians and cronies who embezzled the life out of this country who remain not only remain free but in positions of political authority.

Today a group of septuagenarian men, who mostly inherited the political office, are running the country in the same old fashion their fathers and uncles did a generation ago. They are far removed from the average, younger, more politically astute populace who have been demanding system-wide change. With all branches of the State failing to hear this call and failing even more miserably to check on each other, the Sri Lankan State is moving towards total collapse and a day of reckoning.