Rejecting the Old Guard

The turnout in last week’s election was almost 69 percent, or 11.8 million Sri Lankan voters, ten percentage points lower than in the presidential poll on September 21. Observers have put the lower participation rate down to a number of factors, from voter fatigue to demoralization among supporters of old guard parties and politicians.

AKD and his government now enjoy a supermajority with over two-thirds of parliamentary seats. This makes for a notable contrast with recent experience in Latin America, where victorious left-wing presidential candidates such as Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro govern without supportive majorities in parliament.

There were early signs of the NPP’s victory. Before the election was held, dozens of traditional politicians, anticipating a shameful defeat, announced they were “taking a break” or even retiring from politics altogether. Voters rejected almost all of those who still had the nerve to contest the poll.

Around two in every three members of the new parliament are newcomers. With the exception of a few holdouts, the legislature has now been purged of those who were active in national politics for decades, as demanded in the 2022 people’s uprising. Among the new NPP entrants is a disability rights activist who is also the first visually impaired lawmaker in Sri Lanka’s parliamentary history.

Other forms of change are coming more slowly. Women are the majority (52 percent) of Sri Lanka’s population. The country elected the world’s first female head of government back in 1960, and the human development indicators for women are the best in South Asia, but Sri Lankan politics has an abysmal record when it comes to women’s representation. Only 10 percent of those participating the new parliament are women (twenty-two, which is still an increase from thirteen in 2020). Most come from the NPP, which actively mobilized among women and fielded the highest number of women as candidates.

Standing out in the NPP’s complement of women representatives are three Hill Country (Malaiyaha) Tamils. They are the first women descendants of plantation workers, a structurally marginalized ethnic minority in Sri Lanka for almost two hundred years, to enter parliament. They will be joined by three male NPP trade unionists from the same community.

What about the rest of the NPP’s parliamentary cohort? A closer look will help us make sense of claims about the alliance’s political character and ideology, made by allies and opponents from both the Left and Right.

As the dominant force within the NPP, the cadre-based, centralized JVP unsurprisingly secured seats and the highest preferences — the ballot paper allows up to three votes to be cast in order of preference for candidates on the party list — for all its district leaders. They are full-time political activists recognizable to the public, some of whom have previously been elected in subnational tiers of government. They generally come from the better-educated intermediate classes, engaged in farming, self-employment, or lower-grade government jobs.

The largest occupational group among NPP candidates comprised government schoolteachers and principals. As is common in Sri Lankan politics, there was a surfeit of lawyers; less usual is the high number of women among them. Closely following in numerical terms were state university academics and lecturers in private education providers, mostly male. These nominees symbolize the “intellectuals,” whose educational qualifications the NPP favorably contrasts with those of politicians from the mainstream parties it has now displaced.

There are many business owners and corporate managers too. Their presence on the NPP benches is important to the alliance as evidence that it is friendly to the private sector and supports entrepreneurship. The alliance can count on many “professionals” among its MPs — that is, engineers, bankers, doctors, veterinarians, chartered accountants, and quantity surveyors, who represent the technically trained strata that the NPP greatly admires. The NPP selected more former senior military officers — who were active in a war that killed anywhere between 80,000 and 100,000 of people, mostly Tamils — than farmers among their candidates, but not many won seats.

Watershed

Within Sri Lanka, observers have compared this stunning outcome and the wider historical moment of which it forms a part to the watershed 1977 general election. On that occasion, the right-wing United National Party (UNP) received five-sixths of parliamentary seats — 140 out of 168 — through the first-past-the-post electoral system that was in use at the time.

The UNP, the traditional party of comprador capitalism, subsequently drew on its electoral majority and control of state power to lead South Asia in trade and investment liberalization, market deregulation, and public sector privatization some half a century ago. These “open economy” policies and the authoritarianism that propelled them helped plunge the island into three decades of violence by state and nonstate actors, with the JVP both perpetrator and victim amid the death and destruction.

This time, however, the NPP’s landslide stems from a fairer electoral system, with seat allocations corresponding more directly to vote share. The alliance sought and received a mandate from the people to sweep out the rotten representatives of decaying political parties, replacing them with figures from outside the old elite who are pledged to a new style of politics. Yet the JVP-NPP glosses over the fact that the cronyism, nepotism, and grand corruption against which it has mobilized for its electoral success are a product of the “open economy” that has taken shape in recent decades, and those practices reinforce that economic model in turn.

The NPP’s popularity also hinges on the expectations of many people that it will soon provide relief to those reeling from the austerity policies of Sri Lanka’s seventeenth International Monetary Fund (IMF) program in the face of an ongoing polycrisis. The economy contracted over six successive quarters in 2022 and 2023, boosting unemployment and reducing real wages, and growth has been sluggish since.

Official estimates show that one in every four households has fallen below the poverty line. Food insecurity affects 26 percent of the population, forcing many to eat fewer and lower-quality meals. Energy prices have shot up, making bills unaffordable and throwing over a million people off the electricity grid.

There is massive temporary and permanent migration among young people and the middle class, with day-and-night queues outside the passport office, which is unable to cope with demand. The burden of household debt, which is disproportionately borne by women, throttles one in five households, borrowing for basic necessities: food, fuel, and out-of-pocket health and education fees.

Tamil Politics

The scale of the NPP’s victory received an additional fillip from its unexpected breakthrough in the north of the island. This is the heartland of Eelam Tamil nationalism (“Eelam” being a Tamil-language name for what is now called Sri Lanka). It won five of the available twelve seats, beating the entrenched Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (also known as the Federal Party) into second place. Putting the island’s north and east regions together, where Tamils and Muslims (an ethnoreligious identity in Sri Lanka) constitute a local majority, the NPP is now the largest single party, having never previously taken a seat.

Since its emergence in 2019, the NPP, like the JVP before it, had struggled to make electoral inroads outside of its Sinhala Buddhist core constituency, although its membership is ethnically plural. The presidential election result in September already saw a marked increase in support for the alliance from Tamil-speaking minorities on the eastern coast, along the central massif, and in the parched northern plains, when compared to earlier campaigns. The wave in Sri Lanka’s south that carried AKD to the presidency then rolled over the north and east after his election. There was a palpable mood of hope invested in the new president and his party, emboldening many who had not voted for him in September to back the NPP in the general election.

In its drive for minority votes, the NPP did not deviate from the JVP’s longstanding opposition to the reconstitution of Sri Lanka’s structure along federal lines, a historic demand of Tamils in the northeast. Nor does it back the call for international investigation of wartime crimes against humanity, including the mass killing of civilians and tens of thousands of enforced disappearances in the final days of the war and its immediate aftermath. Instead, the alliance recycles the JVP’s stock solution of “equality” for Sri Lanka’s ethnoreligious minorities and an end to racism in politics.

The NPP manifesto promises to enact a new constitution that will devolve administrative and political functions to encourage popular participation in “governance.” If put into practice, this pledge will be a positive move for the democratization of institutions. However, it is ambiguous for two reasons.

Firstly, the NPP does not spell out the precise extent to which the governing center will transfer powers to the periphery. Second, it does not recognize the specificity of the national question, which requires greater devolution of state power to majority Tamil-speaking areas in comparison to Sinhala-majority ones.

At his rallies in the north a few days before the polls, the new president did promise early release of Tamil political prisoners and of private lands forcibly occupied by state agencies (while studiously refraining from mentioning the military, which occupies vast tracts of it, by name). Those attending the rallies received these pledges warmly, as they did AKD’s vow to revive state industries and provide quality employment. This will be crucial in a poor, agrarian-based local economy where low-income farming and fishing are the mainstay occupations, apart from public-sector jobs and precarious work.

Wishful Thinking

Some analysts have interpreted the NPP’s astonishing performance among Tamils, especially in the north and east, as proof that Tamil nationalism is a waning force, and that the national unity that has eluded Sri Lanka since decolonization in 1948 is in the process of being forged. But this is an exercise in wishful thinking.

It is true that the Tamil- and Muslim-oriented regional parties that were previously dominant in those regions saw a fall in their share of seats. However, it is more realistic to read this as evidence of disillusionment with those particular parties, rather than with ethnonationalism in general. This point also applies to the NPP’s southern voters. They have turned away from Sinhala nationalist parties without abandoning that underlying worldview.

The so-called national parties — that is, Sinhala majoritarian parties with some modest non-Sinhala support — have always had a toehold among some Tamils and Muslims in the north and east, in addition to the local minority Sinhala community. Their voters too defected in droves to the NPP. They have switched from one “national” party to another, notwithstanding the genuine difference between the NPP and the rest.

The swing is also a protest vote. Among Tamils, there is widespread frustration at the absence of unified and coherent representation of their political grievances, and particularly their socioeconomic issues, with the authorities in Colombo. In this election, there were twenty-three political parties and twenty-one independent groups contesting in the Jaffna district alone. Across the northeast, there were thousands of candidates running for just twenty-eight parliamentary seats: a ratio of seventy-three to one, or almost double that in the rest of the country.

There have been political tensions within the ranks of Tamil nationalism on questions of strategy ever since the decimation of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that previously controlled the field of Tamil politics. However, the profusion of parties and groups also derives from egotism and personality-driven differences, as well as the long-distance nationalism of Tamil diaspora financiers who are eager for power without responsibility. While the fall in support for the three largest northern Tamil parties was partly due to the splintering of votes across many smaller parties and nonparty lists, it is also a message of disaffection from the electorate directed toward those three parties for their collective failure as political representatives.

There is certainly a sentiment among some Tamils that talk of self-determination at some indeterminate point offers no balm from the everyday pains of eking out an existence in daily low-wage work or subsistence cultivation. Nor does it help them pay for medicines or private tuition fees, in the hope of securing higher grades and access to a state university for their children.

Fifteen years after the end of the war, Tamil nationalism has only one answer when it comes to any socioeconomic or structural problem, from poverty and unemployment to gender-based violence, caste-based discrimination, and class-based exploitation. It perceives all these issues as secondary when compared to the bane of Sinhala hegemony. Urging Tamils to wait for self-rule to address their grievances, it has nothing to say or offer to the exploited in the interim.

Among those for whom the appeal of this mantra has worn thin, the NPP appeared closest to their way of thinking, as well as having a practical shot at forming a government. In his election rallies in the north, AKD came across as understanding and empathetic with the travails of common people.

Early Moves

Fifty-four days passed between the presidential election on September 21 and the general election on November 14, where the new president governed with a cabinet of three including himself. Harini Amarasuriya, a former academic and civil society activist who was the only woman in the three-member NPP group of the previous parliament, was appointed prime minister. As in the French political system, for example, that office is ceremonial, with executive powers vested in the president. However, Amarasuriya’s selection sent a strong signal on inclusivity, both because of her gender and because she represents the non-JVP component of the NPP.

As foreseen, the transitional government did its best not to rock the boat in matters of state and the economy. It retained the central bank governor and the treasury secretary, who have been staunch supporters of the IMF program and its anti-working-class conditionalities. The influence of their camp was even strengthened through the appointment of the chairman of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the voice of big business since the time of the British Raj, as the president’s senior economic advisor.

This trio were promptly dispatched to Washington, DC, to reassure the IMF that its program was still on track and to counter the “Marxist” tag slapped on the new administration by ill-informed international media reports. Since then, the government has appointed several corporate personalities to leadership positions in state institutions, offering reassurance to both domestic capital and international actors of stability and continuity in terms of economic policy and direction.

There has been no immediate relief from the high cost of living and the problem of price-gouging. The new government has decided that controls cannot work in reducing rice and egg prices and seems helpless to act in the face of politically connected cartels. Instead, it claims it will subvert the power of oligopolies through increasing state participation in the consumer market. It remains to be seen how it will find the fiscal resources to do so and reorient the state sector to compete rather than collude with private capital.

More perplexing to liberal-left supporters of the NPP government was its apparent backtracking at worst, or confused messaging at best, on pledges related to human rights. Government spokespeople suggested that it might only amend the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act, modeled on British and South African laws, instead of repealing it altogether. The government also separately indicated that reform of the Muslim personal law in the interests of human rights and gender justice depended on achieving consensus with conservative clerics. Both these pronouncements directly contradict the NPP’s own manifesto.

Plans for Government

After the parliamentary election, the president now had the numbers to expand his cabinet. Its twenty-two members resemble the governing party, drawn as they are from the JVP’s central leadership, university academics, and professionals. There are only two women, including the reappointed prime minister. The president, as the constitution empowers him to do, has reserved the subjects of defense, finance, planning, and digital transformation for himself. What electrification was to the Bolsheviks, digitalization is to the NPP.

President Dissanayake made the annual policy speech at the first sitting of the new House on November 21, in the first formal indication of his government’s direction. There were no surprises in what he said. The speech repeated familiar themes of zero tolerance for corruption and racial and religious extremism, improved public services, and the breakup of monopolies that fix consumer prices.

As the NPP declared on the campaign trail, there will be an increase in cash transfers to state welfare recipients, and in public sector salaries and pension payments. An allowance for the purchase of school supplies will bring relief to many households. The government wants to increase the size of Sri Lanka’s IT workforce within five years to 200,000 so as to generate export revenue for IT-related services of US$5 billion annually, matching the current foreign exchange earnings in the apparel industry.

The new administration’s first budget will be debated in March 2025. Its expenditure and revenue plan will clarify how much, if at all, the government seeks to wriggle within the straitjacket of an IMF program designed for Sri Lanka to resume servicing its external debt to private and bilateral creditors after 2027. The program is also supposed to rehabilitate the country’s sovereign risk rating in order for it to return to the international money market and borrow again. This in turn will resume the vicious cycle of taking out new loans to repay old loans, adding to a still-growing mountain of debt as interest charges accumulate.

The government has been playing ball with the IMF, anticipating approval of the next instalment of the $2.9 billion extended fund facility. The individual tranches are modest, about $330 million each, disbursed twice a year, following satisfactory review of the government’s application of neoliberal structural reforms. This amount is less than Sri Lanka’s weekly import bill. As is so often the case with IMF financing, its true significance is symbolic. The Fund’s stamp of approval is a periodic assurance to multilateral banks, bilateral creditors, and bondholders of the country’s good behavior, to be rewarded by fresh financing.

While the NPP tacks to the center, hoping to win middle-class approval for its moderation, large sections of the public are to its left. Six in every ten Sri Lankans want higher taxes on the rich to fund public services. Two in every three prioritize increased government spending on health and education.

Even if the NPP shies away from tackling inequalities of income, wealth, and power, aspiring only to make society “tolerable and comfortable” for the middle class, will the many trade union leaders now in government at least ensure that existing labor laws are enforced? This would mean protecting the right to organize and bargain collectively, not least in the export garments industry where women’s labor and lives are depleted before being discarded.

Will they extend labor rights, including social protection, to casualized and contract workers, and grant health and safety rights to all workers? Will the alliance that protested from the opposition benches against the plundering of workers’ savings in provident funds as part of last year’s unjust domestic debt restructuring now reverse this move, as the governmental authority and parliamentary numbers it now possesses allow it to do?

Revolutionary Specters

Election day came just after the JVP’s annual “November heroes’ commemoration,” which honors the memory of its martyrs who died in two failed uprisings (1971 and 1987–89) to overthrow the state. November 13 is the date when the JVP’s charismatic founder-leader Rohana Wijeweera was summarily executed after his capture in 1989, after which the second insurrection petered out.

AKD addressed a small gathering of family members of those killed in combat or extrajudicially, joined by veteran survivors and the current JVP leadership. This has been his practice ever since taking charge of the party a decade ago, though some must have found it startling to see a newly elected head of state doing so.

As in the past, with trademark sobriety, his remarks this year steered a delicate course: recognizing those who sacrificed their lives in Wijeweera’s cause; avoiding criticism of the armed struggle, while alluding to certain “mistakes” made; and charting the party’s changed strategy after it was unbanned and rebuilt itself, entering mainstream politics from 1994 onward. According to AKD, the “goal” was constant — only the means to achieve it had changed. Yet with no hint in his speech of movement toward transformative change in the interests of the working class, the inference is that the JVP’s “goal,” then as now, is the capture of state power, the path to which is today paved by parliamentarism.

When Wijeweera was arraigned before an ad hoc court for his role in the 1971 youth rebellion, he testified that the JVP’s goal was “complete revolutionary change of the existing social system. . . . Ours is not the role of sitting on the fence with folded arms waiting for the day when this capitalist system is taken for burial on the shoulders of others.” He rejected the idea that social formations like that of Sri Lanka must first pass through the stage of a “people’s democratic revolution” before the battle for socialism could commence.

More than a decade before, in 1962, the socialist intellectual and freedom fighter Hector Abhayavardhana posed a question to his comrades of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). The LSSP was nominally a Trotskyist party, easily the most successful of its kind anywhere in the world, and took nearly 11 percent of the vote in the first election held after independence for Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known). The party’s 1950 program declared that its “fundamental aims” could not be “realized through bourgeois parliaments,” since the “inevitable resistance of the bourgeoisie” called for “mass revolutionary action as the only means of realizing the will of the majority.”

However, as Abhayavardhana approvingly went on to say, the LSSP was in practice more invested in parliamentary success than in fomenting revolutionary change:

The Left in Ceylon cannot continue to function on the two planes of parliamentarism and doctrinaire revolutionism simultaneously. The split attitude that results from it makes effective action on either plane impossible. The stage has been reached when it is no longer possible to postpone a decision about this.

The JVP’s gambit of a new type of electoral party (the National People’s Power), and new program (anti-corruption as substitute for anti-capitalism), for a new period (varieties of capitalism as the only alternatives to neoliberalism) has paid off as the party hoped it would. In the afterglow of an incredible electoral result, has the stage been reached when it is no longer possible for the JVP to postpone facing up to the plan of action it has chosen? What should we make of its party program, bearing the title “Programme of the proletarian socialist revolution,” which is still listed on its website but appears to have gone missing from it?