Padma Rao Sundarji | ‘Honeymoon year’ for Sri Lanka’s new govt

Fed up of nepotism, corruption and a staggering economic crisis and for the first time in their history, Sri Lankan citizens last week voted a largely unknown political party, the National People’s Power (NPP), with a landslide two-thirds majority in their Parliament.

The snap poll came barely two months after the leader of the NPP, Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the Marxist-Leninist-Communist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), was elected as the country’s new President.

But though the NPP’s parliamentary victory last week was somewhat predictable, few expected such a resounding one.

It ensured the defeat of political dynasties like the powerful Rajapaksa family and the supremely confident Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, also the son of a former President. Even political veteran Ranil Wickremesinghe, who, as the former President, had at least set the debt-ridden country on the path to recovery over the past two years, was shown the door.

A motley constellation of NPP activists, academics and doctors will now occupy 159 seats in the 225-member Parliament.

In many ways, the NPP’s victory is no ordinary one. There is a trim cabinet of 22 ministers. The previous one had more than 50 Cabinet ministers and ministers of state. Of the total elected 159 MPs, 145 are rank newcomers to politics and 20 are women.

However, the most outstanding achievement of all is how the NPP fared in the Tamil-Hindu-dominated Northern Province of Sri Lanka.

President Dissanayake’s JVP has a bloody and chequered past. It had instigated two uprisings, in which thousands were killed. The JVP has consistently rejected all attempts to grant greater autonomy to Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority Northern and Eastern provinces, such as the 1987 India-authored 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution.

But more than autonomy, Sri Lankan Tamils are enraged about other issues.

Even 15 years after the end of the devastating civil war, the Sri Lankan Army continues to occupy land in their provinces. The local police, too, still report to the Central government in Colombo.

Since Mr Dissanayake himself made no reference to the Tamil demands before he became President in September, it could be surmised that of the 690 odd parties who contested last week’s snap election, his JVP/NPP would be the last to win hearts in the Tamil heartland.

And yet, that’s precisely what happened.

At a recent rally in Jaffna and much to the chagrin of his security detail, Mr Dissanayake mingled fearlessly with the Tamil audience, and promised to return occupied lands. That had a mighty effect.

The NPP became the first Sinhala-Buddhist party to win in the traditionally hardline Tamil bastions of Jaffna and the Vanni, where the terror group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, once had its “headquarters”.

“The northern victory by NPP is historical,” says Jaffna-based economist Ahilan Kadirgamar. “Over the last few years, the Tamil National Alliance (parliamentary party in Colombo), which was really a political mouthpiece of the separatist Tamil Tigers, provided no solutions. Instead, they kept lobbying Western actors and the Tamil diaspora kept pumping money into the TNA to prop it up. Alienation mounted. People were angry, they lost faith. And they turned to Dissanayake.”

The director of Colombo’s National Peace Council (NPC), Jehan Perera, points to other factors that led to the NPP’s path-breaking victory in the North. “Tamils voted for the NPP because they see how happy the rest of the country is with it, and felt they could trust it too,” he says. But he warns that the NPP must now put that faith to good use.

“The new government has a majority, but it must not act unilaterally. It now has ‘its own’ minority Tamils and Muslims in Parliament. And since these MPs have themselves come in under the JVP/NPP mandate, it will be harder for them to obstruct the government. It is very hard for Sri Lanka’s Sinhala majority to think like its minorities. So, the latter must be consulted, when it comes to ethnic relations,” Dr Perera said.

However, minority woes, or even relations with India (whose security interests the NPP government says it will protect) are not the main issues in Colombo right now.

There is endemic corruption, that led to the devastating economic meltdown in 2022, for one.

President Dissanayake has sworn to put an end to it. But to any South Asia watcher, corruption is a by-product of unlimited power and an inherent fault-line that cannot be eradicated. So how will Mr Dissanayake’s largely inexperienced government succeed, when others have failed?

“I agree that corruption is embedded at every level,” says Dr Perera. “But over the past 40 years, JVP leaders have demonstrated a certain ascetic quality. They dress simply and don’t lead ostentatious lives. I am confident that that ethos of the core JVP group will permeate the NPP, and Sri Lankan society as a whole. Everybody knows that this government has inherited a bad situation and will give them time for their promised reforms.”

The other urgent issue is Sri Lanka’s staggering external debt and the ongoing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help pull the country out of its economic crisis.

The IMF had approved an Extended Fund Facility (EFF) of $3 billion to be disbursed over 48 months and subject to periodic reviews. An IMF delegation recently concluded its third such review. But the “austerity measures” that the IMF has demanded of the Sri Lankan government are what made the previous President, Ranil Wickremesinghe, highly unpopular.

President Dissanayake had defeated him by assuring relief from those very austerity measures, whilst assuring adherence to the IMF’s demands at the same time.

But that’s a Gordian knot. Can it really be untangled?

“A billion-dollar question”, said economist Ahilan Kadirgamar, who maintains that the IMF had mounted early pressure on Mr Dissanayake by arriving in Sri Lanka ahead of the presidential poll in September, when it became clear that the “Marxist” would win, and that it was “almost a kind of blackmail into cornering him” to accept the IMF’s conditions.

“The NPP raised expectations all over Sri Lanka and is now secure with an overwhelming vote,” he said. “This is the honeymoon period. But, if the government fails to find a balance between the IMF’s demands and relief measures in about a year from now, we may well see protests on the streets all over again.”