The Sri Lankan people wanted change. They had grown tired of traditional political parties that had wooed them for votes but did very little for them. Popular politicians had fleeced a country already suffering the aftereffects of the Covid pandemic so dry that the island nation’s biggest economic crisis had come to spur a citizens’ uprising that shook Colombo two years ago.
The definitive desire for change was reflected in the mandate when Anura Kumara Dissanayake, presidential candidate of the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna-led coalition National People’s Power (NPP), swept the election while sidelining the older generation of leaders who had led Sri Lanka into an economic wilderness. The voters doubled down on change in exercising their franchise in record numbers in the parliamentary elections to give the NPP a clear two-thirds majority and the authority to steer Sri Lanka into a new era.
NPP’s victory in the snap parliamentary polls was no surprise but what was amazing about the results was that the coalition also swept the Tamil areas of Jaffna and Vanni besides doing very well in the east dominated by Tamil and Muslim voters and in the central hilly region around Kandy where plantation Tamils dominate the landscape. This helped the NPP win every district except Batticaloa in the east. It is the first time in decades in Sri Lanka’s fractious politics divided along ethnic lines that the Tamils have voted resoundingly for a national coalition led by the former revolutionary JVP that had a solid Sinhala-Buddhist base.
The Tamils, long disadvantaged economically in the absence of opportunities in the less developed north and east as opposed to the centre and the south and alienated during and after the ethnic war that raged from the early 1980s to 2009, have decided to throw in their lot with a national cause now. That they did so despite their internal divisions is a remarkable aspect of the unifying message the left-leaning President brought to the country that was on crutches when the people overran the President’s residence and ransacked it in 2022.
Mr Dissanayake will be appointing a new Prime Minister and a bigger Cabinet on Monday and getting on with governance for the people while striving to sustain the economic revival that came about with substantial help from India, China and the IMF. His reform agenda is to begin with downsizing government as one way of telling the people that they matter more than profligacy in the name of administering.
The armed uprisings that the revolutionary JVP were involved in is history now and in any case the party has been in electoral politics for more than 50 years. It might seem incongruous that a leader from a party with such a background should now be the unifier that Sri Lanka needed when the star representatives of legacy political parties were too busy feathering their own nests but the need for change was so compelling.
The President’s early task of balancing ties between China and India have been successful enough for the Indian envoy to have greeted him at every stage as he grew from candidate to the highest executive office. As tourism picks up along with tea export, the signs are sanguine for the island nation that seems willing to leave history behind and carve a pragmatic path that will benefit the people rather than the rulers.
