By Harim Peiris

(Published in “The Island” on the 20th March 2024)

The publishing of ousted President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s memoirs, almost predictably titled, The Conspiracy to oust me from the presidency , provides an opportunity to re-evaluate those tumultuous events that did led to the fleeing abroad of the former president in 2022 and his resignation, including the political discourse that arose from the Aragalaya. The political discourse of the Aragalaya is relevant, as we come to the constitutionally mandated presidential election year of 2024. If the ouster of Gotabaya Rajapaksa was not a widely popular move and was a conspiracy, foreign or otherwise, then the evidence would be obvious at the polls, where the Rajapaksaa’s SLPP candidate should be able to romp home.

This has been the case in two other Asian countries with similar socio-religious backgrounds as ours, Thailand and Myanmar. Whenever the popularly elected governments of the red shirt political movement of Thakshin Shinawatra and his clan are ousted through street protests, they win the next free election. Similarly in Myanmar, when the Burmese military dared to face the public in a free election, they were wiped out at the polls and the National League for Democracy (NLD) of Aung San Sui Kyi emerged victorious.

If the ousting of Gotabaya Rajapaksa was a conspiracy in 2022, then the vindication should occur at the 2024 polls, presidential and parliamentary. However, all indications of published opinion surveys, indicate a near complete repudiation at the polls for the Rajapaksas’. The SLPP is unlikely to run their own candidate at the presidential elections (after all, there is no legal bar for Gotabaya to contest again and seek vindication at the polls), and they are also likely to fare quite poorly at an ensuing general election as well. This is not a conspiracy but the political reality after bankrupting the country.

The Ranil Wickremesinghe administration and the business and political elites who support it would argue the primacy of the economic recovery efforts. But this has already occurred. It was also not rocket science, just plain common sense of basically importing, fuel, with some help from India and renegotiating with our creditors, including getting China to the table. But rebuilding our nation and her political economy requires deeper reforms. Even in the very throes of the economic collapse, the Aragalaya was arguing for a “system change”, deep and fundamental reforms to the Sri Lankan state, including our identity-based politics and culture of poor governance.

While the Wickremesinghe Administration has taken the emergency measures to stabilise the economy, it is seemingly unwilling, unable and even in denial of the need for any reforms of the Sri Lankan state, public governance or economic management. The long-term solution is seen as increased foreign remittances from tourism and little else and business as usual. But the pain in society is deep and real and the election results of 2024 would reveal that.

The need for system change has been brought into stark focus by the vote of no confidence on the speaker of Parliament brought by the Opposition. A move catalysed by the leader of the Opposition, Sajith Premadasa. As this article is being penned, the debate in that august assembly has been scheduled but not yet begun. Given the government’s comfortable majority in parliament, the outcome of the vote is in little doubt. But from a public governance standpoint, it is interesting to note what the Opposition alleges in their no confidence motion, certainly seem prima-facie self-evident and have not really been refuted with any credibility.

The first and most serious allegation in the no-confidence motion against the Speaker is the process of passing and certifying the supremely misnamed Online Safety Bill––the government’s tool to crush online dissent.

If the Wickramasinghe Administration’s agenda is ever accused of being neo-liberal, it must surely be strictly limited to its economic policies since there is surely nothing liberal, tolerant or pluralistic on the crackdown on dissent and freedoms being done through the Online Safety Bill, the Counter Terrorism Act and other similar initiatives. The contention of the Opposition’s motion is that the undertakings given to the Supreme Court by the Attorney General, on behalf of the government were not adhered to by the government in the passage of the Bill. The necessary amendments were not incorporated and the division by name, though requested, was not conducted.

If the youth of the Aragalaya in 2022, were demanding system change and reforms, this is unlikely a conspiracy as Gotabaya Rajapaksa alleges, but a rather obvious response to public governance, post war, where far from a peace dividend either economically or socio-politically, we went in the opposite direction to being less prosperous economically and less democratic with fewer liberties, politically.

The appointment of the IGP was the second allegation in the no confidence motion against the speaker. In what is surely a slap in the face for the judiciary, a man found by the Supreme Court to have personally tortured a person in custody, was soon thereafter nominated for IGP. Notwithstanding resistance from the Constitutional Council, appointed through the Speaker’s casting vote. The said process is now a part of the parliamentary no confidence motion. This administration, though a lame duck and lacking a popular mandate, is certainly not averse to audacious acts in governance. The Aragalaya cry for real reform was no conspiracy and the results of the presidential and parliamentary elections due in the not too distant future will likely bear that out.

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By Harim Peiris

(Published in “The Island” on the 13th March 2024)

The year 2024, is an election year in Sri Lanka, with the president’s term of office ending on 17th November 2024 and accordingly the conduct of a presidential election constitutionally mandated upon the Election Commission between September and October, this year. The ousting of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, through the mass protests of the aragalaya two years ago, has been raised a fresh in the public consciousness through the publications of his memoirs, “The Conspiracy – to oust me from the presidency”, a rather blatant attempt at blaming everyone but the Rajapaksa’s gross mismanagement of the country, for the mass uprising which resulted in the end of his short lived and unlamented administration. The presidential election of 2024, is the first and most decisive of Sri Lankan democracy’s attempt, since 2022 to publicly elect and grant a popular mandate to the office of president of the republic.

The politics of 2024 are being clearly laid out as a three corned race. As incumbent in office, the first contender is President Ranil Wickremesinghe, propped up and kept in power by the rump parliamentary majority of the Rajapaksa’s SLPP, a political formation that lost its popular mandate along with their president in 2022 but continues to control parliament and back the single seat UNP’s president. The official opposition led by the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Sajith Premadasa and his Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) is the obvious alternative to an administration lacking a popular mandate. To his credit Mr. Premadasa has succeeded in preventing a takeover of his party by the UNP, which party he decimated in the general elections of 2020 in the maiden electoral outing of his SJB. By all accounts, the various attempts by President Wickremesinghe and the UNP to dump the SLPP and pivot to the SJB for the presidential poll has now been ended.

However, the JVP says its leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake is the front runner in the 2024 presidential poll. Polling just above 3% of the popular vote in the 2019 presidential election, the JVP was always a distant third and very much an “also ran” in prior elections and Sri Lankan politics in general. Garnering about 4% of the vote in the parliamentary elections of 2020, it secured just three seats. However, as voters repudiate Rajapaksa governance and its associated politics, which brough about national economic collapse, in just two short years, ironically based on a promise of creating splendour and prosperity, the beneficiary of much of the Rajapaksa’s self-implosion seems to have been the JVP, much more so than the main opposition SJB. Some of the dynamics at play are worth examining. We are more than six months away from the presidential election, a near eternity in politics. Much can change in the relatively unchartered terrain of the new three-way race of Sri Lankan politics and the large number of undecided voters, who would be really the deciding factor at the coming election.

The presidential election of November 2019 was all about national security after the coordinated Easter bomb attacks of April 2019. Ironically, we went from national security to national collapse in two years, with no real justice or truth about the perpetrators of the Easter bomb attack, except for a growing belief in the country that these attacks had the sanction and support of the deep state, especially after the UK Channel 4 expose’ alleging the same. However, the aragalaya and the economic collapse changed the political discourse in the country. We went from racial dog whistling and openly anti-minority politics to the politics of social justice. The real and lasting political problem for the Rajapaksa’s and the SLPP is not just that they destroyed the economy, but that their political ideology of majoritarian nationalism was discredited and discarded by the public, along with their governance.

The JVP, rather than the SJB, was the beneficiary of this new post racial, social justice political ethos. Almost overtly racist during their violent second insurrection of 1988/89, through a rejection of even the provincial councils, the JVP over the years more mainstreamed their ethnic policies along communist ideology, which emphasizes socio political class divides over ethnic ones. This didn’t hold much sway in the ethnically polarised Sri Lanka of the past, but the economic collapse of 2022 was much like the Tsunami of 2004, a massive shock to the system, which resulted in swift and significant changes to the popular consciousness and ethos.

The JVP tapped into the mass suffering and pain of the vast majority of the Sri Lankan populace. While our economy has stabilised and recovered, its benefits have been largely to the first and second percentiles or twenty percent of Sri Lanka’s population who earn close to about two thirds of our national income, in an economy with an extremely skewed income distribution. The UNP / SLPP administration has been tone deaf to the pain of the majority, with high malnutrition, huge drops in purchasing power and quality of life from public education and health to rural electrification. Over half a million households had electricity disconnected during the year. We are taking people off the national grid. Not adding new consumers. The JVP, better than the SJB, has tapped into that pain and suffering.

But these are early days in the presidential election race of 2024 and the election is still Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa’s to lose. He much more so, than the old traditional UNP elites, comes from a political tradition and track record of feeling the common man’s pain, of working towards universal housing and social security for all with much more credibility than the JVP. However, one thing is certain, the repudiation of the Rajapaksa political brand in 2024, would be fairly decisive.

(The writer served as Advisor to the President, from 2002-2005)

By Harim Peiris

(Published in The Island – Opinion / Features on 7th December 2023

As we approach the end of 2023 and with about a year to go for the next presidential election due before end 2024, President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s frequent refrain and indeed the rationale for his administration is the revival of the national economy after it was spectacularly destroyed by his predecessor’s administration, ironically elected on the platform of bringing about vistas of “prosperity and splendor”. Instead, the third Rajapaksa administration bankrupted the state, impoverished the nation and plunged about 40 percent of the population, especially its most vulnerable lower income sections into relative poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition, according to UN research and other sources.

A few weeks ago, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling, given in a public interest fundamental rights application filed by several social activists, found the Rajapaksas, namely siblings Gotabaya, Mahinda and Basil, respectively president, prime minister and finance minister in the third Rajapaksa administration as well as several of their key political appointees and officials, including the then Governor of the Central Bank, the Treasury and President’s secretaries responsible and liable for and/or causing the collapse of the nation’s economy through gross mismanagement and deliberate actions of commission and omission. Argued in a lengthy over 200 page judgment, a five judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya delivered the landmark ruling. The lone dissenter did not contest the substance of the culpability but argued more narrowly that it did not constitute an infringement of fundamental rights, the basis for the case.

The link between governance and the economy

The Supreme Court judgement, Sri Lanka’s agreement with the IMF and the public debate around economic revival and its various components from enhancing tax revenues to reducing inflation to restructuring state owned enterprises all focus on one key factor, the importance of public sector governance in the performance of the national economy. Sri Lanka during its two and a half decade long civil conflict, for all the economic and political challenges posed by it, recorded on average a 5.2% annualized economic growth in real terms. However, as President Mahinda Rajapaksa noted in 2009 at the end of the war, there was now no conflict to blame for economic non-performance and Sri Lankans can and will rightfully expect an economic renaissance and revival. That this did not occur and instead that the opposite became true, namely that the economy was destroyed, is surely largely due to both corrupt and inept stewardship of the nation’s public affairs. In rather staid, legal language and with judicial restraint, the highest judiciary argues lengthily and convincingly that deliberate actions and inactions of the Rajapaksas and their key acolytes were responsible for the Sri Lanka’s economic collapse.

The issues that arise in the context of remedial measures and non-reoccurrence is that there exists in Sri Lanka’s laws and institutions that are supposed to act as a check and balance on the executive’s arbitrary and ad-hoc decision making, including the Central Bank, its monetary board, parliamentary oversight and civil society. However, these institutions failed to be an effective check or balance on arbitrary and entirely unreasonable actions of an all powerful presidential administration. These arbitrary actions included ill-conceived tax cuts of December 2019, the refusal to go to the IMF when government finances were running down, the ad-hoc banning of chemical fertilizer impoverishing farmers and especially continuing to pay off Sri Lanka’s foreign currency obligations to the point of letting the fuel pumps run dry and hospitals run out of medicines rather than pulling the plug earlier on foreign debt obligations while previously increasing the amount of foreign, mainly Chinese debt, on white elephant projects of dubious economic and utility value.

A powerful presidency the cause rather than the preventor of national collapse

Sri Lanka’s economic collapse of 2022 was by far the worst national disaster to have occurred in our nation’s post-independence history and the Supreme Court has after much deliberation judicially informed us what everyone on the streets during the “Aragalaya” more instinctively knew that this was a man-made disaster by a small coterie of overly powerful and popularly elected politicians. Sri Lanka has a democratically elected government but not democratic, participatory or accountable governance.

There has been and continues to be much debate about Sri Lanka’s all-powerful executive presidency. The argument has been that such an all-powerful center was required for our national well-being. However our national experience has now been that this all-powerful center became an unaccountable center of power, which overshadowed all other institutions, overran all checks and balances and finally became the architect and vehicle of disastrous national collapse. There is a democratic deficit and a lack of accountability in Sri Lanka’s public governance that still persists in the reconfigured regime which assumed state power after the Rajapaksa retreat. The administration lacks both a popular mandate and public confidence although having perhaps elite support sufficient for it to govern, increasingly repressively until the next election. It has postponed all elections, local and provincial until the day of reconning a year hence. The real debate on economic revival is about strengthening Sri Lanka’s national governance to make it more accountable, transparent and responsive rather than what we have at present.

(The writer served as Presidential Spokesman and Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sri Lanka)

By Harim Peiris

(Published in India Today on the 15th July 2022)

Amid intense protests against Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, here are the three likely scenarios for Sri Lanka, which is facing one of its worst crisis in decades.

Last week, July 9, 2022, was a momentous day in the annals of recent Sri Lankan history when the protests that had been going on for months against the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa gathered momentum. The protesters, swelling to their hundreds of thousands, filled the streets of Colombo and overran the heart of Sri Lanka’s executive arm of the government, the President’s House, the president’s office and earlier the prime minister’s official residence.

On July 13, they overran the prime minister’s office, taking control of the key government institutions and offices.

President Rajapaksa and his family had to be evacuated to safety by the Sri Lankan state security forces, reportedly aboard a naval vessel that then went out to sea but not outside Sri Lankan territorial waters. Three cabinet ministers also resigned, most notably the recently appointed investment promotion minister, business magnate Dhammika Perera, one the richest men in the country.

A meeting of the party leaders was chaired by the speaker of Parliament and they called for the resignation of the president and the prime minister. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to resign on July 13, while Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe agreed to resign in the event a divided Parliament could agree first on his successor.

On July 13, the self-imposed deadline for his resignation came and gone, and it is clear that President Rajapaksa has little or no intention of resigning. Instead, he fled the country, aboard a Sri Lankan Air Force aircraft for the Maldives, from where he appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as acting president. The leaders of parties represented in Parliament again demanded that Wickremesinghe also resigns while the speaker’s office has confirmed that it is examining if the president’s actions of fleeing the country constitutes a vacation of post situation.

Meanwhile, there are new concerns being expressed in Colombo, by both political elements and the security establishment, that the protests or ‘Aragalaya’, meaning struggle in the Sinhala language, is being hijacked and taken over by Left-wing extremists and neo-fascist forces to capture state power through the protest movement.

Trigger for the deadlock

The deadlock in the democratic political structure is very apparent because the Rajapaksa’s or their governing party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), controls a near majority in Parliament, even after breakaways and defections. Short of a genuine resignation, or at least a retirement to the Opposition benches by the Rajapaksas, it creates a complete deadlock in the democratic process.

The relatively young, 50 something leader of the Opposition, Sajith Premadasa, himself the son of former president Ranasinghe Premadasa, has consistently called for a parliamentary election for the multiple purposes of taking the heat from the street protests to an election campaign, getting a genuine people’s mandate and reestablishing the legitimacy of the government and securing public support for the painful fiscal and state reforms which are required for the Sri Lankan economy to become a viable, functional and sustainably growing entity again. It probably helps that he and his party, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), are confident of winning an election, not least because the government has crashed along with the economy.

The likely scenarios for Colombo

So, what are the likely options and scenarios for Sri Lanka? The most likely one in the short term would be that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe will continue to play his preferred role as “acting president”, with the consequence that the country at best would be unable to make the reforms so essential for an economic turnaround, and at worst will lead to anarchy as a government seen entirely as illegitimate seeks to keep people in misery through an iron fist.

The alternative is for the fractious and divided Opposition to start coalescing together at least for the limited purpose of ousting the Rajapaksa regime, but the obstacle to the same is that the parties stronger in Parliament are less prevalent on the streets and those on the streets are not really present or significant in Parliament. Hence, the street protesters stated preference for extra-constitutional regime change and becoming more attractive as constitutional regime change is made impossible by Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe’s intransigence.

The third option which cannot be off the table is a military-backed regime, a kind of hybrid government where a civilian façade of political personalities constitutes a government that is largely seen as illegitimate, and where military might and muscle is needed for barebones governance.

Of the above three scenarios, the only appealing one is for the Opposition to coalesce sufficiently for an interim or transitionary governing arrangement followed by elections in a clearly defined short-time span of perhaps three to six months. Even the Rajapaksas, one hopes that it is in their best interest to step aside and out of the quagmire that they have sunk Sri Lanka into and should they favour their own chances of a quick return, join the fray at an ensuing election. This would be in the best interest of Sri Lanka.

Economic challenges & India’s role

Sri Lanka’s core challenges are economic. The political instability arises from an economic collapse brought about by poor governance and bad policies. Accordingly getting Sri Lanka’s economy back on track, of crucially making her national and especially foreign debt sustainable, all require fiscal and economic policy reforms, which only a stable government can implement. India has pretty much done the most she can, and more than Sri Lanka expected.

Lending Sri Lanka over two billion dollars in currency swaps and credit lines, India stepped into the gap created by other lenders, bilateral and multi-lateral who all stopped, when repayment became suspect. But India too has to ensure that economic reforms take place, not least so that the loans she has extended to Sri Lanka are repaid over the long term and on the concessionary term that have been provided.

(The writer is former adviser to the minister of foreign affairs, Sri Lanka)

By Harim Peiris

(Published in The Economic Times of India on the 11th July 2022)

Will go down in the annals of Sri Lanka’s history as a momentous day. On that day, in a country where schools and government offices were closed for a couple of weeks because of the lack of fuel and the lines outside fuel stations ran into several kilometers and the wait for fuel was about three days, close to 200,000 people converged at the “Gota go home” protest site on the historic Galle Face green at the city centre of Colombo. For a country of 20 million people, 1% of them on the streets of the capital city is quite formidable. From Galle Face, the protestors marched to the presidential secretariat and the President’s (former Governor General’s) house, the official office complex and residence of the head of state and government of Sri Lanka.

By early afternoon, both buildings were overrun by protestors, who overturned barricades, ignored teargas hurled by the police and security forces, to storm and take over Sri Lanka’s seat of executive power. The sheer weight of their numbers, close to perhaps 200,000 at its peak, overwhelmed the thousands of assembled police and paramilitary Special Task Force personnel. The security forces had a stark choice, either stand down or engage in a Tiananmen Square type massacre, because anything less would not have worked.

Very wisely for a military that provides troops to UN international peace keeping operations with human rights mandates and receives advance training and security cooperation from both India and the United States; as well as for a country engaging in negotiations with both the IMF and as owners of its international sovereign bonds, the option of a blood bath of civilian protestors at the centre of the capital city was never really an option.

About 80 protestors and police sustained injuries — none life threatening. The only violence that occurred happened later at night at Prime Minister Wickremasinghe’s private residence, where STF officers badly assaulted six journalists, on live TV, including a young female TV reporter of the fiercely independent News 1st TV channel. As news of the attack spread, the crowd outside the PM’s residence grew, the house was overrun and torched. The whereabouts of the President and prime minister, both of whom were evacuated earlier, is unknown.

The real question is where does Sri Lanka go from here? From Greece to Iraq, Libya to Syria, governments have lost their seats of power, and continued for some time as regimes on the run and under siege. Sri Lanka is South Asia’s oldest democracy having received universal adult franchise in 1932, only a few years after all women received the vote in Britain and, accordingly, as a nation, seem to be loath to extra constitutional means of changing governments.

Sri Lanka has never had a successful military coup and always transferred power after democratic elections, even during the height of the civil war. That the change has to come from the people power protests on the streets is actually an indictment on Sri Lanka’s institutions of democracy, which have been insufficiently robust in dealing with this national calamity.

The problem is, however, more political than institutional. It was only as recently as November 2019 and August 2020 that President Gotabaya Rajapakse received an overwhelming mandate as President and a near two-third majority in Parliament for his party, which under proportional representation was thought a near impossibility. Appalling governance and corruption almost from the start have brought Lanka to ruin.

It takes a particular kind of genius to bankrupt a country, an outcome which did not even occur during 30 years of a long drawn-out civil war. This also ironically from a mandate sought to create “vistas of prosperity and splendour”. The President has informed the Speaker of Parliament (verbally) that he intends to step down in a few days’ time and the prime minister likewise says he is ready to resign if anyone else can show he commands a majority in Parliament. Why not immediate is anybody’s guess. This is because the President’s party, even after defections, is the largest party in Parliament and the other opposition parties cannot seem to agree on a common alternative. Party leaders have proposed an interim solution, where both the President and the PM resigns and, as per the constitution, the Speaker of Parliament takes over as interim President until the Parliament elects a new President and conducts fresh elections within an agreed time frame. Would Sri Lanka’s legislators now heed the voice of the people and reach a minimum consensus on basic interim governing arrangements and crucial immediate economic reforms or fail to do so. Time as well as patience is running out.