Setting all family-based traditions of political domination to a side, the election of the ‘relatively unknown’ 55-year-old Anura Kumar Dissanayake (AKD) of the JVP (People’s Liberation Front)-led NPP (National People’s Power), as Sri Lanka’s President comes as a true serendipitous surprise. He is that — relatively unknown — in more senses than one. Though ‘around’ for decades in Sri Lanka politics as a Marxist politician schooled in the radical Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP), and a cabinet Minister (2004-05) in Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s coalition government, AKD has swum below the radars of most Lanka-watchers. But he is ‘relatively unknown’ also in the important sense (important all over South Asia but particularly so in Sri Lanka) of being ‘unknown as a relative’ or kin descended from a political family.
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Of all early analyses that I have come across of AKD’s dramatic victory, the most insightful is one from an acute observer of Lankan affairs from the perch of Tamil Lanka but not a ‘standard political columnist’, Sivanandini Duraiswamy. The Jaffna-based littérateur who is, whether or not so in a formal sense, a sociologist, sums up the scene in a note that is a nugget of fact and comment: “The mandate if any was against what Mao Ze Dong termed ‘the decadence of the state, the sufferings of humanity and the darkness of society’. It was in reaction to International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity and the extravagant recklessness of the Colombo elite. It represented a paradigm shift where a monolingual outsider who belonged to a party that rose in revolt twice in 1971 and in 1987-89 [resulting in the deaths of 80,000 Sinhalese youth] is now at the helm. Further, AKD is not from the dominant Sinhalese Govigama caste from which all 15 Heads of Government, except one, belonged to in our 75-year post-independence history. That is itself a significant achievement. He is likeable, self-made and charismatic.”
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Having given AKD his rightful due, she goes on to explain some of the interstices of the AKD phenomenon. Chief among these, in my re-telling of those with my added observations, are the following:
The vote and challenges
AKD’s dramatic win must be seen with the hard realities he must face. Foremost of these is plainly political: If 42% of the electorate has voted for him, 58% voted for others in a scattered way but decisively against him. This large non-AKD if not anti-AKD majority comprises the huge chunk of Sinhala majority voters who voted in ‘old UNP’ style for the two former ‘UNPer’s the second-in-the-race, Sajith Premadasa, son of the late Prime Minister R. Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe, taken together. This AKD-negative chunk includes also, almost the entirety of the Tamil electorate in the nation’s 10 non-Sinhala majority districts in the north, east and the central highlands.
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This means that AKD has to not just consolidate his own Left-inclined and Left-supporting Sinhala support base but seek support from non-Left Sinhala and Tamil Lanka as well. If AKD is to form a stable government he has to do so with his own JVP and NPP MPs and others. The most logical and, in Sri Lanka, the tried-and-tested way of doing this would be through the coalition path. Or through ‘outside support’ — ever tenuous.
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The next biggest challenge is financial. AKD has to meld his tare of past ideological positions with the hard reality of Sri Lanka’s dependence on IMF funding. How he will be able to convince his support base — his ‘bread and butter’ — about the inevitability of the self-denying austerity regimen that comes as the price for IMF funding, remains to be seen. If Ranil Wickremesinghe was judged and judged out in under two years, AKD will have a tighter calendar to work within. If Sri Lanka’s polity is a minefield, its political economy is an all-but dry lake. Early reports suggest that AKD will negotiate, not scrap, the Ranil government’s convergences with the IMF. If AKD holds deliberations with the outgoing President’s economic team, that could lead to calibrated increments in decision making. Ranil Wickremesinghe may have made political misjudgements, especially in his more-than-generous handling of the Rajapaksa order. But his grasp of economic affairs is not a resource to be lightly disregarded.
The third and from India’s point of view, a very serious challenge to AKD’s Leftward mindscape is the ideological voltage which will be directed to it from China. Even if one were to disregard the speculation about China having played a financial role in AKD’s election campaign, one cannot be over-cautious about Beijing’s reflexive leverage over any government in Colombo. Within touching adjacency to India, the emerald isle shares with its immediate neighbour all the frictions proximity brings. Sri Lanka’s distant but deep oceanic heave with China is without the frictions that proximity brings. If IMF funding spells uneasy austerities in the short term, Chinese support cannot but script risky promissory notes in the long term.
Renewal of the democratic voice
AKD cannot do better than remember a defining question that the great Lankan Marxist asked of those pressing for ‘Sinhala only’ politics in Parliament in 1956. “Do you want two languages and one nation, or one language and two nations?” On how AKD navigates the language and religious fissures of his country depends on the veracity and validity of his leadership. In this the experience of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge in proposing federal and devolution principles to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and other Tamil political formations can be instructive for him. Let me say, with welcome admiration, that I found this statement of AKD’s at his inauguration nothing less than redemptive: “Democracy helped me win. Some voted for me, and others didn’t. But my pledge is to work hard to win the trust of those who didn’t vote for me as well.”
In her note dated September 24, 2024, Sivanandini Duraiswamy gives the optically gratifying and synoptically telling news that “(AKD) took a needed first step. He visited a Hindu Temple in Kandy today to receive a rapturous welcome.” Bravo, is what I would say to that, bravo AKD.
An outstanding former Indian diplomat, Ramu Damodaran, recently drew my attention to a new play, ‘Counting and Cracking’ by Lankan playwright S. Shakthidharan which is said to be currently ‘dazzling’ New York audiences. Anand Giridharadas, founder editor of The.Ink online journal, has interviewed Shakthidharan, where he says: “I think the best way to strengthen democracy after realizing how fragile it is — rather than being terrified by that — is to listen deeply to the truths of people who are different to us and to find ways to agree to disagree.”
Scepticism in the shape of hard-knocked realism marks India’s general attitude to its neighbours. But at this point of time, India needs to view the AKD phenomenon with faith in the self-renewing power of the democratic voice. The internal gravitas of the AKD-led government will necessarily have to be ideological, its external outreach will need to be empirical. But its link with India, which has internal and external dimensions will have to be what they have always been and will always be: umbilical.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former High Commissioner of India to Sri Lanka
Published - September 30, 2024 01:18 am IST
