Neil DeVotta
Sri Lanka’s 2024 elections have ushered in a seismic shift, with Anura Kumara Dissanayake (often known by his initials ‘AKD’) of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) becoming president in September 2024 and the JVP-led National People’s Power (NPP) alliance winning a parliamentary supermajority in November 2024. The two elections represent a political realignment, empowering a new class of elites while marginalising long-dominant politicians.
The Marxist-Leninist JVP was responsible for two bloody insurrections in 1971 and 1987-89 that killed tens of thousands of Sri Lankans. This violent past was long an electoral albatross, but creating the NPP alliance with twenty other groups helped transform the JVP into a more conventional left-leaning party.
AKD’s winning personality and articulate, rational discourse held sway over now former Sri Lankan president Ranil Wickremesinghe and Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa in the presential election. Educated professionals who contested for the NPP in the parliamentary election further softened the JVP’s prior radical image. The splintered opposition also helped.
But the main reason for AKD’s and the NPP’s victories was the island’s bankruptcy. The alliance effectively linked the resulting economic crisis to the corruption, nepotism and impunity of previous regimes and promised more accountable and transparent governance.
Systemic change requires that Sri Lanka’s political structure and political culture must now be transformed. The NPP has promised a new constitution, which could appreciably change the political system. But transforming the political culture would require weakening ethnocracy in ways that may sideline powerful constituencies like the military and Buddhist clergy. A new political culture would also require accountability for crimes committed by security personnel — often hailed as war heroes —against Tamils, journalists and detractors of the former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family.
No comments:
Post a Comment