On Sunday, the Indian High Commissioner Santosh Jha called on Sri Lanka’s president-elect Anura Kumara Dissanayake to convey greetings from Prime Minister Narendra Modi no sooner than the election result emerged. Dissanayake was yet to be sworn in. Another country to congratulate Dissanayake real-time was the US. These were, no doubt, exceptional gestures. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s message came a day later, after Dissanayake was sworn in on Monday, as per protocols.
Apparently, neither New Delhi nor Washington was taken by surprise at Dissanayake’s victory. In a post on X, Jha called Sri Lanka with élan as India’s “civilisational twin”. Greetings also poured in from the Indian opposition, including Rahul Gandhi and the CPI(M). The latter hailed Dissanayake’s election victory as a historic event.
Running such a fine comb through another country’s democratic election process is most certainly unwarranted, but it has become necessary because there is such a lot of angst being expressed that Dissanayake is ‘pro-China’, that the National People’s Power coalition he leads is a Marxist alliance, that his party Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna has an ‘anti-Indian’ pedigree, and so on—none of which is wholly incorrect, of course. But simplistic notions betray a lack of awareness about the nuanced politics of Sri Lanka.
Dissanayake’s victory calls attention to the grim reality that Sri Lanka’s deep economic crisis continues to devastate lives. Much of the optimism generated by the youth-led movement known as the Aragalaya (‘struggle’ in Sinhala) two years ago that toppled the ancient regime of the Rajapaksas—a decadent political and social system characterised by absolutism, deep-rooted corruption and venality, and state terrorism—has dissipated.
Analogous to what has been happening in India, the Sri Lankan elections too were dominated by issues of caste, race and religion. But Sunday’s poll was primarily about the economy. The dull roar of a seething disenchantment with traditional politics provided its choir. One may call it, therefore, an event of compelling authenticity, not only for Sri Lanka but India as well.
Sri Lanka’s economy is unlikely to get better anytime soon. Dissanayake, a political veteran, has openly spoken about the daunting challenge facing him to meet people’s expectations of ‘change’ as they have realised that Aragalaya didn’t fundamentally usher in the transformation to progressive democracy they had hoped for, but kept turning in old grooves.
Sri Lanka’s crisis only took a new direction aggravated by the IMF conditionality. Dissanayake has been critical of the harshness of the IMF’s austerity loan conditions—the removal of social subsidies, in particular. He promised to ‘renegotiate’ the package of obligatory policy reforms, but seems open to the IMF route as such.
The geopolitical implications of IMF loans are often not properly understood. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Shakespeare’s old blowhard Polonius advised his son Laertes who was going off to college, for “borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry”—the management of one’s home.
All South Asian countries except India and Bhutan are indebted to the IMF. Pakistan is by far the biggest culprit, followed by Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Interestingly, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s message to Dissanayake touched on strengthening bilateral ties and “promoting economic growth, security, and deeper cooperation”.
Xi Jinping’s effusive message was also substantive. It recalled “mutually beneficial cooperation” and spoke of readiness to “enhance political mutual trust, facilitate more fruitful high-quality Belt and Road cooperation and make steady and long-term progress of China-Sri Lanka strategic cooperative partnership featuring sincere mutual assistance and ever-lasting friendship”.
In retrospect, the outgoing Sri Lankan president Ranil Wickremesinghe accommodated Indian investment and security considerations while advocating for economic reforms rooted in neoliberalism that allowed for smoother relations with the West than when the Rajapaksas were in power. However, the JVP’s ideological leanings align with China’s interests, although the party appears less tethered to Marxist tenets than in the past and realises the need to deal with all major powers to stabilise the economy. If the CIA’s hidden hand had indeed ensured Brazilian president Lula da Silva’s victory in the October 2022 election over Jair Bolsonaro, it only goes to show that Americans are no longer afraid of Marxists next-door.
Anyway, given his country’s dire economic and debt situation, Dissanayake will have to balance major powers like India, China and the US. He may have to contend with the China factor. All the same, the incoming government may greenlight the multi-billion-dollar project by the Adani Group for the expansion of the Colombo West International Terminal.
That, at least, is the meaning of Dissanayake’s acceptance of the invitation by the Modi government to visit New Delhi in April when he didn’t hold any official position. The discernible toning down of Dissanayake’s India rhetoric needs to be put in perspective.
Many cross-currents exist in Sri Lanka’s domestic politics. Dissanayake’s working class background—”son of a farmer and a homemaker, he worked as a tutor, sold cigarettes on trains and hawked vegetables in his village market before committing to politics”, as The New York Times portrayed him—is tempered by the steady evolution of the JVP that he helped lead to power as part of a broader coalition today, ready for bourgeois democracy.
It is drastically different from when he joined it as a violent insurgent communist movement in the early 1980s—bringing in academics and activists, putting female voices in its leadership and mobilising the youth as voters.
Historically, the JVP has been a staunchly Sinhala Buddhist party, which was supportive of the brutal war against the LTTE. It backed without hesitation the government’s rejection of calls for investigation into the war crimes. The JVP opposed the Indian Peace Keeping Force’s deployment. And its ethno-nationalist politics repudiated the 13th Amendment prescribed by India for devolution of powers to Tamil-dominated regions. But then, the Modi government has also given up prioritising the unresolved Sri Lankan Tamil question in its engagement with the interlocutors in power in Colombo.
(Views are personal)
M K Bhadrakumar | Former diplomat