On your Marx, Sri Lanka

Cloaks, daggers and conspiracies swirl around every election in Sri Lanka. Will there be violence between militant monks and woke peaceniks? Will politicians stepping out of gleaming limos have eggs hurled at them? Will the “Foreign Hand” (read India) ‘ensure’ that its own “favourite” candidate is elected? And will the next ocean swell drown the corrupt villains of the “Establishment” and bring working-class Sri Lankans the elusive change they yearn for?Saturday’s high tide did just that. Sri Lankans swung to the extreme left by voting Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a man with a squeaky clean reputation and of humble origins, to their country’s highest office. The 55-year-old is popularly known as AKD and will likely be sworn in soon.The former students’ union leader heads the Marxist-Leninist communist party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), an organisation with a bloody and chequered past. It twice attacked the Sri Lankan state and instigated riots in which thousands were killed. In the late 1980s, it rebelled against the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord and the India-authored 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution that envisages devolution to Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority-dominated north and east.It is to Dissanayake’s credit that despite having only three seats in Sri Lanka’s 225-seat parliament, he managed to stitch together a mantle of respectability to shield JVP’s reputation, nine years ago: a broad coalition called National People’s Power (NPP) consisting of activists, student leaders and women’s rights crusaders. That the disparate nature of NPP mirrors the motley crew known as the Aragala movement — the poets, intellectuals, activists, student leaders, university professors and bards — who had pitched a tent-camp in protest outside the parliament, when Sri Lanka went broke two years ago, is no coincidence. Then as now, NPP’s main fight is against corruption, nepotism, disastrous policies and reckless spending by the political establishment that was responsible for the economic collapse in 2022. Given the JVP’s controversial history, it is also no coincidence that the rowdy vandalism that followed those peaceful demonstrations of guitars and fairy lights, was blamed on the party: the president’s official residence was ransacked, and the private home of Ranil Wickremesinghe, the current president who will soon hand over charge to Anura Dissanayake, was burnt to cinders.Still, rally after NPP rally in the previous weeks was awash with the party colour pink — a milder shade of red, an obvious attempt to tone down the image of JVP. And though AKD has sworn to rework a debt restructuring programme negotiated by the outgoing president, cut taxes and promise other populist measures, he has been pragmatic enough to realise that he cannot do all that without taking International Monetary Fund (IMF) — a delegation is due in Sri Lanka in two weeks — and various other donors, including India, into account.AKD is expected to be ideologically closer to China, Sri Lanka’s largest investor and creditor, whose chokehold of debt on Sri Lanka, its BRI partner country, has emboldened it to make frequent naval forays into Sri Lankan waters and threaten India’s regional security. On the other hand, AKD’s trip to New Delhi at the latter’s invitation earlier this year, set tongues wagging across Sri Lanka that India had found its ‘yes’ man in Colombo.“The international community and our region will want Sri Lanka to have a stable economy. The Wickremesinghe govt did the preliminary work, but a lot remains,” says Prasad Kariyawasam, former envoy to India and US. “Sri Lanka needs a leader who can take tough decisions, but ensure that the pain of restructuring is shared by everyone, not just the most vulnerable sections of society.”Jehan Perera, director of Sri Lanka’s leading think tank, National Peace Council (NPC), points to how incomes have shrunk drastically over the past years among poor Sri Lankans. It is their deep-seated desire for change, he says, that is reflected in Saturday’s vote.“People feel that NPP will deliver change and eradicate corruption, because it has the fewest vested interests,” says Perera. “And that the Marxist-oriented JVP will focus on the poor. But there is the possibility of another collapse, and that concerns me. For all its good intentions, will NPP deliver?”Anura Dissanayake seems devoid of guile, and therein lies his appeal. He speaks well and humbly, with none of the arrogance and pompousness displayed by some of the candidates towards both the general public and the international media, which had travelled to Sri Lanka to cover the election.But Anura has no silver tongue, no smooth-talking skills: crafts required at global negotiating tables, especially when the international spotlight is on China’s close ally Sri Lanka, a country located at the cross-roads of crucial shipping lanes, right in the middle of Indian Ocean.Grey clouds that had hovered on the firmament when counting began, lifted to a bright, pink Sunday. President-elect Dissanayake will have to deliver. If not, another tent-village, but this time devoid of his own supporters, will spring up outside his office window and hound him out, as happened with the leadership in 2022, in search of that ever-elusive “change”.The writer is a foreign correspondent and author of Sri Lanka: The New Country.