In Sri Lanka and elsewhere, people are telling elected politicians to clean up their act or find themselves out of a job.
Supporters of National People’s Power cheer their leader and presidential candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake during a public rally in Dehiowita, Sri Lanka, 17 September 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)
This article was produced exclusively for News Decoder’s global news service. It is through articles like this that News Decoder strives to provide context to complex global events and issues and teach global awareness through the lens of journalism. Learn how you can incorporate our resources and services into your classroom or educational program.
Tired of systemic corruption, people in countries across the world have been rising up to dismantle the political systems that have long controlled their nations.
The latest upheaval came 21 September in Sri Lanka when Anura Kumara Dissanayake, leader of the National People’s Power (NPP) was elected president, becoming the first from a small village in the country’s North-Central region to become president.
In Bangladesh in July, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina sought safe refuge in India after a popular revolt. Earlier this year, in Pakistan, former Prime Minister Imran Khan was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to 14 years in prison. In Uganda and Kenya, youth have been rising up in mass protests against the government corruption that has put their nations in deep debt.
Back in 2011, endemic corruption saw the emergence of the Arab Spring. The uprisings that took place then highlighted the fractious nature of political life and relations between the people and their governments, and toppled authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
What has caught the world’s attention in Sri Lanka is that Dissanayake is a member of the Marxist-oriented People’s Liberation Front, or JVP, which was once an armed group reviled after two failed attempts to overthrow the government, once in 1971 and again in 1988-89.
The NPP formed out of the JVP with a different ideology and a social contract but their bid to contest parliamentary and presidential elections had little success. In 2019, Dissanayake garnered just 3% of the votes. But he won last month’s election with more than 42%. So what happened?
A people frustrated by corruption
Sri Lanka’s political landscape for nearly 70 years has been dominated by two parties — the United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party which has broken into several factions.
It was frustration over widespread corruption, mismanagement and abuse of power by the traditional rulers that saw Dissanayake’s NPP popularity balloon. The same example was seen in Bangladesh, where the respected Nobel laureate Mohamed Yunis now heads a temporary administration.
Political columnist Jehan Perera said that Dissanayake, more than any other candidate, represented the spirit of the ‘Aragalaya’ protest movement which called for a ‘system change’ and for new, clean faces in politics.
Underlying both these demands was the conviction that the corrupt government needed to be cleansed, he said.
“People were frustrated with the existing political systems as the system of entrenched corruption had destroyed the country,” Perera said. “A breath of fresh air was that the NPP had no connection to the two traditional parties. The NPP follows a middle path with a state and private partnership and will focus on education, health and subsidies.”
A cry for political change
Professor SD Muni, professor emeritus at the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said in a recent webinar that for the first time a third force in South Asia has challenged the hegemony of traditional political parties.
“There is a disenchantment of traditional political parties across South Asia and the popular uprising and developments in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh points in this direction,” he said in the webinar. “There has been a strong focus on majoritism in the region and a neglect of minorities and I hope Dissanayake can bridge this gap.”
Sri Lanka’s economy was shaken by an acute foreign exchange crisis in 2021-22 exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which resulted in a shortage of fuel and other essentials and led to long queues lining up for essential goods.
This forced the then-president Wickremesinghe to seek support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While the IMF’s $2.9 billion bailout package restored some normalcy, a regime of high taxes and suspension of subsidies to the poor marginalised the low-income citizens resulting in the poverty levels rising sharply.
Dissanayake has said his government will renegotiate with the IMF and ensure their policies don’t adversely impact the poorer masses.
Marxism but no mandate
Lakshman Gunasekera, a former editor and veteran journalist, believes despite the presence of many Marxists in the NPP leadership, the overall coalition does not formally espouse any Marxism.
Instead, the essence of the NPP’s programme of governance is a little more than a firm defence of the social welfare dimensions of Sri Lankan society and state. Already that is becoming apparent in the low-income-friendly measure enacted recently, he said.
Sasanka Perera, a former founding professor of sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi, said that the many people who voted for Dissanayake were not supporters of the NPP.
“Their anger and frustrations was over the abuse of power, absence of the rule of law and widespread corruption,” he said.
The NPP will need a fresh mandate at the 14 November parliamentary elections. Sri Lanka is ruled by an all-powerful presidential system of governance and a British-styled parliament. Dissanayake’s NPP, which had just three seats in the 222-seat parliament earlier, must win a parliamentary majority to rule the country, a daunting task. Traditional parties are trying to partner to represent a formidable force at the upcoming poll.
If the NPP fails to capture power in parliament, its detractors can throw out any legislation or proposal by the NPP and even impeach the president. While the president has the power to suspend parliament, Dissanayake has vowed to scrap the presidential system and give those powers back to parliament.
At the end of the day, the 21 September election in Sri Lanka was a watershed in the class struggle between the haves and the have-nots with the latter succeeding, which analysts say are lessons for the rest of South Asia.
Three questions to consider:
- Why did the people of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka choose someone new to lead their countries?
- What did the uprisings of the Arab Spring have in common with the youth protests taking place now in Kenya and Uganda?
- If you took over a corrupt government how would you go about cleaning it up?
Feizal Samath is a Sri Lankan who covered the war between Tamil Tiger guerrillas and government troops, and the leftist insurgency attempting to overthrow the government, for Reuters. A journalist for nearly four decades, he more recently has covered economic development in Sri Lanka for a newspaper in Colombo. A social activist and guitarist, Samath founded a concert series that has raised millions of rupees for children’s charities.
Read more News Decoder articles about Sri Lanka: