LONDON, Dec 06 (IPS) – On 26 December 2004 a powerful Asian tsunami struck several coastal provinces of Sri Lanka, killing thousands of people and wildlife, devastating areas and sweeping a train full of passengers off the railway line. .
Almost 20 years later, on November 14 this year, another tsunami struck, hitting the entire country with unprecedented waves that surprised most of the 22 million people.
But this was a tsunami of another kind. To the surprise of much of the nation, it created a revolution in the post-independence political landscape and traditional forms of governance as we broke away from the corrupt old guard.
The November 14th parliamentary elections removed the long-standing ruling class and comprador capitalism of the old political parties that had dominated Sri Lankan politics since independence in 1948.
If the 2004 tsunami was natural and natural, and the damage it caused was within the country, this one was political and its impact was felt not only in neighboring nations but far away, especially in western countries, although for different reasons. .
The November election was won by a political coalition formed a few years ago, which swept away Sri Lanka’s main political parties that had dominated politics for more than 60 years. And on its way to power, it made history.
And it’s not because it won 21 of the country’s 22 states; and also because it was the first Sinhala-Buddhist party from the south of the country to win parliamentary seats in the Tamil-minority districts in the north, including the Tamil heartland of Jaffna, in the east and the heavily cultivated Tamil areas in the central hills, defeating the long-established Tamil political parties that promoted Tamil nationalist politics.
The newly elected leader who made political history in November was a left-wing coalition of small political parties, trade unions, civil society organizations and activists named National People’s Power (NPP). It threatened to remove the rotten and corrupt politics of the past and install a completely new system of politics and governance.
Today, for the first time in its history, Sri Lanka has a government led solely by a Left coalition.
The NPP that emerged as a political party in 2019, led by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, (popularly known as AKD), a former member of the former Marxist party Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP- People’s Liberation Front), which he had joined as a student, ran for president that year this year but he got less votes by 3 percent. The following year, the NPP managed to secure 3 seats in the 225-member Legislative Assembly.
Disparaged by his parliamentary opponents and critics as ‘the 3 percent’ due to his electoral non-performance in both elections, it ousted the Rajapaksa family, the country’s most powerful political family, with one sibling as president and another as prime minister. minister and the other minister of finance.
However, in a surprising turn of events that shook the country’s political establishment, a party that was ridiculed only five years earlier and dismissed as a minor nuisance has risen to the top of the administration.
The opponents of the NPP called them violent Marxists
Its relatively easy seizure of executive and legislative power in an unexpected peaceful democratic transition has reverberated in neighboring countries, some of which are facing civil unrest and unrest at home.
This is the transformation of a coalition that almost five years ago was rejected by voters as a non-political entity that has been reduced to long-standing parties with veteran leaders and politicians. When the nation woke up the next day to hear this news, it was like a fairy tale.
But history intervened between the 2019 and 2024 elections. This helped the NPP to gradually gather public support to transform the one-time Marxist party into a progressive democratic political movement, despite the fact that the former JVP was involved in armed insurgency, the second in the late 1980s, which was forced by a western-rights government that decided to end democratic tension.
While the JVP was a strong party at the center of the now emerging NPP led by Dissanayake, a progressive socialist determined to transform Sri Lanka into a people-centered democracy, the other 20-odd parties that made up the NPP were more inclined to follow Dissanayake. the idea.
In 2022, public protests against the then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa began to spread, due to his ambiguous and unthinkable policies, which led to shortages of food and household essentials such as fuel. Massive protests broke out in Colombo and protesters camped in front of the presidential secretariat in their thousands for months.
It was an opportunity for the progressive democratic NPP, which has been calling for the abolition of the executive presidency and a return to the parliamentary system, to join the ‘Aragalaya’ protest movement and establish its credentials as a people’s movement committed to ending apartheid. old order and build a new Sri Lanka.
Unable to stop the public protests, President Rajapaksa fled the country, having previously appointed his political opponent but still a member of the ruling class, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as prime minister. Wickremesinghe was later elected president by a parliamentary majority led by the Rajapaksa family, as the constitution allowed.
Wickremesinghe’s high-handed policies, supported by the military and police to quell social tensions, and his cooperation with the IMF that led to a drastic reduction and increase in poverty, promising only economic prosperity in the coming years, made people strongly opposed to his policies and dictatorship. .
Coming from a remote village in rural Sri Lanka and from a poor family living in a small house, Anura Kumara Dissanayaka, like many of his JVP and later NPP friends, is a real man of the soil, the first such leader in Sri Lanka. you ever had.
After struggling to educate himself in rural schools and later in a provincial government school, AKD nevertheless managed to enter university and graduate with a degree in physics – a rare achievement for a boy of his background.
If President Wickremesinghe had the opportunity to postpone the national elections, he would have done so, as he did in the local government elections during his interim presidency, for fear of losing the public. But the constitution stood in his way.
Seeing the large number of people who attended the public meetings of the NPP, the Wickremesinghe Government, and others who are expecting victory in the parliamentary elections, panicked. They began to label the NPP as terrorists and insurgents who were involved in armed violence and were likely to do so again. They demonized the NPP and created a bad image of a country under a totalitarian regime.
But such efforts to scare Sri Lankans and potential foreign investors have failed, due to Sri Lanka’s important political position in the busy Indian Ocean.
However, this did not stop the opponents of the NPP from calling them violent Marxists, as they forgot their past who were in charge of armed groups responsible for killing and torturing hundreds of civilians in the late 1980s.
Those who read some of the Indian media and western news reports will not forget how they branded the NPP as a Marxist state government, and continue to do so. However, more than 60 percent of Sri Lankan voters turned their backs on these nightmare ideas, whether they came from local political leaders and their trusted media, Indian or western media, who might have hoped for the return of pro-western politicians and the continuation of corrupt regimes.
They are now afraid that the NPP will go after the corrupt and bring them to court for looting government property as it has promised to do.
Although the NPP’s priority is to continue dealing with the IMF to save the economy and other issues in the country, foreign policy does not seem to be at the top of its list. But, between India and China as before, major issues lie ahead in this regard, which the NPP cannot ignore for long.
Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London at Gemini News Service. He has been a journalist in foreign media, including the New York Times and Le Monde. He was most recently Deputy High Commissioner of Sri Lanka in London
IPS UN Bureau
Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
Follow IPS News UN Bureau on Instagram
© Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
