A new wind in Colombo

These are extraordinary times in Sri Lanka. While the proportional electoral system has been in place since 1977, no single party hade secured two-thirds of the seats in the 225-member house. The National People’s Power (NPP), a centre-left outfit that has existed only since 2019 and had only three MPs in the last parliament, now has 159 — roughly 70 per cent of the legislature. Even the Rajapaksas, in their headiest years, soon after Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government ended the 26-year civil war, had fallen short of this mandate.

Back then, the Rajapaksas also had on their side the powerful Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists who, for decades, had essentially argued that while Tamils had Tamil Nadu and Muslims had the Arab world, this was the Sinhalese Buddhists’ only homeland, and that minorities should live on sufferance.

The NPP freshers now flooding into parliament, meanwhile, defy collective description by the old, racially-charged metrics. There are dyed-in-the-wool Sinhalese leftists, a Tamil trade unionist and a school principal from the northern city of Jaffna, two women from the Malaiyaha Tamil community, a young Muslim MP hailing from the largely-Sinhalese deep south — all set to be led in the house by Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, a woman with a PhD in social sciences, hailing from Colombo. This, in a nation that had largely been beset by elite and family rule since independence.

That the political consciousness that brought this mass change proliferated in 2022’s colossal protests, is almost inescapable. Though the protests had primarily been born of anti-Rajapaksa rage in the midst of a harrowing economic crisis, braided into the movement was a range of other progressive critiques. That political elites had worked in lockstep with the wealthy, to enrich both groups at the expense of regular people was one allegation. That sowing racial discord had been a long-time strategy to divide and rule ethnic groups that otherwise shared a common economic plight was another. Other questions bubbled: Why did Sri Lanka have so few women in parliament, though it boasted of having had the first elected female head of state in the world? Why was the clergy so influential?

It was easy to dismiss these ideas as mere progressive fantasies at odds with Sri Lanka’s political culture. But there are now hard electoral results. Many of the most virulent Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists shrank even from contesting in the parliamentary elections, a mix of internal polling and a general reading of the room leading them to the conclusion that people would vote for their removal. Many who did contest, lost.

This new parliament has the greatest proportion of women it has ever had (still paltry, at less than 15 per cent, but double the number in the last parliament). And NPP has outperformed the Tamil nationalist parties even in most minority-dominant regions, winning more seats in the Jaffna, Vanni, and Trincomalee districts than any other party. Partly, this is down to the traditional Tamil parties’ waning influence while Sri Lanka’s economic crisis depleted household purchasing power in regions that were already among the poorest. It also results from Tamils’ willingness to give NPP a chance, though it has done little to improve their lives yet. In that, they and the southern populace that has turned to NPP en masse, are alike.

This vote is an experiment in remaking the nation, just as it is a repudiation of establishment politics. Perhaps devolving power to minority provinces can co-exist with better living standards across the mostly-Sinhalese south. Perhaps a party largely aligned with the south, but which seeks to replace corrupt elites, can improve quality of life for minorities too. Over the past few months, there has been far less of the usual electoral rhetoric that demonises minorities. These polls have reshaped the genre, however briefly.

Early signs from the NPP are that the party understands it is merely the beneficiary of a political consciousness that centres accountability. “The people have given us this huge win because they’ve believed in us,” spokesperson Tilvin Silva told journalists. “But if we don’t hold on to the weight of that responsibility and we fail, then there is no one else to come to the rescue.”

Sri Lanka remains in the midst of an economic crisis. Child malnutrition has worsened over the past few years, while the new government and the IMF work out the details of the country’s path back from debt defaults, and the bankruptcy it declared in 2022. Sri Lanka has voted for an alternate vision, but if IMF-imposed austerity continues to suppress economic freedom in the homes of regular people, where does the country turn next? The ethno-nationalists who have held sway for a century, have not been vanquished— merely driven back. In the north and east, citizens will also rightly expect land long-held by the military to be returned to them, and for expanded language rights to be the starting point of NPP’s rule.

Steps toward a nation less riven by ethnic divisions are only tentative and yet, for the moment, ethno-religious critique against the state and the socio-economic critique have dovetailed. This is an island that, in the late 1980s, had simultaneously had Tamil nationalists fighting for a separate state in the north and east, while socialists attempted violent revolution in the southern provinces.

It’s long been argued that equality of economic opportunity is key to producing social change in Sri Lanka. But previous liberal projects have largely refused to make economic rights a component of their calls for justice.

A protest movement largely born of, and propelled by, the middle and lower-middle classes has created conditions necessary for what appears to be a more progressive, and pluralistic, government to sweep into office. If these are gains, economic wellbeing in homes across the island is critical to consolidating them.

Fernando is a Colombo-based journalist and writer