Comprehending the crisis, reviewing the responses

That the Sri Lankan crisis is also a crisis of ethics, morals, and norms, cross-cutting Government and Opposition, Pohottuwa and Aragalaya, is proved by the polarisation over lethal violence 

In economics, the dominant thinking embracing Government and Opposition is that globalisation is the answer and the more the better; de-globalisation is the problem and rapidly re-globalising Sri Lanka’s economy is the solution. That stridently proclaimed postulate is untenable simply because it is not reflective of contemporary reality, its dynamics, trajectory and likely future. The premise is obsolete

“One should study philosophy because…above all it teaches one the distinction between good and bad use of force” —Kautilya, Arthashastra, 2nd century BC (Penguin 1992, p 106)

Kishore Mahbubani launched his new book of essays, The Asian 21st Century, at the NUS this week. It has already had over a million readers worldwide. He sourced Asia’s spectacular success to three factors: 

(1) The weight of historical fact—except for 200 of the last 2,000 years, the world’s two largest economies have been China and India. 

(2) The high cultural premium on education. 

(3) Pragmatism as perspective, policy and practice.

The most brilliant of the stellar panel discussing the book was the Ambassador-At-Large of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry, Prof. Chan Heng Shee. A political scientist and former ambassador/Perm Rep to the UN, she emphasised that historical experience underscores the pragmatic perspective that in the hands of the government and state, “too much power” and “too little power” were both equally disastrous. She warned that these extremes would be more calamitous in the context of the coming global crisis which Tharman Shanmugaratnam has termed “The Perfect Long Storm”.

Tharman Shanmugaratnam was an outstanding Asian Finance Minister and is one of the best economic policy minds anywhere. He once told me with fond pride that he was a cousin of Jeevan Thiagarajah (currently the Northern Governor, and my old pal and neighbour from the 1980s). 

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe should put his Singaporean contacts to good use and reach out to Tharman Shanmugaratnam for an extended opinion on how Sri Lanka might weather its own Perfect Storm. 

Zero-pragmatism policy

Asian pragmatism is lacking in Sri Lanka in the responses to our national crisis. 

In politics, the neoconservative rightwing ruler clings to “too much power”, i.e., the 20th Amendment, while the liberal Opposition and the Left push for “too little power” i.e., the abolition of the executive presidential system.  

In economics, the dominant thinking embracing Government and Opposition is that globalisation is the answer and the more the better; de-globalisation is the problem and rapidly re-globalising Sri Lanka’s economy is the solution. That stridently proclaimed postulate is untenable simply because it is not reflective of contemporary reality, its dynamics, trajectory and likely future. The premise is obsolete. 

Prescriptions based on the paradigm of globalisation without borders are past their sell-by-date. This was amply clear at Davos 2022 and spotlighted by Nobel prize-winner for Economics, former chief Economist of the World Bank Prof. Joe Stiglitz:

“The World Economic Forum’s first meeting in more than two years was markedly different… a forum traditionally committed to championing globalisation was primarily concerned with globalisation’s failures…

Among the proposed responses to these problems are to…enact ‘industrial policies to increase country capacities to produce’. Gone are the days when everyone seemed to be working for a world without borders; suddenly, everyone recognises that at least some national borders are key to economic development and security.

For one-time advocates of unfettered globalisation, this volte face has resulted in cognitive dissonance, because the new suite of policy proposals implies that longstanding rules of the international trading system will be bent or broken… 

…Now that globalisation has peaked, we can only hope that we do better at managing its decline than we did at managing its rise.” (https://socialeurope.eu/getting-deglobalisation-right)

Surely any serious Sri Lankan effort at economic crisis-management and recovery must contain as a crucial component, a national economic planning mechanism and practice? Planning helped us from the glory days of Dr. Gamani Corea and Godfrey Gunatilleke to President Premadasa’s Ministry of Policy Planning and Plan Implementation (a portfolio he valued enough to retain), but I have yet to hear the Government or the main Opposition mention the term. 

Leveraging global support

If Sri Lanka is to get maximum or even sufficient support from the global economic institutions and the world economy in which the USA continues to have an edge, Gota’s gotta go and Rajapaksa rule replaced. The Chairperson of the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Bob Menendez is in no doubt: “Under the Rajapaksas, Sri Lanka has been left on the brink of financial ruin and humanitarian catastrophe…today, Sri Lankans of all backgrounds are rising up to make clear that it is time for a change.” 

No US or international official or institution is going to ignore this Wanted poster nailed by an influential US Senator, and go flat out for Sri Lanka. 

PM Wickremesinghe acquitted himself very well while being interviewed by Kruthika Pathi of the Associated Press (AP) and Palki Sharma of WION. He came across as unruffled, diplomatic, good-humoured, yet utterly lucid and soberly resolute. Already, his interviews on the Ukraine-Russia conflict a few months back showed that this time around, shorn of Mangala Samaraweera’s West-centricity, Wickremesinghe has evolved a mature, realist capacity for discerning Sri Lanka’s national interest and balancing Great (and Big) Powers, in accordance with that national interest. He has correctly noted the unwillingness of the Indian Ocean region to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and identifies Sri Lanka as standing with the South Asian consensus for autonomy.

Conceptualising the crisis

The crisis is bigger than any single political party or leader. Surviving this crisis and exiting from it requires three main things: thinking, leadership, action. Since no political party or the people’s resistance movement (‘Aragalaya’) even remotely contains all three, and the crisis is far bigger than the parliament, the presidency and the Aragalaya, it will take collective effort, joint or interactive. 

The collective predicament must be understood; the crisis must be correctly conceptualised. Our most senior political science academic was animatedly vexed (as seen on TV) that the current debate is all about the crisis being either economic or political, while it is not understood that it is social—specifically, a crisis of povertisation. 

All this reminds me of the tale of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. One could add to the list of economics, politics, and society, those of external relations, institutions, ideas, ethics and morality, but even this extended litany sees only the trees, not the wood. What is most vital to recognise and most distressing about this crisis is precisely its totality—a category the importance of which was emphasised by philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs. We are in the vortex of a complex, combined, compound crisis; what old-school Marxist political economists would call a ‘general crisis’ and the founder of Marxian political science Antonio Gramsci called an ‘organic’ crisis. 

This being so, the crisis is changing and is going to change many things, perhaps everything, before it ends, and will have to change many things or change everything in order for it to end. The question is whether we can co-manage and shape the changes, and if so, what changes we should make, in which direction and to what extent. 

To get out of this crisis to a better place than we are now, we have to see the crisis as a chance; a chance to lucidly audit and acknowledge our weaknesses and errors, a chance to make long overdue changes for the better, which includes renewing the best of the post-Independence past; a chance to build back better or at least more sustainably and wiser. 

If Sri Lanka is to get maximum or even sufficient support from the global economic institutions and the world economy in which the USA continues to have an edge, Gota’s gotta go and Rajapaksa rule replaced

Autonomisation and multipolarity

What I discern as characteristics of this stage of this crisis are (a) autonomisation and (b) political multipolarity, with autonomisation leading to political multipolarity. 

The dialectics of history are such that Gota’s unipolar order (post-20A) created hyper-centralisation which caused a crisis and generated its opposite: the end of unipolar hegemony and the rise of political multipolarity. ‘System change’, in the sense of a change in rather than of the system, a structural change rather than a change from one system to entirely another, is taking place in the form of a crack-up, thanks (firstly) to the crisis and (secondly) the Aragalaya as a state of collective consciousness. 

The Aragalaya began, in effect, in March 2022 with unconnected initiatives—the ‘Gota Go’ slogan appearing in Kotahena in early March, the candlelight vigils on suburban sidewalks, the Mirihana event of end-March—autonomous, non-party civic activism, though subsequently supplanted or eroded by the JVP, FSP and their affiliates. 

We are currently witnessing a second wave of autonomisation, this time in the formal political space: the proliferation of parliamentary ‘Independents’. It began with the SLFP and its smaller allies leaving the Government and sitting in the Opposition but not joining the existing main Opposition led by the SJB. 

It has appeared in the SJB alliance with Champika Ranawaka conspicuously de-linking. The intelligent, able, experienced, polarising and authoritarian Ranawaka seemed willing to curb his relentless, restless ego-centricity and play second fiddle to Sajith Premadasa as during the November 2019 presidential election and the founding of the SJB, but not to the ascendant neoliberal ex-UNP policy elite which has never served with Presidents or been through the Long War on the right side. 

Most recently, fissures have begun to show in the façade of the ruling party, the SLPP (‘Pohottuwa’) itself. 

Crisis of responses

The Sri Lankan crisis is also a crisis of the responses to the crisis. It is a crisis of thought, leadership and action, taken separately and certainly together. 

No single formation or political space contains the triad thought-leadership-action. Worse: when one takes each of these domains separately, no political formation or social space contains all or even a sufficiency of ‘thinking’ or ‘leadership’ or ‘action’. Not the Government, the Opposition or the Aragalaya; not the centre-right (which covers both Government and main Opposition) nor the Left (JVP, FSP). 

The distribution of thought, leadership and action is markedly uneven but shows a spatter pattern, in a welcome transcendence of party-political lines. 

I would describe thought as a fusion of analysis, ideas and discourse. I observe quite diverse interventions of intelligence and ideas. 

They include Sajith Premadasa’s welcome return to (social democratic) form in a recent TV interview ‘Ilakkaya’; Champika Ranawaka’s advocacy of a two-track strategy for recovery including a more national-centric Track B, in case Track A, the IMF option, fails to materialise in time or falls far short; Tharaka Balasuriya’s suggestion that the Army be granted State lands up to 5 acres per farm and deployed as the main force or vanguard in a massive cultivation war; and Dullas Alahapperuma’s humanistic reflections in his condolence remarks on the lynched parliamentarian.

The crisis is bigger than any single political party or leader. Surviving this crisis and exiting from it requires three main things: thinking, leadership, action. Since no political party or the people’s resistance movement (‘Aragalaya’) even remotely contains all three, and the crisis is far bigger than the parliament, the presidency and the Aragalaya, it will take collective effort, joint or interactive

Dullas and SLPP-reformists

Things may improve on the thinking-ideas-discourse front with a new political initiative under the leadership of Dullas Alahapperuma, whose intelligence, progressivism and decency make him a consistent personification of a new political culture and always imparted a Teflon coating to him even at this time when all politicians are reviled. 

The emerging reformist project from within the Pohottuwa illustrates the tendency to autonomisation and growing political multipolarity. Soon, the largest single formation in Parliament may turn out to be a third vector of ‘non-aligned’ reformist-centrists belonging neither to the Gota-led Rajapaksa camp nor the post-UNP centre-right liberal Opposition.

What the generalisation of autonomisation reveals is that the dominant political formations and their solutions are inadequate not merely to answer but more basically, to keep pace with the unfolding crisis and the unravelling of Sri Lanka. Where this autonomisation will stop or the final form it will take, if there is one, is as yet unknown and unknowable. As Mervyn de Silva, my father, wrote during the intense crisis of the late 1980s, the patterns are ‘kaleidoscopic’.

Crisis of ethics and civilisation

That the Sri Lankan crisis is also a crisis of ethics, morals, and norms, cross-cutting Government and Opposition, Pohottuwa and Aragalaya, is proved by the polarisation over lethal violence. There are three currents of opinion. 

Firstly, those who oppose the violent attack on MynahGoGama and GotaGoGama on the morning of 9 May which fortunately did not lead to any deaths, but remain silent or tacitly justify the retaliatory violence of the second half of the day, leading into the early hours of the next morning, which led to more deaths (9-10 killed) than inflicted by Police shooting during the Hartal of August 1953 (8 killed). 

The mob attack with clearly murderous intent, on Temple Trees on 9 May night, aimed at Mahinda Rajapaksa, lasted many hours until pre-dawn on 10 May and was just around the corner from Galle Face Green, making deniability implausible. The man had already resigned earlier that day after the morning’s provocative fiasco by his hardcore followers and the instant counter-attack. He was no despot clinging to power who had to be violently ousted with petrol bombs and slaughtered like Muammar Gaddafi. 

No Aragalaya, JVP-JJB or FSP personality has yet denounced the attacks on Kumar Welgama and Sajith Premadasa. Welgama who wanted Gota to go home years before GotaGoGama, may never fully recover, and if not for the superb professionalism of the STF, the Opposition Leader could have been murdered or maimed on Galle Face Green. 

The argument that the violence was initiated by the Mahinda Rajapaksa camp is absolutely correct. But the justification or brushing over of the lethal violence of the second half of the day on the grounds that the MR camp began the day’s violence which triggered the retaliation, is exactly the argument used by those who sought to brush over or tacitly excuse the anti-Tamil pogrom of Black July 1983 on the grounds that the LTTE killed 13 soldiers. 

The legal and (originally) theological theory of Just War—founded by Saints Ambrose, Augustine and Aquinas, and developed by Hugo Grotius—established that the use of lethal violence cannot be exclusively justified by reference to the justice of the cause (‘jus ad bellum’) but is also measured by the justice of the means, including the criteria of proportionality (‘jus in bello’). And yet, members of the academic, legal and religious fraternities seem to have completely forgotten this framework with its normative parameters and firewalls.

Secondly, there is the opposite (governmental) camp, those who condemn the Aragalaya and rail against the burning of houses and the lynching of persons, but fail to acknowledge, apologise for and condemn the original attack by their side on MynahGoGama and GotaGoGama, which triggered the massive retaliatory violence. 

Thirdly, there are those who broadly support the Aragalaya and condemn both the morning’s unprovoked violence and the retaliatory massacre by lynch-mobs. Sadly, very few have articulated such a correct position (Michelle Bachelet being one). 

The JVP and FSP haven’t been able to overcome their seemingly congenital defects: 

Firstly, the inability to grasp the core philosophical issue which master-strategist Kautilya (Chanakya) identified in Arthashastra as “the good and bad use of force”. 

Secondly, the inability or unwillingness to correct and control their members, be they in the Central Committee or the grassroots, in the matter of the use of force, especially lethal force. 

Thirdly, the inability or unwillingness to make a self-criticism and rectification of this abiding deficit (which led them to two crushing defeats). 

Thus, the dark side of their history always casts a shadow.