Early elections or another Aragalaya

A re-awakened Aragalaya is almost inevitable for several reasons, political, economic and social

Following the SLFP and the 9-party alliance came the most significant fissure, from the heart of the SLPP: the decision dramatically announced by SLPP Chairman, former Foreign Minister, Finance Minister and Minister of External Trade, Prof. G.L. Peiris, that a group of 12 MPs, including Dullas Alahapperuma, Charitha Herath and Nalaka Godahewa, henceforth constituted itself an independent group sitting in the Opposition.

The ruling party the SLPP is losing Cooperative Society elections to the SJB, and that’s always been a key indicator—such as when the UNP and SLFP were on their way out, the Rajapaksas were on their way back and the SLPP was on its way up. The ruler, Wickremesinghe hasn’t won a popular vote in seven years and was rejected utterly a mere two years ago, in 2020. Thus, an alliance of the most unpopular politician and most unpopular party rule this deeply democratic country with its recently restive, radicalised society. President Wickremesinghe should be walking as in a mine-field, but his Budget showed that he is not. How long can this last? How can it last?  

If you take the past quarter-century, or just the 21st century, no ruler or Government lasts two-and-half to three years in the middle of an intense economic crisis. Everywhere that a deep economic crisis prevails, the single common feature is the inevitability of elections. Crises even less intense than that of Sri Lanka tend to chew through successive governments. 

Elections don’t solve the crisis but let out steam, prevent a catastrophic explosion, bring in an administration with a greater measure of mass consent and enable the crisis to be tackled. Examples abound from Greece to Chile to Lebanon. Why would anyone in their right mind think that Sri Lanka, with its deeply electoral ethos, could be different? 

Advance presidential election

I endorse but am not echoing the JVP-JJB’s and SJB’s calls for an early parliamentary election while remaining silent over a presidential election. Their strange logic seems to be that as they are for the abolition of the executive presidency, they do not wish to call for an early presidential election. This is quite beyond me. Even to abolish the presidential system, the post of President has to be won, occupied, and liberated from its present unelected incumbent. 

As for the FSP’s valuable suggestions for a new Constitution embedding organs of popular participation and power parallel to representative indirect democracy (Parliament), how can this be achieved except through an election, a new Parliament and a Constituent Assembly? It cannot be achieved before an election by a second Aragalaya putting pressure on this reactionary Parliament.

Even if the SJB or JVP-JJB win a parliamentary election and the people take to the streets in massive numbers demanding the abolition of the presidential system, President Ranil Wickremesinghe who is also the Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief, and his political patron, the Rajapaksa clan, will have no compunction in ordering live ammunition to be used. 

He will rule according to the same formula that the militarist, religious, avowedly Hitlerite Right publicly proposed in 2020 to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa: run the country with the military; there is no need for Parliament. That proto-fascist project will trigger the Third Civil War. 

The only way to obtain the level of stability needed for economic reform and recovery is a declared and firmly fixed date for an early Presidential and Parliamentary election. The 22nd Amendment gives the chance for changes to be made which permit this. That is the last chance to open the safety-valves. If it is lost, then all bets are off as the crisis deepens, widens, accelerates. 

An early presidential election is imperative because President Wickremesinghe has a crisis of legitimacy though not legality. Nobody elected him the country’s leader and nobody elected him to Parliament in the first place. An utterly fraught situation at any time, in the aftermath of a massive civic uprising and against the backdrop of an unprecedented economic crisis, the status-quo is a formula for catastrophe. 

President Wickremesinghe hoped to plug his popularity deficit with an all-parties administration, but failed to understand that it imperatively requires confidence-building measures. He vaporised his chances of such an administration because he did exactly the opposite and launched an outrageous campaign of repression. 

If he wanted to keep the Rajapaksas and their SLPP support on board, he could have limited the scale and scope of the crackdown to those who engaged in violent actions (arson, lynching). Such a surgical crackdown should have been under the normal law. He should never have invoked the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), and that too against a popular leader of the university students’ movement. But he has done all that and made his continued incumbency even more of a liability from the perspective of systemic stability than it already was. 

“Who better than Ranil to handle the economy?” goes the counter-argument. That is beside the point. If someone isn’t allowed on board a plane because he/she lacks COVID-free certification, it isn’t a condemnation of a person’s ability to do a job. It is that he/she poses a risk. Ranil Wickremesinghe may or may not be the best person for the job, but he should not be undertaking it without the necessary certification of popular consent, which alone confers legitimacy.

Legitimacy is more important than legality. Slavery, colonialism, apartheid, segregation, were all legal in their day. Apartheid and segregation existed in my lifetime and were criminalised only decades ago. All these horrors were legal but not legitimate. Legitimacy is a moral-ethical question. It is not, however, an abstract one. The Sri Lankan citizenry is far more likely to vomit out ‘bitter medicine’ when forced down their collective throat by someone not of their choice, someone they never consented to. 

No Ranil rescue

The contention that the Wickremesinghe presidency is good for the economy had two large holes blown in it, due to a recent decision. It is the new list of an overnight (Gotabayan) ban on a large number of imported goods. 

In a strong indictment at a televised media briefing, Tania Abeysundara, Chairperson of the Sri Lanka United National Business Alliance slammed the policy move which she pointed out would have devastating multiple effects. 

“…she said the decision was taken without considering the sub contents listed under the HS product codes.

…SMEs make up a large part of Sri Lanka’s economy, accounting for 80% of all businesses.

These are found in all sectors of the economy, primary, secondary and tertiary and provide employment for persons of different skills, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled.

SMEs are an essential source of employment opportunities and are estimated to contribute about 35% of employment. The SMEs play an important role in promoting inclusive growth.

…Therefore, the government should revoke the gazette and re-impose the import limitations after discussions, the Chairperson said. “Nearly 4.5 million workers belong to 4,500 SMEs will fall on to the streets for not being able to pay their workers’ wages.

…With the ban on raw materials, most of the companies and industries are facing the threat to close down the business and the above number of employees will have to suffer, the Chairman added.”

Chairperson Tanya Abeysundara also indicted the Government for its unilateralism. “There’s a forex crisis and we have proposed various solutions to attract dollars, but the government has taken decisions on its own.” She was supported by several other business personalities at the presser. (Business community affected by import restrictions - YouTube)

The second blow (so far) came from the vital IT sector. 

“The Federation of Information Technology Industry Sri Lanka (FITIS) yesterday cautioned that there is a serious danger of technological platforms in the country breaking down due to the government’s import ban on IT devices and peripherals due to the dearth of dollars prevailing in the country at present…FITIS is a collection of united organizations dedicated to the advancement of information and communications technology industry in Sri Lanka and is the apex body of ICT industry in the country...”

So much then for the economic turnaround which President Ranil Wickremesinghe can allegedly achieve as no other can. His policy moves are punching holes below the waterline of the economy. 

The Aragalaya will re-awake 

A re-awakened Aragalaya is almost inevitable for several reasons, political, economic and social.

Political: Classic democratic revolutions aim for the overthrow of tyranny and the achievement of political liberty. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was overthrown because he was behaving like a tyrant when he ruined the country’s agriculture, having armed himself with the 20th Amendment. At least he was elected and started out with a vast popular base, thereby lasting half his term. Structurally, Ranil Wickremesinghe is a tyrant or despot because he has no popular mandate whatsoever and yet enjoys all the power granted to a person who wins a majority of the island’s voters. Illogically, he expects to last 2½ years in office without an electoral mandate, which is quite as long (or short) as Gotabaya Rajapaksa did with one. Political liberty means having a leader that the people have chosen. Sri Lankans are long-accustomed to such a political order but have just been deprived of it. It is wildly irrational to assume that they will acquiesce in this grotesque distortion.

Economic: Instead of a sweeping streamlining/rationalisation of the management of State enterprises, President Wickremesinghe’s Budget aims to eliminate the State sector of the economy and the legal superstructure (TEWA) that protects working people. It will prove profoundly polarising and de-stabilising, generating blowback.

Social: Sri Lanka which punched well above its income in worldwide social indicators, is according to UNICEF, now the 6th worst in the world and the 2nd worst in South Asia in child malnutrition. The starvation of State universities of funds; slashing the State sector option for employment while foreign universities are encouraged and the Kotelawela Defence University proliferates; the transfer of strategic national economic assets to big corporates, local and foreign—all signal the unleashing of an unprecedented social counterrevolution shredding the Social Contract which has prevailed since Independence. The Wickremesinghe Budget’s covert class warfare will be resisted by the people.  

The return of the Aragalaya with the struggle of the working people as the motor of development, cannot be prevented by suppression of the FSP, the JVP-JJB, the IUSF or the Trade Union movement. 60,000 State employees were sacked, the left-led trade union movement crippled, and the IUSF banned by the UNP Government of the 1980s of which Ranil Wickremesinghe was a Minister. As Dr. Newton Gunasinghe emphasised at the time, this mass sacking (of which Minister Wickremesinghe was a robust defender, refusing to reinstate the strikers in institutions under his purview) did not prevent but rather enabled a violent insurrection by removing the crucial intermediate social organisations, the established trade unions and students associations. There was no buffer; no interlocutors for the State to dialogue with. 

Thinking the Aragalaya   

Most retrospectives about the Aragalaya and prescriptions for its future seem to lack a capacity for ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’; the ‘conjuncture’. 

I was part-appalled, part-amused to read an essay on the Aragalaya and ‘activist-intellectual’ trends and tasks, posted as late as mid-August by an emeritus political science academic, which does not once mention any of the synonymous terms ‘military’, ‘armed forces’, ‘army’, ‘security forces’ or ‘defence ministry’, i.e., the repressive core of the State. 

None of the analyses focus on the turning point in the correlation of contending forces; the moment of the Aragalaya’s folly, when the ‘Thermidorian’ counter-revolution became possible. 

The military and the demonstrators showed visible signs of fraternisation on 9 July, the zenith of the Aragalaya, but that dramatically changed on the night of 13 July with the needless march on Parliament (the FSP/IUSF were uninvolved and absent) and the dangerous street-skirmish with the Army causing injuries to several soldiers as electricity was somehow suddenly cut off to the area (facilitating agent-provocateurs and possible ‘false-flag’ action). That night as the photographs of the injured soldiers circulated with the old ‘roaring lion’ revengeful rhetoric, the military snapped-back into compliance, and by the next morning the power-compact between Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Rajapaksa Clan, and the Deep State was sealed.

Concentrating almost exclusively on the form of the State— “abolish the Executive Presidency!”—the Aragalaya forgot or ignored the character, content and composition of the State, with the military as its hard-drive. 

The Aragalaya suffered from a utopian-idealist deviation while its real enemies, waiting in the wings, were materialist-Realists. The Aragalaya failed to calculate the correlation of forces. Ranil, the Rajapaksas and the re-grouping Right were tougher-minded ‘materialists’ while the Leftists in the Aragalaya were philosophical ‘idealists’ who ignored the materiality of the armed forces. True, the Aragalaya was a mass, material and kinetic force, but, given the absence of structure, it was not more of a material force than the structured, permanent military—and that miscalculation made the moment of victory unsustainable. 

Having won a dramatic victory with the ouster of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Aragalaya suffered a strategic political defeat with the Constitutional coup or parliamentary putsch which installed Ranil Wickremesinghe as President. Had the Movement propelled Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa to take the Prime Ministership after 9 May, representing its agenda and with its back-up outside Parliament, the Wickremesinghe outcome of July could’ve been avoided. 

The elan vital of the Aragalaya collapsed not because the middle-class defected but because the Movement was politically outmanoeuvred. It could be politically outmanoeuvred even after the victory of displacing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, because it had a deficient and defective reading of politics, political strategy and ‘the political’. 

Today’s tasks, tomorrow’s struggle

The biggest adversary of the democratic people’s movement is the power-bloc of an unelected President, a revanchist-restorationist Rajapaksa Clan, the (Gotabayan) Defence bureaucracy, the Defence contractors and the military brass. The primary political task of the people’s struggle is to restore the democratic republic and neutralise the dictatorial impulse. That requires the triune strategy prescribed by Nicos Poulantzas, the finest Marxist political theorist after Antonio Gramsci: struggles against the state, struggles within the state, struggles at a distance from the state. 

The task is not primarily of debating varying forms of state or modes of democracy – the “recipes for the cookshops of the future” which Marx rejected. 

The blunder of 13 July and the Ranil-Rajapaksa counter-revolution was possible because of the absence of a unified or coordinated tripartite political vanguard containing the leaderships of the three formations in the Aragalaya: the non-partisan civic activists, the IUSF-FSP and the SYU-JVP-JJB. There was no strategic coordination, and grossly insufficient tactical and organisational coordination. That remains the case. 

The burden of intellectual-ideational responsibility is to focus on “creating a system of alliances which allows it [the Left] to mobilise the majority of the population” (Gramsci), i.e., the problems of the United Front. It is imperative to draft the platform of the United Front, centring on a progressive macroeconomic alternative to the crisis.