Ranil’s rule: Recipe for revolution?

President Ranil Wickremesinghe 

Ranil, the Rajapaksas, the military/ex-military brass and a clutch of corporate chieftains constitute a recomposed and reinforced regime that seeks to offset huge deficits of popularity and legitimacy, with manipulation and ruthlessness. It is highly probable that the new President intends a pre-emptive strike to coercively atomise the Aragalaya and the Left, or provoke them into militant rebellion which can be used to trigger a military counterrevolution, before he implements an aggressive austerity package

The Ranil Wickremesinghe presidency began with the assault on the Aragalaya protestors. It was an attack of choice, not of necessity. 

That start signals the trajectory. Just as its predecessor, the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration, Ranil’s presidency too will not end well, because it cannot, having been precluded by its own choice from doing so.  

The Ranil regime was born with congenital birth defects and its first moves should have been to compensate for those defects. Instead, it chose to accentuate them. 

The most glaring defect and deficit is that an unpopular political personality has assumed governmental and state power by means other than a popular election of any sort. Prime Minister D.B. Wijetunga who succeeded to the presidency without a popular election and by unanimous choice of Parliament upon the assassination of President Premadasa, was a legislator by virtue of the fact that he had been elected (handsomely) at the last held Parliamentary election. He had won at the previous General Election too.

President Wickremesinghe’s pathway, devoid of a popular mandate, is therefore devoid of the legitimacy – as distinct from constitutional legality—that can derive only from it. His is an abnormal Presidency.

One would have thought that a new President who owed his anomalous accession to presidential office to the youth-led popular uprising known as the Aragalaya (‘the Struggle’) would be especially grateful and sensitive to youth opinion and have sought to cultivate it.  One would have thought that a President who was awaiting maximum support from the IMF would be wary of projecting any negative international image on governance issues

Aragalaya and occupy

Ranil’s political backstory is a chronicle of chronic unpopularity. He ran for the presidency twice and lost. He was Prime Minister six times but only two of those six was by a parliamentary election. On the two occasions he was elected to the Prime Ministership, he was never returned at the next election; always defeated. Between the two terms he served as elected PM, there was a 15-year gap. On the last occasion he was PM, his tenure concluded with his 75-year-old party electing zero representatives to Parliament.

One would have thought that a new President who owed his anomalous accession to presidential office to the youth-led popular uprising known as the Aragalaya (‘the Struggle’) would be especially grateful and sensitive to youth opinion and have sought to cultivate it. 

One would have thought that a President who was awaiting maximum support from the IMF would be wary of projecting any negative international image on governance issues.

But the Ranil presidency began with hundreds of men in uniform assaulting unarmed, non-violent protestors in a pre-dawn raid. This was an act of gratuitous brutality because in the days before, the protestors had already vacated the Prime Minister’s residence and the President’s House mainly at the request of the Bar Association (BASL), had pulled down the black flags and banners adorning the Presidential Secretariat the previous day, and had announced their withdrawal from the Presidential Secretariat at 2 p.m. on the day they were savagely beaten. What the world saw through the lenses of the international media, cannot be unseen. 

There is a counterproductive witch-hunt underway. Young Aragalaya activist Dhaniz Ali was forcibly arrested on board a SriLankan Airlines flight. Invited into the Rupavahini TV studios on 9 July as a representative of the Aragalaya demonstrators who had marched there despite the heavy military presence, he delivered a dissident message in purely pacifist ‘guerrilla theatre’. (I recall ORTF, the French state TV supporting the student revolutionaries in May 1968.) On board the Air Lanka plane, the young activist was cheered and the arrest by the CID and Police denounced by passengers, who used it to inform the world that “it is not democracy we now have in Sri Lanka”. 

President Ranil’s demonisation of the protests echoed President Trump’s denunciation of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. 

Furthermore, his ridiculous rebuttal of diplomatic concern referenced the 6 January attack on the Capitol. As a torrent of footage showed, those who stormed the Capitol (many with separatist Confederate, KKK and neo-Nazi flags) were lethally armed; a Policeman was killed and others injured; the Congress was in session and prominent representatives were sought with murderous intent. 

This bears no resemblance whatsoever to the occupation of state buildings by the Aragalaya, inspired by the Occupy Movement in the USA, replicated worldwide including in Spain in 2011. Their precursor was the “sit-ins” of the 1960s in the USA. The hundreds of thousands of visitors, mostly families, that stayed patiently in line to tour the peacefully-occupied state buildings in Colombo and picnic on their lawns, proved what a cathartic, liberating experience these occupations were. 

Just as its predecessor, the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration, Ranil’s presidency too will not end well, because it cannot, having been precluded by its own choice from doing so

Rightwing realignment 

Perhaps Ranil did it to firm up a compact with the gung-ho defence bureaucracy, the retired and serving military brass, the military contractors, and the hawkish SLPP majority: the hardcore Gota constituency. A President without popularity needs props. 

More broadly, however, it was a marriage of the ideologically compatible. It is a realignment of Sri Lankan politics through the intertwining of two strands of the neoconservative Right.  

Gotabaya spent 15 years with the rightwing Republicans of California, and a few years in Sri Lankan politics. As President, his catastrophic tax-cuts were from the Reaganite ‘supply-side’ playbook of Arthur Laffer.  

The young SLPP hawks grew loyal to the avowedly Trumpian President Gotabaya, and internalised his ideology. 

Ranil Wickremesinghe was always aligned organisationally with the US Republicans and especially its Right (from Reaganomics to George W. Bush). 

Sir John was the hardline rightwing successor the UNP had unwisely chosen after Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake had resigned in the face of the first Aragalaya, the Hartal of August 1953 in which eight people were killed in Police shootings. 

Ranil Wickremesinghe’s father Esmond was the advisor of Sir John Kotelawala, most notoriously at the Bandung conference of 1955.

Sir John Kotelawala, the ex-military man and UNP Prime Minister, was Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s political hero though Gota’s father was a co-founder of the SLFP which crushed Sir John’s UNP in the ‘Silent Revolution’ of 1956. 

The Ranil regime has an airbag in the Prime Ministership of Dinesh Gunawardena, classmate and childhood friend who now covers the Sinhala-Buddhist flank.

Philip Gunawardena, the father of Ranil’s PM Dinesh Gunawardena, was known as the father of the Marxist Movement of Ceylon. Philip wound up “in the lap” (as they used to say) of the UNP, in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake where he made a considerably constructive contribution as the Minister of Industries. A tragic figure, arguably more sinned against than sinning, he ended up electorally eliminated, reviled and heartbroken by a double-shock: the crushing defeat of the UNP government in 1970 in a repetition of the 1956 victory he had been a co-architect of, followed by the violent extermination in April 1971 by that new government of a generation of young radical leftist rebels adhering to an ideology that Philip had introduced to the island. 

One thing I can say for Philip Gunawardena though: he would never have joined the Cabinet of Sir John Kotelawala. 

The Ranil presidency has a time-bomb ticking in its foundations. That time-bomb is not the economic crisis alone, but the combination of that crisis with the harsh remedies proposed to solve it, sourced not so much in the IMF—which will be the scapegoat—but in the neoliberal free-market fundamentalist agenda that President Wickremesinghe has always been an adherent of and is raucously advocated by Colombo’s rightwing economists and policy intellectuals

Ranil read-out 

‘Reading’ Ranil Wickremesinghe requires getting one’s head around two symptomatic stories. 

One is contained in the massive double volume produced by the University Teachers for Human Rights-Jaffna (UTHR-J), co-authored and edited by the respected Rajan Hoole. His scrupulous reconstruction of the Welikada prison massacre of Black July 1983, incorporating the testimony of the then Commissioner of Prisons, points to instigation of the savagery of the Sinhala prisoners from outside the gates or rather, over the walls, by the sinister figure of Gonawela Sunil, former inmate of Welikada’s Death Row. 

Sentenced for leading the gang rape on Galle Face Green of the teenage daughter of Dr. A.T.S. Paul, his release on a pardon by President Jayewardene, subsequent appointment as a Justice of the Peace (JP) – no less—in the Kelaniya area, and institutional affiliation with a Ministry, made his source of political patronage an open secret among human rights activists of the dangerous 1980s. 

Somewhere in the 1990s, viewers saw Ranil Wickremesinghe on TV news, in a courthouse, tersely replying a Presidential Commission: “Yes, I knew Sunil”. 

Even when elected PM in 2001, he never took legal action against the televising of testimony at the Batalanda Commission including by parents of the victims. Therefore, logically, that testimony cannot be dismissed as without credibility. 

Another, more transparent story was the double-crossing of President Premadasa’s righthand man, Sirisena Cooray, former Mayor of Colombo, Minister of Housing and General-Secretary of the UNP. Emotionally hollowed by the LTTE’s suicide-bomb assassination of his leader and friend of decades, Cooray rejected the successor President D.B. Wijetunga’s entreaties to take over the Prime Ministership. Instead, he asked that it be given to Ranil Wickremesinghe, to whom he also gifted the UNP organisership of Colombo Central which had been bequeathed to him by Ranasinghe Premadasa upon election to the Presidency.

Cooray was never restored as the party’s General-Secretary or even made its Chairman by Ranil Wickremesinghe. When Cooray was unjustly arrested by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in 1997 –a charge on which he was acquitted and an arbitrary action for which he was awarded handsome compensation by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Mark Fernando—Ranil Wickremesinghe, UNP leader, Leader of the Opposition and UNP Organiser for Colombo Central did not utter a word of condemnation nor demand his release, still less mount a protest in and out of Parliament. 

In fact, he strove to sabotage the Premadasa Commemoration of that year, which Cooray and the Premadasa Center were organising. As Executive Director, I had to lead it with Cooray in detention, guarded by armed military. Dr. Farah Mihlar, now an academic in the UK, then a young reporter for Capitol FM radio, covered the entire story from detention centre to courthouse.

Will President Wickremesinghe be able to secure adequate international support, negotiate with the creditors, stabilise the economy, implement an austerity package and restore the economy to health? Will his authoritarianism be an acceptable trade-off for economic recovery? That’s a ‘no’ because it imperatively requires stability through social consensus, and is torpedoed by escalatory, repressive confrontationism

Presidential prospects 

Unelected and unpopular, the Ranil regime has the narrowest social base, starting out, of any administration Sri Lanka has ever had. Buttressing it with the Deep State rising and the Rajapaksas’ ruling SLPP, only makes it morphologically similar to the intersecting ‘civil-military junta’ and the ‘National Security State’ models of Latin America in the 1960s-1980s. In the vortex of Sri Lanka’s economic catastrophe, it cannot have even a fraction of the lifespan of its Latin American forefathers.  

This narrow popular base does not make for a simple, short, sharp, straight-line struggle to dislodge the Ranil regime. His lineage combined with sheer longevity in politics gives President Wickremesinghe a small but strategically significant stock of social capital, political contacts and networks, and mastery of media manipulation. The unelected new President has the natural loyalty of the top corporate bosses, though not their sons and daughters, let alone their grandchildren. 

Ranil is backed by the Rajapaksa clan, which has lost its electoral empire but retains its dominance of the ruling SLPP and therefore Parliament. 

He can comfortably command the state apparatus for now, though this will diminish as he takes a helicopter-gunship to the public sector.

Will President Wickremesinghe be able to secure adequate international support, negotiate with the creditors, stabilise the economy, implement an austerity package and restore the economy to health? Will his authoritarianism be an acceptable trade-off for economic recovery? That’s a ‘no’ because it imperatively requires stability through social consensus, and is torpedoed by escalatory, repressive confrontationism. 

Though the son of an internationally-known media figure who won the Golden Pen award, President Wickremesinghe somehow doesn’t care about the world media and world opinion. Given the fact that China’s President Xi Jinping was the first international leader to congratulate him, added to the fact that it was Prime Minister Wickremesinghe who gave China much more of the strategic Hambantota Harbour area and for far longer than did Mahinda Rajapaksa, he probably thinks –as did Gotabaya—that he has the China card to play. 

The President’s long-standing ally (before he became Gotabaya’s long-standing ally) High Commissioner Milinda Moragoda, another personality with close connections to the US Republican Right, can be counted on to run the old scam of signalling India that if it didn’t bail out Colombo, then China would, also hoping that India would tell the Quad to get the International Financial Institutions to follow suit.   

An island with a welfarist social democratic ethos; a moment in history where rights-and-justice consciousness is at its zenith; a massive mobilisation of educated youth of all classes; a strong Left; a ruthless rightwing ruler without a popular mandate or legitimacy; and an economic collapse compounded by sadistic formulae for ‘shock therapy’. This country is poised for a perfect storm

Repression-Resistance-Rebellion-Revolution

I recall Hector Abhayavardhana, chief theoretician of the LSSP and one of the most refined intellects of the Old Left defining Ranil Wickremesinghe to me almost a quarter century ago: “Ranil is the only one among the political leaders of the capitalist class who would have no personal compunctions over the use of lethal violence to resolve contradictions.” 

Ranil, the Rajapaksas, the military/ex-military brass and a clutch of corporate chieftains constitute a recomposed and reinforced regime that seeks to offset huge deficits of popularity and legitimacy, with manipulation and ruthlessness. 

It is highly probable that the new President intends a pre-emptive strike to coercively atomise the Aragalaya and the Left, or provoke them into militant rebellion which can be used to trigger a military counterrevolution, before he implements an aggressive austerity package.

When 60,000 state employees were sacked in July 1980, a Referendum held in December 1982 to defer for six years a parliamentary election, and the JVP was framed and proscribed for the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983, Mervyn de Silva sternly cautioned in the Lanka Guardian that repression in the service of the status quo does not bring stability, and that, to the contrary, the Jayewardene UNP regime was practicing “the fine art of self-destabilisation”. Within a few years, civil war tore through southern Sri Lanka, threatening to end the regime. 

The “torch ablaze at both ends” was tossed reluctantly by the old elite to Ranasinghe Premadasa (some hoped he would lose to Sirimavo Bandaranaike) who upended the old order and saved the System of democracy and the market economy by radically reforming/transforming it. Perhaps his son is destined to do the same.

When 134 Members of Parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe, it is irrational to regard it as evidence of the need to abolish the Executive Presidency. Far from justifying ‘Presidency-phobia’, it is a loud alarm against consigning our collective fate to the Parliament. 

It is also illogical to call for a snap parliamentary election while President Wickremesinghe remains in office, unless that call is pinned to a primary slogan “Ranil Resign!” and the struggle to retrench the unelected Ranil presidency. 

The Ranil presidency has a time-bomb ticking in its foundations. That time-bomb is not the economic crisis alone, but the combination of that crisis with the harsh remedies proposed to solve it, sourced not so much in the IMF—which will be the scapegoat—but in the neoliberal free-market fundamentalist agenda that President Wickremesinghe has always been an adherent of and is raucously advocated by Colombo’s rightwing economists and policy intellectuals. 

An island with a welfarist social democratic ethos; a moment in history where rights-and-justice consciousness is at its zenith; a massive mobilisation of educated youth of all classes; a strong Left; a ruthless rightwing ruler without a popular mandate or legitimacy; and an economic collapse compounded by sadistic formulae for ‘shock therapy’. This country is poised for a perfect storm, one travelling exactly in the opposite direction of that envisaged by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, and possibly culminating in an attestation of the validity of Mimmo Porcaro’s thesis: “The crisis thus rings in, once again, the hour of Lenin”. (‘Occupy Lenin’)