Rainy day in Nugegoda: Namal as contender, Sajith’s strategic shortsightedness

Namal Rajapaksa on his way

Rock-star reception from the crowd

Sajith should teach his party about his great, successful father’s ideas and policies

Nugegoda showcased Namal Rajapaksa’s indisputable chemistry with the people. He was given a rock star’s welcome when he was caught in the crowd as he emerged from the roof of his vehicle, vaulting nimbly onto the stage. He had smartly twinned the traditional white long-sleeved top with denims and shoes: a hybrid ‘look’ denoting both continuity and generational change. Perhaps most telling was the spontaneous surge of young people—mainly young men and teenagers—onto the platform together with Namal, packing themselves into the frame of whatever footage and photographs that were being taken. The Sinhala rap songs at the close and in post-event videos that streamed out, announced a ‘People’s Prince’

As someone who was on the Nugegoda stage with his wife ten years ago on 18 February 2015, and as the guy who read out Mahinda Rajapaksa’s message to the nation from the Nugegoda platform, and indeed as the person who initiated and convened the process of Opposition political discussion after Mahinda’s 2015 defeat that resulted in the decision to hold the Nugegoda rally (a decision taken, as chronicled by Dr. Nalaka Godahewa, over a working dinner at the house of a well-educated, exceedingly smart and highly successful young businessman), I think I am qualified to express an informed opinion about the success and impact of  the 21 November event 10 years later, which I didn’t attend but watched keenly on TV and social media. 

Adjusted for dreadful weather and obstructionism by the authorities, I have little hesitation in saying that the 21 November 2025 Nugegoda event was every bit as successful as the 18 February event at the same venue a decade before. I’d go further: last week’s Nugegoda manifestation is almost certain to be politically more successful and therefore, historically more significant. 

Namal’s breakout moment 

The weather was freakish. After the rain, at nightfall the lightning kept flashing for hours. For those even vaguely familiar with theatre and literature from the Greeks to Shakespeare and Emily Bronte, or simply to superhero flicks on TV, lightning-filled stormy weather is symbolic,  portentous. 

On 21 November 2025 at Nugegoda, the weather was both backdrop and symbol. The backdrop was a portal for the emergence of a new player, probably a game-changer: the eruption of Namal Rajapaksa into the political game as a second, ‘shadow’ or parallel Opposition leader and contender for the Presidency in 2029. He may have to settle for less, such as the PM’s slot or even Opposition leadership, but that was just not the vibe at Nugegoda. 

Many things dictate the outcome of an election, such as what’s happening at that time, the ‘swing vote’ etc. Elections are complex, but one thing remains simple, basic. The essence of an election is that it is a popularity contest. To win, you have to have the widest popular appeal; the greatest hold on the public imagination. 

Nugegoda showcased Namal Rajapaksa’s indisputable chemistry with the people. He was given a rock star’s welcome when he was caught in the crowd as he emerged from the roof of his vehicle, vaulting nimbly onto the stage. He had smartly twinned the traditional white long-sleeved top with denims and shoes: a hybrid ‘look’ denoting both continuity and generational change. Perhaps most telling was the spontaneous surge of young people—mainly young men and teenagers—onto the platform together with Namal, packing themselves into the frame of whatever footage and photographs that were being taken. The Sinhala rap songs at the close and in post-event videos that streamed out, announced a ‘People’s Prince’. 

The weather prevented Namal from making the full speech he would’ve planned to. He had to select, and what you heard was his core message. 

Firstly, Namal Rajapaksa stepped through the Nugegoda ‘portal’ as a leader; a leader of a wing of the Opposition, but a leader aspiring to the highest national office and destiny. He tossed his hat in the ring. 

Secondly, he was explicit that he saw himself as the counter, the active alternative, even the real alternative to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. 

Thirdly, he challenged Anura frontally. Sounding like a young Muhammad Ali, he announced that he was coming for AKD and his rule of broken promises through a pro-people struggle, a “janathavaadee aragalaya”. 

When he stayed behind at Temple Trees until his father Mahinda and everyone else had finally been evacuated after a Molotov cocktail throwing inner-city mob had besieged and broken in with terrifying, disgraceful intent to lynch war-winning ex-President MR; and when he decided to take the plunge and enter the 2024 Presidential race after Dhammika Perera bailed-out at the last moment, Namal has shown himself resolute, with real courage to take real risks. 

Last week’s Nugegoda gathering showed he had the courage to risk taking the political initiative. 

A leader is a fighter. Someone who can and will lead his/her collective, his/her side in battle defending the cause or country against the enemy. Namal Rajapaksa is a fearless fighter, as was his father Mahinda --and Sajith’s father Ranasinghe Premadasa. If anyone was looking for who had the personality—the combination of daring and appeal, guts and smarts—to take on President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his JVP-NPP machine, the rainy November day in Nugegoda revealed it was Namal Rajapaksa. 

In a salute to the young Marx whose doctoral thesis was on the subject, the philosopher Louis Althusser returned in his last days to the Greek (and Roman) ‘Atomists’. Following the Atomists’ stunningly prophetic scientific discernment that the universe consisted of atoms falling in a ceaseless rain, but which would suddenly, randomly swerve, thereby making for change, creation—this swerve, permitting rupture and leaps, distinguished it from the ancient Indian ‘Atomists’— Althusser concluded that the crucial thing in politics was to be able to make the atoms swerve or position oneself when and where they would/did. 

Ranil and Anura showed in 2022 and 2023-2024 respectively that they were there, when and where the atoms swerved. Sajith could’ve been but wasn’t. At Nugegoda, and with Nugegoda, Namal Rajapaksa showed he could make the political atoms swerve from their usual ceaseless rain.    

With ‘Genocide Day’ resolutions and Tiger flags in Western cities, and a President who is dismantling our hard-won defences, retrenching the military from our border provinces, establishing a so-called Independent Public Prosecutors’ Office, making vital economic sectors dependent on Tamil Nadu and granting strategic areas to those who adhere deeply to the Ramayana and regard Lanka as the island of the ‘demon’ Ravana, we shall once again need a fearless young fighter from the South, this time the son of a great patriotic leader, to defend us.   

However, knowing what the JVP cruelly did to Vijaya Kumaratunga in February 1988 for far smaller stakes—the Chief Ministership of the Western Provincial Council—Namal must know he’s taking on a ruthless, conscienceless party in power, ‘hard-wired’ for untrammelled political evil. Of course, the blowback from that atrocity was such that 21 months after the much-loved Vijaya’s murder, the JVP was almost exterminated.       

Nugegoda backstory and MR

The 2015 Mahinda comeback campaign failed because it was not completely independent of the SLFP. Intended to make Mahinda the PM at the August 2015 General Election, it failed because a Mayor (Dehiwala-Mt. Lavinia, I think) in the Mahinda camp declared at a public meeting that when Mahinda won, the masses would pressurise President Sirisena—”even descending through the roof”—to hand power over to MR. I was a speaker on that stage and recall Mahinda’s expression bearing the same shock and dismay I felt inside. President Sirisena reacted by addressing the nation and declaring he would not appoint Mahinda as PM, whatever the number of votes he polled. That ensured Mahinda’s defeat. 

The second defeat of the Mahinda comeback that originated with Nugegoda 2015, was the ‘52-days’ experiment in late-2018. I had phoned President Sirisena and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa from Moscow, and warned them not to petition the Supreme Court because the 19th Amendment was clear-cut. I suggested a non-binding referendum instead, which if won, would give national legitimacy to the induction of MR as PM and the holding of a snap General Election, and be taken cognisance of by the SC. Unfortunately, certain Opposition politicians including one of MR’s siblings were pressing for the Supreme Court option. 

Mahinda’s siblings failed to mobilise parliamentary numbers or the masses in support of him as the newly reappointed PM. There was no gigantic public gathering such as the 2017 Galle Face May Day. Hostile to a Mahinda-Maithripala rapprochement, MR’s two most influential siblings left him dangling in the wind during the ‘52 days’—with only his son Namal and old comrade Vasudeva Nanayakkara loyally doing their best.      

The third defeat of the Mahinda comeback launched at the Nugegoda rally 10 years ago, was after Gotabaya Rajapaksa became President and passed a version of the 20th Amendment  that removed almost all power from the PM – “Mahinda Aiya”—and re-centralised it in the Presidency. This made possible the fertiliser lunacy, triggering the peasantry’s anti-GR surge and lighting the Aragalaya fuse.

These in-house betrayals may have broken Mahinda’s heart and health, but now, with the reawakening at Nugegoda a decade later, he can be glad. Namal is not dependent on anyone as a proxy as MR was, due to the imposition of an absolute (not merely non-consecutive) two-term limit. Mahinda’s comeback never really came to fruition after Nugegoda 2015, not even in 2019-2020, but Namal’s Nugegoda 2025 moment is a new beginning which provides continuity.

In Parliament, Sajith sounded the alert about a ‘Police State’. An LSE product, he should surely know that history provides no example of defeating such an autocratic project other than through the broadest bloc of the most diverse democratic forces. The dictatorial danger is never overcome by a single party. If Sajith believes there is an AKD-JVP effort to create a Police State—and I think he’s right—then he should have been at Nugegoda, leading the democratic Resistance

Sajith’s blunder: Bifurcated, bipolar Opposition     

Sajith’s absence and abdication on 21 November 2025 produced two results: 

(I) The mainstream Opposition is now split; bifurcated.

(II) The Opposition is now also bi-polar, with Namal emerging as the second leadership ‘pole’ and co-leader or parallel leader of the country’s Opposition space; the alternative within the alternative. 

Had Sajith attended the Nugegoda event, as Leader of the Opposition, leader of the biggest Opposition party, an excellent orator, and the largest shareholder of the crowd since Colombo is his base, he would have had a preeminent status and role. He passed up the chance. The strategic losses outweigh the ‘moral’ gains of abstinence. Absent leadership is a political oxymoron.    

Sajith is the finest speaker, economic mind and overall policy expert in Parliament, bar none. Moreover, as proved by the ‘Sakvala’ and ‘Husma’ programs, he is more caring and practically helpful to the underprivileged and needy than any other Sri Lankan politician today.

Ours is a Presidential system, not the Westminster model. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and (at state and mayoral levels) AOC and Zohran Mamdani didn’t win because of speeches in the legislature. They won because of their speeches, conversations, debates in public and media (talk-shows, podcasts) spaces—their performance in the agora, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us. Sajith’s father Ranasinghe Premadasa used to drop by poor people’s homes in the inner-city  and in remote villages and chat to them by name. At the John de Silva Theatre, he once burst into an impossibly fast song from the Tower Hall era (later turned by Bhathiya and Santhush into the first Sinhala rap-song). 

One of Sajith’s favorite stanzas from the Buddha states it is not by birth but by one’s actions that one achieves a certain ranking, status. In 1973-1977 JR Jayewardene and R. Premadasa led the Opposition from the front, both in Parliament and on the streets. 

In his last May Day speech in 1992, President Premadasa said that if SWRD Bandaranaike had been alive he’d have been on the UNP platform on that May Day because he, Premadasa, had transformed the UNP into a party that SWRD would not have felt the need to leave. Premadasa felt that the old UNP was more at fault than SWRD had been at the time of the split, and strove for an ensemble of ideas which would have pre-empted such a split and would heal the historic schism in the democratic center that had occurred in 1951.

Yet, inexplicably, the SJB was not founded on the basis of a proven success but an abiding failure; not on the foundation of Ranasinghe Premadasa’s successful political, social and developmental doctrine and model, but on the electorally doomed Ranil Wickremesinghe UNP doctrine and model of 2001-3 and 2015-2019. The foundational flaw and folly have never been rectified or transcended. 

Instead of seizing the chance to address a nationalist, center-leftist audience from Nugegoda on 21 November, Sajith and the SJB remain self-isolated in the ‘generic green’ ghetto of the 30+% range. 

One publicly stated excuse for the SJB’s absence is that “this is not yet the correct time for the Opposition to take the path of agitation and propaganda; to take the anti-Government struggle out of Parliament into the public spaces. It is a time to seek constructive solutions”. In sharp contradistinction, R. Premadasa as Opposition MP argued brilliantly in the early 1970s that an Opposition vastly outnumbered by a Government with a two-thirds majority in Parliament, cannot be an effective counterweight and competitor on so lopsided a playing field. He advocated transforming the social character of the UNP while ventilating mounting public grievances in a campaign of mass meetings, i.e., outside Parliament. He urged the UNP to become a mass movement. UNP leader Dudley Senanayake disagreed. 

For R. Premadasa, founder of the Sucharitha Movement at age16, and a member of AE Goonesinghe’s Labour Party, purely parliamentary politics was a politics of passivity, and never an option. He almost left the UNP by founding the populist Puravesi Peramuna/Citizens Front, enlisting a diverse group (ex-ambassador RSS Gunawardena, Gamini Fonseka, Sirisena Cooray, Ven. Meetiyagoda Gunaratne thero, teenager Imthiaz Bakeer Markar) and launching a series of packed open-air gatherings including at Colombo’s Hyde Park. With Dudley Senanayake’s death R. Premadasa returned fully into the UNP fold at JR Jayewardene’s invitation, deactivating the Citizens’ Front after agreeing to reconfigure and reorient the UNP onto his recommended lines. The re-engineered UNP initiated a series of Gandhian ‘Satyagrahas’ from 1973. 

SJB spokespersons argue on TV that “this is not the time” to take on the Government frontally because “we have a few more things to get done by this Government on the economic front, which they would oppose if in Opposition”. This economic excuse, originating with Dr Harsha de Silva, is exactly what the SJB trotted out when Ranil was Prime Minister and President—enabling Anura and the JVP-NPP to outflank the SJB and win. Logically it also damages the SJB’s claim to be the alternative to Anura and the JVP-NPP.

Harsha’s ‘continuity of congruent economic ideology’ argument is the exact opposite of the history of the UNP in Opposition in 1973-1977. The UNP escalated the confrontation with the Sirimavo Government after the Left had been evicted from the ruling coalition and substituted by Felix Dias Bandaranaike who represented the SLFP’s economic right-wing. The UNP and LSSP jointly dubbed him ‘Satan’! JR and Premadasa never confused politics, especially Opposition politics, with economic ideology. 

In Parliament, Sajith sounded the alert about a ‘Police State’. An LSE product, he should surely know that history provides no example of defeating such an autocratic  project other than through the broadest bloc of the most diverse democratic forces. The dictatorial danger is never overcome by a single party. If Sajith believes there is an AKD-JVP effort to create a Police State—and I think he’s right—then he should have been at Nugegoda, leading the democratic Resistance. 

The most electable SJB figure nationally, if Sajith seriously still aspires to the Presidency instead of the more accessible Prime Ministership, he must emulate his dynamic populist father, starting now.   

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