An opportunity squandered on politics of fear

There is today a pervasive sense of stagnation surrounding the current administration of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a feeling that a historic opportunity for change is slowly but surely being wasted. This malaise is not born of impatience alone, but of repeated and visible retreats by an administration that came to power with an overwhelming mandate for transformation. 

Across multiple fronts, the pattern is the same: promise, hesitation, capitulation, and finally disappointment.

The latest setback in education reform illustrates this malaise starkly. Faced with pressure from misogynist, repressive elements, many cloaked in religious authority, the Government has once again chosen to retreat rather than lead. Instead of standing its ground and pursuing reforms that are essential for a modern, inclusive, and equitable education system, it has cowered before imaginary threats and manufactured outrage. These “ghosts” it fears are neither representative of society nor decisive in electoral terms. Yet the Government behaves as if they hold veto power over policy.

This is not an isolated failure but a part of a troubling pattern. Time and again, the president and his administration have run scared of reactionary forces that were never going to support them in the first place. In doing so, they have alienated the very constituencies, women, minorities, young people, professionals, civil society actors, and the LGBTQ community, who believed in the promise of monumental change and delivered an unprecedented mandate.

Nowhere is this failure more profound than on the fronts of human rights, accountability, and reconciliation. Here too, the Government’s record is one of abdication. Rather than taking bold, decisive action to dismantle entrenched cultures of violence and impunity, it has chosen to embrace the very institutions and power structures that enabled state terror and systemic abuse. Under the guise of caution and stability, it has preserved the status quo.

This approach is not pragmatism, it is paralysis. The nationalist and extremist elements the Government appears so eager to appease remain implacably hostile to it regardless of concessions. Meanwhile, victims of violence, families of the disappeared, and communities yearning for justice see once again that their pain is negotiable and their rights expendable. By refusing to confront the past honestly and courageously, the Government ensures that the future remains hostage to it.

Politics everywhere teaches a simple lesson, that the first year of a strong mandate is when difficult, transformative decisions are possible. It is the window in which political capital can be spent to reshape institutions, norms, and expectations. That window is now closing. Momentum has been lost, and in its place has emerged a corrosive sense of disappointment and disillusionment among those who believed this President and his administration represented a genuine break from the past.

Disappointment, however, is not static. If it deepens into frustration and then anger, governance itself becomes untenable. History in Sri Lanka shows that governments rarely fall because of their enemies alone. They fall when their supporters withdraw consent, hope, and patience.

It is still not too late for course correction. But that requires courage, the courage to confront reactionary forces rather than appease them, the courage to reform institutions rather than protect them, and the courage to deliver on promises of social, economic, and cultural change. 

This Government was not elected to manage decline or preserve inherited injustices. It was elected to challenge them.