Opposition and related problems

If Sajith Premadasa invokes his father less and studies his father’s economic path more, he might be able come up with some answers

“While Sri Lanka’s economy is bouncing back stronger than expected, a significant portion of the population—about a third—remains in poverty or is at risk of falling back into poverty. To ensure this recovery works for everyone, especially those who have been hit hardest, Sri Lanka can focus on policies that create jobs and support the poor.”

The World Bank – Sri Lanka Development Update April 2025

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

It is known as the Axiom of Aristotle, though Parmenides might have been the actual discoverer: nature abhors a vacuum. 

So does politics. 

In 2024, the NPP/JVP filled the vacuum in the Lankan oppositional space, and won the presidential and parliamentary elections, bypassing Sajith Premadasa and the SJB. Less than a year later, the NPP/JVP Government is haemorrhaging support. Between November 2024 and May 2025, the Government lost 2.3 million votes, as much of a Lankan record as the NPP’s vaulting from 3% to power in five years.

2024 was characterised by twin crises – a crisis in Government and a crisis in Opposition. The crisis in Government ebbed after Presidential election and began to re-flow in 2025. The crisis in the Opposition never ended. 

In general, voters unhappy with the Government move over to the Opposition. That didn’t happen at the Local Government election of 2025. Most of the 2.3 million voters who opted not to vote for the Government also opted not to vote for the Opposition. Their abstention signified a lack of confidence in the Government and the Opposition.

If the Government manages to contain its tendency for self-harm and improve its performance, many of these disgruntled voters are likely to return to the NPP fold. But what if the Government’s failures continue to be matched by the inadequacies of the Opposition? 

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, columnist David Graham observed that President Trump’s growing unpopularity and the incompetence of his administration have created a favourable terrain for the opposition Democratic Party and added a rider – “But if anyone can figure out how to fumble the situation, it’s the Democratic Party.” He asked the question, “Why aren’t these boom times for America’s opposition party,” and answered by pointing out the blue party’s state of unpreparedness, its uninspiring politics, and its lacklustre leaders (The Democratic Party slides into irrelevance). 

Anura Kumara Disanayake has stolen Sajith Premadasa’s and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s thunder. He does temple hopping better than Sajith Premadasa and manages the economy as well as Ranil Wickremesinghe (by staying on the Wickremesinghe path). The NPP/JVP in power is no more left/ socialist than Chinese or Vietnamese Communist Parties. It is not a replacer but a manager of capitalism 

All of these ills assails Lanka’s Opposition as well, especially the democratic opposition – from which the Rajapaksa-owned SLPP is excluded by its anti-democratic nature. 

The American political system’s moribund nature is leavened to some extent by its primary process, which enables relative unknowns to enter the political stage, beating establishment candidates. The most well-known example was Barack Obama. At the non-national level, the primary process has added new blood to the party, the rise of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from bartender to a future presidential candidate being a case in point.

Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old political upstart who pulled an unexpected win in June 2025 Democratic Party’s primary for New York mayoralty, is the latest example of this process. Mamdani seemed an unlikely winner: a Muslim of Indian-origin born in Uganda with no name-recognition, no campaign war-chest, and policies considered suicidal in the US, from his self-identification as a democratic-socialist to his unqualified support for Palestine (New York has the second largest Jewish population, after Tel Aviv). 

He won because of his undoubted personal abilities and because of the centrality of his message and his laser-like focus on it – making New York affordable for every New Yorker. He crafted a winning message, stayed on it, and beat a competitor backed by really big money.

“For hope we don’t need certainty, only possibility,” historian Howard Zinn wrote in his 1990 essay, Failure to Quit. Hope is what Lanka’s democratic opposition is failing to generate. 

Anura Kumara Disanayake has stolen Sajith Premadasa’s and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s thunder. He does temple hopping better than Sajith Premadasa and manages the economy as well as Ranil Wickremesinghe (by staying on the Wickremesinghe path). The NPP/JVP in power is no more left/socialist than Chinese or Vietnamese Communist Parties. It is not a replacer but a manager of capitalism. 

The democratic opposition’s path to victory does not lie in shifting to the right; doing so would snag it in an ideological thicket. Instead, it should identify the Government’s main failures, craft a message based on those failures, and stay on it. The latest Sri Lanka Development Update by the World Bank provides some markers for such a winning path.

Attention, please

The Wickremesinghe presidency succeeded in stabilising the economy and returning it to the growth-path. Its main failure was the inability to engage sufficiently with the poverty crisis. The Anura Kumara Disanayake presidency has kept the economy on an even keel while failing equally to deal with public economic distress.

The new World Bank report gives the dimensions of the crisis: “Despite easing inflation, food prices more than doubled between 2021 and 2024, contributing to elevated malnutrition and food insecurity... The employment ratio declined from 46.0 percent in the second quarter of 2023 to 45.5 percent in the second quarter of 2024, and real wages remain below their 2019 levels… The reforms, including utility pricing adjustments and new revenue mobilisation measures, strained household budgets. Facing higher living costs, households adopted risky coping strategies, such as cutting human capital spending, borrowing more, and reducing nutritious food intake” (https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/srilanka/publication/sri-lanka-development-update-2025). 

High electricity and water rates, high indirect taxation, high food inflation, low employment, low real wages, high debt levels, and reduced access to education and health – the Government’s unwillingness to reduce military expenditure or increase direct taxes limits its ability to deal with these interrelated problems. Can the democratic opposition do better? 

If Sajith Premadasa invokes his father less and studies his father’s economic path more, he might be able come up with some answers. President Premadasa’s inherited an economy beset by low growth, diminished foreign reserves, high unemployment, and massive poverty. While stabilising the economy and spurring growth, he implemented two programs aimed at alleviating the economic distress of the poor and low-income earners: the path-breaking Janasaviya, Sri Lanka’s first poverty alleviation programme (unlike Samurdhi, its aim was not to give forever handouts, but to provide a stepping stone for the poor to move out of poverty) and the 200 garment factories program which helped increase growth and foreign reserves and reduce unemployment and poverty by creating jobs with a living wage. 

Even where electricity prices are concerned there’s something Sajith Premadasa can learn from the unorthodox, forward-thinking approach of his father and his closest companion, Sirisena Cooray. As career civil servant WD Ailapperuma explained, in 1990, during Sirisena Cooray’s tenure as housing minister, a solar village was established as a pilot project in Pansiyagama in Kurunegala with Australian assistance. This provided “a simple photovoltaic solar home lighting system to 500 families... - 4-6 lamps, a radio and a small television.” Based on that experience, a solar power project was set up in the lower Uva region in 1991. “Solar power was provided to rural hospitals and maternity clinics, doctors’ quarters in rural hospitals, rural schools and school laboratories, teachers’ quarters, vocational training centres and most importantly for community water pumping. In addition, midwives were provided with portable solar lanterns to help in their night rounds and deliveries...” (https://ceylontoday.lk/2022/04/29/b-sirisena-cooray-a-tribute/). All this was done decades before green energy became fashionable. It is a legacy that is Sajith Premadasa’s to mine, which he is ignoring at his – and the country’s – peril.

As American political commentator Chris Hayes points out, “Attention is prior to other aspects of speech and communication we associate with power – persuasion, argumentation, information. Before you can persuade, you must capture attention” (The Siren’s Call). Attention has to be earned, and it can be earned only if you have something relevant to offer. In 2024, the NPP prevailed over the SJB because its message was way more attention-grabbing than that of the SJB. If the SJB continues to blunder and dither, come 2029, it will find itself outsmarted again, this time by a rejuvenated SLPP and a Candidate Namal who appeals to the primordial fears of a disenchanted electorate.

Back to necromantic politics?

Patriotic, Nation-loving National Convention – a mouthful of a name for a gathering of majoritarian extremists, monks and laypersons. They smell an opportunity in the Government’s vulnerability and the democratic opposition’s inability to exploit it. They sense the vacuum and plan to fill it with perennial phobias and enemies – Tamils, Muslims, Christians, India, the West…

High electricity and water rates, high indirect taxation, high food inflation, low employment, low real wages, high debt levels, and reduced access to education and health – the Government’s unwillingness to reduce military expenditure or increase direct taxes limits its ability to deal with these interrelated problems. Can the democratic opposition do better?

Close to two decades, these extreme elements functioned as Rajapaksa supporters and enablers. Today, they are acting as the unofficial Rajapaksa advance guard, again, saying things and taking stances Namal Rajapaksa is not willing to say and do, yet.

A main positive of the NPP Government is its non-racism. The President seems willing to go further, and be explicitly anti-racist. “If someone thinks that the best way to become a patriot was to become a Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist, it would inevitably cause an exacerbation of Tamil-Hindu nationalism,” he warned at a recent Buddhist religious function in Anuradhapura. Unfortunately, the Government’s inability to grasp the economic distress of around 33% of Lankans (an inability demonstrated, again, by this week’s fuel hike) might tilt the political landscape in favour of competing majoritarian and minoritarian extremisms.  

Bengamuwe Nalaka thero, a veteran of race/religion wars wants to create not an army of soldiers but an army of war heroes. Soldiers can exist in the absence of war; indeed, most soldiers do. But war heroes, by definition need, a violent conflict to be. The monk also hopes to implement a programme that creates and nurtures war heroes. Enemies and threats would be the essential starting point of such a program.

Addressing the same ‘patriotic gathering’, Medagoda Abayatissa thero – who memorably defined a vote for the Rajapaksas as a deed of merit a person would be able to remember with pleasure at death’s door – named one of those enemies/threats: India. Borrowing from the JVP of the Second Insurgency, he called the Indian army the Indian monkey force (wandura hamudawa – a reference to Hanuman) and warned that Lankan army would become a regiment of the Indian army. He even opposed digitalisation, seeing in it another international conspiracy, and revived that favourite bogey of the Second Insurgency JVP - Sri Lanka becoming the 29th province of India (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-WxdhqUZJo). 

During a June 2025 meeting on the issue of Lankan soldiers serving in Russian and Ukrainian armies, defence secretary and tri-forces chiefs promised to resolve “…long standing issues related to the pensions of retired war veterans and the Widows and Orphans Pensions scheme for the families of war heroes” (https://www.newswire.lk/2025/06/02/sri-lankan-veterans-in-ukraine-russia-war-defence-secretary-addresses-pension-concerns/). The war ended in 2009; the Rajapaksas were in power till 2015 and again from 2019 to 2022. The likes of Bengamuwe Nalaka and Medagoda Abayatissa were closely associated with those two regimes. So, how come ‘war heroes’ and their families still have pension problems? The answer is simple. These lay and ordained rabble-rousers don’t care about the real problems of real soldiers. What they want are expendable cannon-fodder to advance their own agenda. 

Currently, these extreme elements remain in the fringe. But their star may rise, if the Government and the democratic opposition continue to fail. Violence first against the Other, and then against one’s own might yet be our future. Like the ongoing outburst internecine Jewish violence in the Occupied West Bank.

On 27 June, extremist Jewish settlers entered a private Palestinian land in the Palestinian village of Kafr Malik and tried to set up an illegal outpost there. The army intervened, and ended up by shooting dead three Palestinians! The Jewish settlers also attacked the nearby Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh. “These days we have been living under the fire, barbarism and brutality of the settlers,” lamented Father Bashar Basiel, the resident-priest of the village (https://www.osvnews.com/israeli-settlers-attack-christian-village-in-west-bank-leaving-3-dead-and-homes-burned/). 

Within hours of attacking Taybeh and Kafr Malik, the settlers gave their own army a taste of that barbarism and brutality. They attacked an IDF patrol, torched ‘a multi-million-shekel military installation’ and rioted outside the Binyamin Regional Brigade military base, calling the base commander a ‘traitor’. The political leaders of these settlers, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his extremist allies, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, consider the IDF too left wing and soft on Palestinians. This is the same army carrying out a genocidal war in Gaza, the same army accused of deliberately targeting civilians near aid stations: “IDF officers and soldiers told Haaretz that they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza even when no threat was present…” (Haaretz – 27.6.2025). Now the ‘Jewish Patriots’ in the Occupied West Bank are attacking the Patriotic Jewish Army for not being patriotic enough. 

Extremism, like Saturn, ends up by consuming its own. This is the unpalatable future we may end up in, if the vacuum in the opposition is filled by the anti-democratic opposition headed by the Rajapaksas and their extremist allies. 

As the American economist Isabella Weber said, “We are at a moment where the crisis of economic security, of affordability…are being used by the far right… I think having an agenda that is laser focused on the needs of the ordinary people is what we need and that is where the Democrats fell flat last year (New Yorker – 30.6.2025). So did Lanka’s democratic opposition in 2024. Can it do better in 2029?