The NPP’s most painful problem

If the agenda for sweeping reforms to nation, state, country, governmental ethos and socio-political culture have failed to materialise, the NPP has to hold itself accountable in the main 

When the NPP set its sights on rescuing the republic from the perils it faced, pre- and post-Aragalaya, the enemy in the hall was decidedly the tried, tested and failed political uni-culture comprising an indistinguishable combine of parties with no ideology, identity or integrity. After eight to ten months in power, depending on when you started counting the beginning of the putative transition, it is evident that perhaps far more insidious enemies lurk within the establishment

One cannot but help being sorry for the National People’s Power government of late at least. Best understood at multiple levels of national feeling, this phenomenon spans the emotional gamut from sorrow to sympathy. 

If a newspaper is a nation talking to itself, a hijacked (or is that sabotaged? or is it both?) national reformation agenda is the NPP still whispering soft, sweet-nothings – and sometimes, thundering grandiose denouncements – to the polity in public while no doubt muttering dire imprecations against its detractors in private.

Secret sorrows

On the one hand, there is the sorrow a nation at large may undergo at what appears to be the abandonment of a project with promise (pun intended) and no little potential.

Once the toast of a town baying for the blood of those in city, chamber and corridors of power responsible for bringing a nation to its knees, the JVP-led Marxist/socialist/progressive combine came into power with a promise of system change and received two resounding mandates to match its ambitions.

If the agenda for sweeping reforms to nation, state, country, governmental ethos and socio-political culture have failed to materialise, the NPP has to hold itself accountable in the main.

A crippling cost of living matrix compounded by IMF strictures uncritically embraced by the new administration despite decrying the burdensome taxation regime among other millstones while in opposition. An odious executive presidency critically unengaged to date by a promised new constitution. The plethora of albatrosses around the citizenry’s necks – from a draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) through an insidious Online Safety Act (OSA) to the brutality of a police state in the face of ongoing criminal activity undeterred by the government’s ‘Clean Sri Lanka’ campaign.

These are but the tip of the socio-political iceberg. What lies beneath the surface – a sea of shimmering stresses and tensions in troubled socio-economic waters – threatens to rock the country’s economic boat again.

Let there be some light shed on this through a few examples of present woes. 

For starters, the Ceylon Electricity Board has recorded a loss of Rs. 18 billion in Q1 of 2025, after five profitable quarters. And now, the CEB proposes an 18.3% electricity tariff hike from June to December of the year ahead.

A sidewinder causing no little concern and raising the spectre of a future bloodbath if the political gang joins the underworld fray is that over 30 people have been killed in gun violence in 2025. In the past seven months, 52 were gunned down in 79 shootings according to a minister of state.

The spiralling epidemics at hand – dengue, chikungunya and chicken pox – are placing an intolerable burden on the masses and the medical and healthcare sectors of the state. 

That Sri Lanka needs to quickly and effectively transform into a resilient nation capable of withstanding sundry challenges has crossed the mind of no less than President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

If this is at odds with the assertion of Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya that the government won’t rush into finding solutions for the country’s persistent unresolved issues, then so be it for the nonce – it was ever thus...  

And whether the ship of state founders on the shallows of superficial governors cynically gulling a nation hungry for more than bread and circuses or flounders in the choppy seas of its inability to sustainably service debt repayments due starting 2028 is largely academic. 

Hostility and hijacking

On the other, there is the sympathy the people may offer its erstwhile champions at the not-so-secret sorrows they may be experiencing themselves in many corners of the playing-field that is national politics. 

For one, and taking centre field in the aftermath of the NPP’s attenuated win at the recently concluded local-government elections, is the shameful lack of principle exhibited by the traditional mainstream parties that received a drubbing at last year’s presidential and parliamentary trophies. 

Where once shy of uniting under a common flag in the run-up to the LG polls, these manipulative political machines from yesterday’s pragmatic ideologies managed to find they shared a common front to tackle the problem of the NPP’s persistent popularity! 

What ensued to secure the 100 or so urban and town councils and pradeshiya sabhas that were hung constituted nothing less than a hijacking of the people’s will.

It will no doubt leave a bad taste in the mouth of an electorate desirous of a sea-change – although, with the next elections at least a year away, the polity may experience a minor episode of amnesia? As regards the unscrupulous attack on its sovereignty by unprincipled politicos who don’t know yet that in the longer run they’re dead in the water.

Also, ironically, the NPP may be sitting-ducks in the face of an ‘enemy at the gate’ – the union strength they once deployed so often masterfully and sometimes aggressively against previous governments.

Now, reports are emerging of a ‘palace revolt’ of sorts – the burgeoning bureaucracy that comprised the JVP’s bulwark against past attempts to reform the public service are rebelling against their newly empowered political masters. 

If so, the irony is doubled – for wasn’t it NPP supremo AKD himself who only recently importuned the trade unions to turn down their agitation a notch and urged the state sector to deliver on the service and efficiency fronts?

There are rumours as much as research findings to the effect that the public sector – whether perversely for personal reasons, or purposely at the behest of political agitators (not the JVP/NPP) – are deliberately throwing a spanner in the works of the government’s agenda and attempts at programmatic reform of white elephants.

Work to rule? Delays in delivery? MIA from their seats? Files going mysteriously missing? Hmm... at least the last of these the miscreants seem to have borrowed from the NPP’s playbook. Missing files!

When the NPP set its sights on rescuing the republic from the perils it faced, pre- and post-Aragalaya, the enemy in the hall was decidedly the tried, tested and failed political uni-culture comprising an indistinguishable combine of parties with no ideology, identity or integrity.

After eight to ten months in power, depending on when you started counting the beginning of the putative transition, it is evident that perhaps far more insidious enemies lurk within the establishment.

Let us hope or trust that the fell day never dawns when in addition to the remnants of the old political culture, saboteurs in the still bureaucratic public sector and the nefarious nexus between underworld and deep state, the polity does not come to feel and think that there is another, more visible and by then powerful enemy of the people at hand.           

(Editor-at-large of LMD | Enemy at the gate)