Haunted by the betrayal of the 2015 mandate

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

“…there is such a thing as suicide.” Aldous Huxley (Texts and Pretexts)

There is a picture of Ranil Wickremesinghe and Maithripala Sirisena seated side by side inside the Colombo Fort Magistrate Court waiting for the verdict on the former’s bail application.

In November 2014, the two men united to defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa’s third presidential bid and to end Rajapaksa familial rule. The popularity of the Rajapaksa regime was waning, and its defeat at the next national election was a statistical possibility. But the weak and fractious nature of the opposition made such a defeat a political near-impossibility until Maithripala Sirisena walked out of the government to become the joint opposition candidate.

It was the broadest oppositional unity Sri Lanka had seen, possibly ever.

In those heady days, time moved fast, and what was unimaginable a mere week ago became a living reality. Maithripala Sirisena visited Sirikotha, the United National Party  (UNP) headquarters, to a hero’s welcome. Ranil Wickremesinghe told UNPers that the Rajapaksas had printed posters worth hundreds of millions of rupees attacking him, expecting him to contest the presidential election. He laughingly advised the regime to destroy the posters as his audience cheered.

An alarmed government reacted in a multitude of ways, ranging from dangerous to bizarre. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara was unleashed to depict the united opposition as a viper’s nest of traitors. The name of the regular meditation program of the Sri Broadcasting Corporation (SLBS) was changed from Maithri Bhavana to Meth Veduma. Prices were decreased, state resources mobilized, and politically appointed diplomats summoned to join the Rajapaksa campaign.

Candidate Mahinda Rajapaksa flew to Tirumala Venkateshwara Temple in India’s Andhra Pradesh with an entourage of 56 to procure divine blessings. For the duration of this pilgrimage, he turned vegetarian and ordered the entire flight to follow suit. “There were strict orders to the Sri Lanka Airlines special flight….to serve only vegetarian food on board,” The Sunday Times reported (14.12.1014). A tamed astrologer appearing on Rupavahini news blamed Maithripala Sirisena for torrential rains; the weather issue began on November 21, he claimed, because nature gods are angered over the evil acts of an evil person. Basil Rajapaksa dismissed the sudden escalation of election violence by proclaiming that the opposition was attacking itself.

But society, seeing deliverance from Rajapaksa rule, began to resist in unprecedented ways. Several top-level finance ministry officials protested against the use of state resources to promote Candidate Rajapaksa and warned Treasury Secretary P.B. Jayasundara that they may be “compelled to refuse to carry out such orders or slow down the process in a work-to-rule scenario” (The Sunday Times, 14.12.2014).

In Dambulla, President Rajapaksa stopped his speech and flounced off the stage due to persistent heckling from some members of the crowd. P.L. Keerthisinghe, the OIC of Wanduramba, resigned after 18 years of service in protest against political interference in police work.

The writing on the wall was clear to anyone willing to see.

Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney in his’ Cure at Troy’ writes of once in a lifetime moment when “the longed-for tidal wave for justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme”. January 10, 2015, seems to be one such moment. Deborah Philip, a Sri Lankan civil society activist who had volunteered as an election monitor at the Colombo District counting centre at the Royal Collage wrote poignantly of that moment, “…soldiers on the street were celebrating the results from Polonnaruwa streaming through their phones…the police were fed up…the government counting agents held their breath every time a ‘hansaya’ vote was counted, looking at each other furtively and smiling… The future was now. The crisis was past”.

Then the tidal wave of justice receded, leaving those Sri Lankans who voted for Maithripala Sirisena in January and Ranil Wickremesinghe in August 2015 in the hope of a better Sri Lanka stranded.

From hope to despair

In the first year of the new government, things moved in the direction they were supposed to, despite a slower-than-expected speed and some worrying setbacks. The 19th Amendment was passed. Even more important was the ending of fear, returning Sri Lankan society to its loquacious norm, airing opinions about any and all subjects. Authoritarianism ended as did familial rule. Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe worked well together, and the administration they presided over was the most inclusive and collegiate in living memory. The cabinet remained plus-size, but ministers no longer whizzed around in convoys as if they owned the earth. Corruption and waste survived, albeit on a lower scale, other than the Bond scam. The rule of law was restored, as was judicial independence. Although ethno-religious racism was not dead, the government took a clear stand against both the mindset and its manifestations.

By the end of the first year, hope remained, albeit somewhat tempered by reality.

By the end of the second year, hope was as good as dead.

The passing of the Right to Information Bill and the replacement of Arjuna Mahendran with Indrajith Coomaraswamy as the Governor of the Central Bank were the sole major achievements of 2016. In that year, the government began to embrace the Rajapaksa ethos and ape Rajapaksa ways. Rising economic distress was brushed aside, and blueprints were prepared to give the Hambantota port to China on a 99-year lease. Although the government didn’t resort to using racism, it ceased being anti-racist as well. The relations between the president and the prime minister declined. The possibility of a Rajapaksa return could no longer be ruled out.

In 2017, that prospect became a near certainty.

The drought that began in 2016 continued in 2017. Close to one million affected Sri Lankans were in immediate need of food assistance, according to a joint assessment by the government and the UN. Of these 80,000 were in need of “urgent life-saving support”.

In that year, the government moved two supplementary estimates in Parliament for Rs 494 million and Rs 134.4 million. Neither was to help citizens imperilled by the drought. The first was to buy luxury vehicles for several cabinet and state ministers and the second to fund a monthly allowance of Rs 100,000 for parliamentarians to “maintain an office”.

The government’s refusal to correct the severe imbalance between direct and indirect taxes (20:80) impeded its capacity to help drought-stricken Sri Lankans and other citizens in need. The UNDP’s Human Development Report 2012 had warned that such disproportionate reliance on indirect taxes “shifts the burden of taxation onto the poor”.

 “As long as the revenue from direct taxation remains low, this ratio will prevail and this in turn means that the bulk of the burden of indirect taxation will be felt by the poor people,” Dr Saman Kelegama, the then head of the Institute of Policy Studies, pointed out in 2013 (The Island, 2.6.2013). The ideal ratio of direct to indirect taxes would be 40:60, he had maintained. The Rajapaksas ignored both the malady and the prescription. The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government talked about the problem in its first year and forgot it thereafter.

By its third year in office, the government had forgotten much. It had forgotten the time before it was the government, when it was the joint opposition facing the might of the Rajapaksa juggernaut. It had forgotten how the hopes and the dreams of 6.2 million Sri Lankans carried it to an incredible victory. It had forgotten that good governance was not a catchy slogan or a label but a description of the pledge it gave to the people and of the mandate it received from the people.

2018 sealed their doom and the country’s.

Crossing the Rubicon

Saliya Peiris, in a widely quoted Facebook post, compared the arrest of Ranil Wickremesinghe to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The Roman Republic was a military power, but its many generals were banned from entering Italy with their armies, a measure aimed at maintaining a degree of political stability and preventing civil war. Caesar broke that taboo, precipitating a series of events which would end in his own death, the death of the republic itself and the birth of the Roman Empire.

In 2018, the government, the president and the prime minister all crossed their varied Rubicons. The government’s point of no return came first when it failed to intervene decisively to stop the anti-Muslim riot of Digana. When an anti-Muslim riot broke out in the Southern town of Gintota in 2017, the government intervened fast and decisively. That zero-tolerance attitude was absent when the Digana riot erupted. The government watched as rioters ran amok. That inaction would play a major role in the success of the Easter Sunday massacre one year later.

Maithripala Sirisena crossed his own Rubicon when he presided over the anti-constitutional coup of October 26, dismissing the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe and appointing Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister.

Unexpectedly, uncharacteristically, Ranil Wickremesinghe resisted. He refused to concede the premiership or accept the dissolution of Parliament. He also refused to vacate Temple Trees and opened its doors to UNP members. He built alliances with other opposition parties, reached out to civil society groups and mobilized party activists. But once the battle was won, instead of forging ahead to fulfil the 2015 mandate, he returned to his survival at all costs mode. By letting that go of the opportunity, he crossed his own Rubicon.

One year later, Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the presidency.

History may yet pronounce Gotabaya Rajapaksa the most consequential Sri Lankan president, all in negatives. Without the Gotabaya presidency, Sri Lanka wouldn’t have gone bankrupt. Or Ranil Wickremesinghe become the president. Or the JVP/NPP win the presidency and more than a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Or Ranil Wickremesinghe been arrested and remanded.

In June 2022, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, appearing on ‘Ira Hari Kelin’ on Swarnavahini said that his party, if allowed to form an interim administration, would restore social normalcy in three to six months. He itemized what this restoration would entail: reopening schools and offices, ensuring medical supplies for hospitals, providing fuel to farmers and fisherfolk and ending shortages of gas, fuel and other essential goods.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, as president, achieved those broad aims in five months. In March 2023, he secured a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), opening up vital credit lines to the bankrupt economy. His government introduced the Aswesuma poverty alleviation program and a program to give ownership to poor Sri Lankans living on government land. The 21st Amendment he pushed through, restored independent commissions, including election and bribery commissions. He also enacted a campaign finance law and a law giving greater powers to the bribery commission.

On the vital counts of restoring democracy and reviving the economy, he was one of the most successful presidents in Sri Lankan history.

Had he opted to retire in September 2024 instead of contesting, he could have rested on his laurels as Azdak did in the Caucasian Chalk Circle. There was no way he could win the 2024 presidential election, given some of the unpopular measures he had been compelled to push through, especially the massive hikes in electricity and water rates. Unfortunately, he failed to, refused to understand this reality.

He could have retired post-defeat, knowing that his place in the country’s history is assured. Retire and give the UNP a chance of regeneration under a new leadership. He didn’t. When the UNP went down to a crushing defeat at the 2020 parliamentary election, he disengaged from politics (while holding onto UNP leadership), saying that he spent his time watching Netflix. In 2024, there wasn’t even a pretence of disengagement. His supporters made clear that he was planning for an encore. The new government would cause another existential crisis, they claimed. They would then either turn to him for salvation or circumstances would propel him to the presidential/prime-ministerial seat again.

Maybe that was the reason why Wickremesinghe preceded the Rajapaksas. His inability to understand his own peril would have made him an easier target.

How this story would turn out in the coming days and weeks is uncertain. But the fate of Ranil Wickremesinghe is a warning to the NPP/JVP about the danger of ignoring its own mandate. Had Wickremesinghe been loyal to his 2015 mandate, he would have been in a different place today, and the country could have avoided the harrowing drama that was the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency. Breaking promises is a dangerous business – a reality governments and leaders forget at their own and the country’s peril.

–This article was originally featured on groundviews.org