“Marxist Anura Kumara Dissanayake has been sworn in as the new president of Sri Lanka. His election is a political earthquake as Sri Lankans have rejected entrenched parties and handed power to a non-elite for the first time.” (Sri Lanka now delivers a political earthquake in India’s neighbourhood by Yudhajit Shankar Das, India Today, 23 September 2024)
Comrade Dissanayake’s victory in the 21 September presidential elections in Sri Lanka is all the more remarkable for the fact that in the previous election a mere five years ago, when he also stood as a candidate, his share of the vote was a mere 3.16 percent. In the parliamentary elections a year later his party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front or JVP), gained only three seats.
How is this extraordinary turnaround to be explained?
The main driving force has been the descent of Sri Lanka into bankruptcy in 2022, an issue on which we commented in detail in May 2022 (Sri Lankan workers revolt against the kleptocracy). The rage of the Sri Lankan masses in response to the hardships visited on them as a result of the government running out of money led to the downfall of the then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the country in July 2022 after seeing his residence invaded by indignant citizens, and two months after his brother Mahinda had been forced to resign as prime minister.
His departure to some extent assuaged the anger of the masses, who were inclined to believe that it was his, and his government’s, egregious corruption that was mostly to blame for Sri Lanka’s dire economic situation.
There followed a hurried restoration of government to the country.
The Wickremesinghe administration
In July 2022, Sri Lanka’s parliament appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe to complete the remainder of the departed Rajapaksa’s term. The economy was in dire straits. Inflation was running at 59 percent, the currency had almost halved in value since March 2022, and food and fuel were in very short supply, while the country’s economic activity had virtually come to a halt.
There was no money to pay public workers. The central bank had almost run out of foreign currency, making it impossible to pay for imports or even pay foreign debts. The only way out of the situation, as far as Wickremesinghe could see, was to bend the knee to the IMF and agree to whatever was demanded in order to be able to achieve anything at all.
In March 2023, the IMF advanced $3bn to the country as part of a 48-month debt relief programme. This did not prevent the economy shrinking by 9.2 percent in 2022 and by a further 4.2 percent in 2023, but thanks to swingeing austerity imposed on the masses, the economy did make something of a recovery in time for the 2024 presidential election. By the first half of 2024, the economy had grown by 5 percent, but at what cost?
According to the World Bank: “The economy contracted by 9.5 percent in total during 2022 and 2023, and public and publicly guaranteed debt ballooned to 119.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022 amid high inflation (46.4 percent, annual average in 2022) and a sharp currency depreciation (81.2 percent, 2022). Food insecurity and malnutrition increased, poverty doubled, and inequality widened.
“Approximately 60 percent of households experienced a decline in income due to reduced work hours or job losses. The implementation of recent structural reforms, including cost-reflective utility pricing and new revenue measures, helped macroeconomic stability but strained household budgets.”
Pensions were cut, income taxes increased by 36 percent, subsidies on food and other essentials were removed, energy bills rose by 65 percent. Although in theory inflation subsided in 2024, prices were still on average over 75 percent higher than in 2021.
The rich, however, were ‘all right’. “According to the World Inequality Lab, the top 10 percent of Sri Lankans take 42 percent of all income and own 64 percent of all personal wealth; the top one percent have 15 percent of all income and 31 percent of all wealth. The bottom 50 percent of Sri Lankans have just 17 percent of all income and only four percent of all personal wealth!” (Sri Lanka’s debt default by Michael Roberts, 21 September 2024)
At the same time, ever increasing interest payments are weighing heavily on the Sri Lankan economy. In 2023, payments absorbed approximately three-fourths of revenue collected!
The wind of change
In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the voters of Sri Lanka were looking for a change of direction! Nor is it surprising that they were drawn to a left-wing party genuinely committed to improving the lives of the masses of Sri Lankan people from all communities – Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim and ‘Burgher’ (ie, creoles of European descent, Dutch or Portuguese for the most part).
Dissanayake stood in the election under the banner of a left-wing coalition that calls itself National People’s Power (NPP), in which the JVP is the major organisation – a mass party that has previously participated in a government coalition but has never before been put as fully in charge as it has been as a result of its candidate winning the presidential election.
The JVP has a revolutionary history. “Rooted in Marxist ideology, the JVP was founded in the 1960s with the aim of seizing power through a socialist revolution. But after two failed armed uprisings in 1971 and 1987-89 … the party shifted toward democratic politics and has remained so for over three decades.” (Sri Lankans throw out old guard in election upset: What nation’s new Marxist-leaning leader means for economy, IMF loans by Vidhura Tennekoon, The Conversation, 23 September 2024)
Its massive May Day parades proudly hold aloft an abundant array of communist symbols – hammers and sickles, portraits of the great Marxists, etc.
Nevertheless, the question arises now that they have undertaken responsibility for governing a bankrupt state, to what extent will they be able to act differently from Wickremesinghe who unashamedly represented purely bourgeois interests?
If workers are to have enough food to eat and jobs that enable them to earn their living, where is the money to come from for that food to be provided; and who is going to give people jobs, and where is the money to pay their wages to come from?
Previous Sri Lankan administrations have seen only one way out – more borrowing and more foreign investment. Yet both borrowing and foreign investment inevitably result in more of the wealth being produced by Sri Lankan workers being exported, and ever less being available to develop the Sri Lankan economy to the point where it can itself produce all the food it needs, and create all the infrastructure necessary without resort to loans.
As long as Sri Lanka is not self-sufficient in food and energy, it is necessarily dependent on outside support – support that inevitably comes at a price! For the moment at least, Dissanayake is prepared to negotiate with the IMF and to encourage foreign investment, especially from India and China – on terms that are fair to Sri Lanka.
Otherwise, what Dissanayake’s government can certainly do is to ensure that the price is to a far greater extent paid by the ultra-rich rather than by the poor and the middle class. It can and will ensure that much less of the wealth produced by the workers is appropriated by the corrupt. It can expropriate wealth that has been acquired through corruption. It can invalidate contracts unfavourable to Sri Lanka that were secured previously by corrupt means.
Accordingly, the new administration has already ordered an immediate halt to unnecessary expenditure, wastage and misuse of public funds and government resources, as well as investigation of fraud and corruption.
Parliamentary elections
However, much of what it needs to do requires the support of parliament, currently consisting overwhelmingly of the old guard whose opposition would have been guaranteed. Therefore, Dissanayake has wasted no time in dissolving the old parliament and calling new parliamentary elections for 21 November.
The NPP has to obtain a two-thirds majority in that parliament if it is to be able to fulfil all the reforms it deems essential, which include changing the constitution – both to give parliament greater powers at the expense of the presidency and to bring about reforms designed to promote communal harmony.
Various factors will be coming together that could frustrate the endeavour to wrest parliament out of the control of the old guard. First and foremost is the fact that although Dissanayake won the presidential election, he did so without obtaining a majority – it was just that the NPP had more votes that any other party or coalition.
“Of the total valid votes of 13,319,616, 42.31 percent of voters voted for NPP candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake, 32.76 percent voted for SJB leader Sajith Premadasa, 17.27 percent for incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe, 2.57 percent for SLPP candidate Namal Rajapaksa and 1.70 percent for Tamil common candidate Ariyanethiran Pakkiyaselvam. The remaining 33 candidates secured less than one percent of votes after the first round of counting.
“As no one secured 50 percent plus one votes, the counting went to the second round, in which except Anura and Sajith, all candidates were eliminated and the second and third preference votes secured by these two leaders were counted. After the second round of counting of the preference votes, Sajith got more preference votes than Anura, but when both the votes (without preference and with preference) were added, Anura emerged as the winner of the 2024 presidential election after getting 5,740,179 total votes.” (2024 presidential election in Sri Lanka: An analysis by Gulbin Sultana, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (Delhi), 14 October 2024)
Another problem is resentment among the Tamil community in Sri Lanka (11 percent of the total population) that the JVP did not support its call for their own independent state of Tamil Eelam, which JVP’s enemies fraudulently attribute to the party’s alleged Sinhala chauvinism, despite the fact that JVP always stood for equality and non-discrimination for all Sri Lanka’s communities.
The fact is that Sri Lanka’s Tamils do not constitute a separate nation and their demands for a separate state arose from disgruntlement at loss of privileges in education and employment that they had enjoyed in colonial times under the British; privileges they were having to share with all other Sri Lankans after the British left. It was because their cause was divisive that the JVP did not support them – not because of any Sinhala chauvinism. However, the resentment to some extent still lingers.
To this has to be added the force of habit – of people who, in spite of everything, feel more secure with the ‘devil they know’ and continue to support the old guard; also those who have been benefitting from corruption still have both votes and the considerable influence that their wealth brings them!
And then there is the real fear that a Marxist government will annoy the imperialists so much that they will use their considerable power to punish Sri Lankans for voting them into office. Plus, people in Sri Lanka, as well as everywhere else in the capitalist world, have been subjected to unrelenting propaganda to the effect that Marxist economics ‘just don’t work, but make things much worse’.
Nevertheless, there are some signs that the steps that the NPP has already taken against corruption has very much strengthened support for its government, so that there is hope that the parliamentary elections will after all produce the best result.
Can Sri Lanka overcome communalism?
The NPP and JVP are to be congratulated on winning the presidential election, which is the result of their hard work among the masses and on behalf of the masses over many decades. Their programme is admirable, however difficult it may seem to fulfil it.
“Dissanayake’s long-term vision is to transform Sri Lanka into a production-based economy, focusing on sectors like manufacturing, agriculture and information technology rather than service industries. One of the key policies is to promote local production of all viable food products to reduce reliance on imports.
“To support these activities, the NPP plans to establish a development bank. Additionally, the NPP proposes increasing government spending on education and healthcare, in line with Sri Lanka’s tradition of providing free, universal access to both.” (The Conversation, op cit)
Moreover, both NPP and JVP are determined to defeat for once and for all the communalism that has hitherto prevented the Sri Lankan masses from uniting for the promotion of their common interests. In an election speech, Dissanayake expressed his party’s long-held policy:
“We are a country where Sinhalese, Tamil, muslim, Malay and Burghers live; a country that believes in many religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, and a country where people speak two main languages, Tamil and Sinhala. Our country is a country living with many cultures. The Sinhalese have a unique culture of their own. Tamils have a unique culture of theirs, and muslims have a unique culture of theirs.
“Therefore, the future of this country exists only when there is unity among these diverse groups of people. As such, the government of the NPP will give you the right to practice your religion and the right to speak your language. Creating a free country that accepts your cultural identity is the hope of the NPP.
“We want a country with national unity, where everyone lives in brotherhood.”
We wish President Dissanayake, the NPP and the JVP every success in their endeavours to unite the Sri Lankan communities, to build a self-sufficient economy, and to bring the masses closer to the one goal that will secure them a prosperous and secure future – the goal of socialism.
