The rise of Anura Kumara Dissanayake
IN January 2020, weeks after becoming the President of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa set up a commission of inquiry “to investigate allegations of political victimisation, 2015-19”. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, or AKD , sworn in as Sri Lanka’s ninth President on Monday, was among the many named by the commission for punitive action as he was part of an anti-corruption panel set up after Mahinda Rajapaksa’s authoritarian and nepotistic presidency was voted out in 2015 to investigate the alleged misdeeds of the Rajapaksa clan and cronies. Had the economic meltdown in 2021 not interrupted the Rajapaksas’ nightmarish rerun from 2019, Dissanayake may have been stripped of his civil rights for seven years and imprisoned.
The seeds of AKD’s victory were sown when people saw the Rajapaksas clawing their way back to power by propping up Wickremesinghe as the President.
The incident may be a footnote in Dissanayake’s political journey from a student cadre of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in rural Sri Lanka during its blood-soaked armed insurrection of 1987-90 to a pragmatic leader of his party and its National People’s Power (NPP) alliance, and now to the country’s most powerful office, the executive presidency. It is also true that this historic, politically shape-shifting election victory may not have come about had it not been for the Rajapaksas, and not just for their mismanagement of the economy.
A quick flashback: Through the first dozen years of the new millennium, the JVP split twice on the question of whether its alliances with the main ruling coalitions of that period, led by President Chandrika Kumaratunga first and then her successor, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had identified the party with Sri Lanka’s entrenched power elite, robbing it of its unique identity as an anti-establishment, ‘pro-people’ entity.
In those years, the JVP was an eager partner in the war against the LTTE, with no daylight between it and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, of which Rajapaksa was then the leader. JVP’s charismatic leaders of that period favoured the alliance and quit the party, hoping to reap electoral benefits from the war. AKD, who had been a parliamentarian since 2000, stayed put. By 2014, he had risen to the leadership of the JVP.
In the presidential elections of 2015, held against the backdrop of popular discontent against the authoritarian regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa, AKD’s JVP backed the common Opposition candidate, Maithripala Sirisena, the main challenger to Mahinda. But the association with the dysfunctional successor government — this was the period in which AKD was part of the anti-corruption committee against the Rajapaksas — burnt the JVP once more.
In 2019, AKD stepped out of the mould. He formed a ‘socialist coalition’, the NPP, with 27 other leftist and like-minded groups such as trade unions, women’s rights groups and youth organisations, and announced himself as a candidate in the presidential election of that year. He polled just 3.16 per cent of the votes. Gotabaya Rajapaksa won with 52 per cent of the votes, while Sajith Premadasa, then the main Opposition candidate, representing the United National Party (UNP), polled 42 per cent.
In the parliamentary elections of 2020, the NPP did just as badly. It won just three seats. This was still slightly better than Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP, which was wiped out after most of its members walked out with Premadasa, whose new party, Samagi Jana Balawegaya, emerged as the main Opposition party in Parliament. Undeterred by the double defeat, AKD set to work. He saw the 2022 Aragalaya, the people’s movement to demand accountability from the Rajapaksas for the economic crisis, as an opportunity to stay relevant in the Sri Lankan polity. The JVP’s participation in the movement leading to the ouster of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, without grabbing its leadership from the disparate student and youth entities at its helm, was the turning point for the party.
The seeds of AKD’s victory were sown right then, when people saw the Rajapaksas clawing their way back to power by propping up Wickremesinghe as the new President.
What this means is that AKD is perhaps the most pragmatic leader that the JVP has had since it was founded in 1965 as a Marxist-Leninist group that wanted to bring total revolution in Sri Lanka. In this election, Sri Lanka’s Tamil question was not an issue, and the JVP’s past as a vehicle for Sinhala nationalism did not come into play. To the Tamil community that expectedly did not vote for him, AKD’s message is that he will be an inclusive President. The true test will come with the 13th amendment, made in the Constitution at India’s behest, for devolution to the Tamil north and east. It was the trigger for the JVP’s 1987 armed insurrection. Will AKD do away with it? The new President himself has been keen to anchor the party in economic policies, but not of the radical left with which it was earlier associated. Observers have noted that the NPP flag is not red but a shade between purple and pink, also the predominant colour at its rallies. Dissanayake’s sartorial choices, too, eschew the bright red of the JVP’s past.
What this also means is that huge expectations are riding on AKD. He has to deliver, and quickly. He will be judged within months on his promise that he has the solutions to fix the economy without imposing financial burdens on the people. He has promised to renegotiate the terms of the $2.9-billion IMF package that was negotiated by Wickremesinghe. He will be expected to dismantle the punishing regime of indirect taxes set up by his predecessor. AKD has proclaimed himself open to foreign investments, including from India, though the non-tendered, secretive Adani deal with the hated Rajapaksas in 2021 will certainly come under scrutiny. A parliamentary election will have to be held soon in which the JVP/NPP will need to win many more seats than the 33 it had at its peak in 2005. A majority may remain elusive, so it will need to find coalition partners that will not taint it.
India has not been unprepared for this moment. AKD visited India in February this year on Delhi’s invitation, as opinion polls began to read the tea leaves. He had also visited as a minister in 2005, when the JVP was in the coalition with President Kumaratunga. He is as much a pragmatist on foreign policy as he is on domestic issues. Early on, he declared that it was China and India in geopolitical rivalry with each other, not Sri Lanka. Good ties with India were in Sri Lanka’s best economic interests, he said. AKD has also said his party is mindful of India’s security concerns. Setting loyalty tests for him or painting him as a pro-China leftist in the media will not help.
True, the JVP has had long-standing ties with the Communist Party of China. But India must recognise this peaceful but momentous political change in Sri Lanka for what it is — an expression of the Sri Lankan people’s will for real political change. Just as Delhi walks a tightrope between Moscow and Washington to get the best for itself from both, other countries too have their strategic autonomy. Unless India’s security is threatened, the highly vaunted Indian Foreign Service should be able to deal with a not entirely unexpected change in Colombo.
