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THE LEFT WINS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN SRI LANKA  
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Atul Chandra, Vijay Prashad
September 29, 2024
CounterPunch
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_ Whether Dissanayake will be able to deliver on this program of
economic sovereignty is to be seen. However, his victory has certainly
encouraged a new generation. _

, Bunty456 – CC BY-SA 4.0

 

On September 22, 2024, the Sri Lankan election authority announced
that Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
(JVP)-led National People’s Power (NPP) alliance won the
presidential election. Dissanayake, who has been the leader of the
left-wing JVP since 2014, defeated 37 other candidates, including the
incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party
(UNP) and his closest challenger Sajith Premadasa of the Samagi Jana
Balawegaya. The traditional parties that dominated Sri Lankan
politics—such as the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) and the
UNP—are now on the back foot. However, they dominate the Sri Lankan
Parliament (the SLPP has 145 out of 225 seats, while the UNP has one
seat). Dissanayake’s JVP only has three seats in the Parliament.

Dissanayake’s triumph to become the country’s ninth president is
significant. It is the first time that a party from the country’s
Marxist tradition has won a presidential election. Dissanayake, born
in 1968 and known by his initials of AKD, comes from a working-class
background in north-central Sri Lanka, far from the capital city of
Colombo. His worldview has been shaped by his leadership of Sri
Lanka’s student movement, and by his role as a cadre in the JVP. In
2004, Dissanayake went to Parliament when the JVP entered an alliance
with Chandrika Kumaratunga, the president of the country from 1994 to
2005 and the daughter of the first female prime minister in the world
(Sirimavo Bandaranaike). Dissanayake became the Minister of
Agriculture, Land, and Livestock in Kumaratunga’s cabinet, a
position that allowed him to display his competence as an
administrator and to engage the public in a debate around agrarian
reform (which will likely be an issue he will take up as president).
An attempt at the presidency in 2019 ended unsuccessfully, but it did
not stop either Dissanayake or the NPP.

ECONOMIC TURBULENCE

In 2022, Colombo—Sri Lanka’s capital city—was convulsed by
the _Aragalaya_(protests) that culminated in a takeover of the
presidential palace and the hasty departure of President Gotabaya
Rajapaksa. What motivated these protests was the rapid decline of
economic possibilities for the population, which faced shortages of
essential goods, including food, fuel, and medicines. Sri Lanka
defaulted on its foreign debt and went into bankruptcy. Rather than
generate an outcome that would satisfy the protests, Wickremesinghe,
with his neoliberal and pro-Western orientation, seized the presidency
to complete Rajapaksa’s six-year term that began in 2019.

Wickremesinghe’s lame duck presidency did not address any of the
underlying issues of the protests. He took Sri Lanka to the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2023 to secure a $2.9 billion
bailout (the 17th such intervention in Sri Lanka from the IMF since
1965), which came with removal of subsidies for items such as
electricity and a doubled value-added tax rate to 18 percent: the
price of the debt was to be paid by the working class in Sri Lanka and
not the external lenders. Dissanayake has said that he would like to
reverse this equation, renegotiate the terms of the deal, put more of
the pain on external lenders, increase the income tax-free threshold,
and exempt several essential goods (food and health care) from the
increased taxation regime. If Dissanayake can do this, and if he
earnestly intervenes to stifle institutional corruption, he will make
a serious mark on Sri Lankan politics which has suffered from the
ugliness of the civil war and from the betrayals of the political
elite.

A MARXIST PARTY IN THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE

The JVP or the People’s Liberation Front was founded in 1965 as a
Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party. Led by Rohana Wijeweera
(1943-1989), the party attempted two armed insurrections—in 1971 and
again from 1987 to 1989—against what it perceived as an unjust,
corrupt, and intractable system. Both uprisings were brutally
suppressed, leading to thousands of deaths, including the
assassination of Wijeweera. After 1989, the JVP renounced the armed
struggle and entered the democratic political arena. The leader of the
JVP before Dissanayake was Somawansa Amerasinghe (1943-2016), who
rebuilt the party after its major leaders had been killed in the late
1980s. Dissanayake took forward the agenda of building a left-wing
political party that advocated for socialist policies in the electoral
and social arenas. The remarkable growth of the JVP is a result of the
work of Dissanayake’s generation, who are 20 years younger than the
founders and who have been able to anchor the ideology of the JVP in
large sections of the Sri Lankan working class, peasantry, and poor.
Questions remain about the party’s relationship with the Tamil
minority population given the tendency of some of its leaders to slip
into Sinhala nationalism (particularly when it came to how the state
should deal with the insurgency led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam). Dissanayake’s personal rise has come because of his
integrity, which stands in stark contrast to the corruption and
nepotism of the country’s elite, and because he has not wanted to
define Sri Lankan politics around ethnic division.

Part of the refoundation of the JVP has been the rejection of
left-wing sectarianism. The party worked to build the National
People’s Power coalition of twenty-one left and center-left groups,
whose shared agenda is to confront corruption and the IMF policy of
debt and austerity for the mass of the Sri Lankan people. Despite the
deep differences among some of the formations in the NPP, there has
been a commitment to a common minimum program of politics and policy.
That program is rooted in an economic model that prioritizes
self-sufficiency, industrialization, and agrarian reform. The JVP, as
the leading force in the NPP, has pushed for the nationalization of
certain sectors (particularly utilities, such as energy provision) and
the redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation and
increased social expenditure. The message of economic sovereignty
struck a chord amongst people who have long been divided along lines
of ethnicity.

Whether Dissanayake will be able to deliver on this program of
economic sovereignty is to be seen. However, his victory has certainly
encouraged a new generation to breathe again, to feel that their
country can go beyond the tired IMF agenda and attempt to build a Sri
Lankan project that could become a model for other countries in the
Global South.

_This article was produced by Globetrotter
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_VIJAY PRASHAD is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author
of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the
Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third
World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global
South, and The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the
Fragility of U.S. Power, written with Noam Chomsky. Vijay is the
executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research,
the chief correspondent for Globetrotter
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editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi) [[link removed]].
He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings
(2017)._

_ATUL CHANDRA is a postgraduate from the University of Delhi. He has
been a student and youth activist since 2007. While pursuing his
bachelor’s degree, he was elected as the central councilor of the
University of Delhi student union (2009–2010). Prior to joining
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Atul worked as a field
investigator for the Right to Food Campaign, focusingon the themes of
human bondage, land alienation, and hunger death among Sahariya tribes
in Rajasthan. Between 2013–2017, he coordinated and organised
various activities and research work as a researcher and project
assistant in collaboration with the South Asian University and Rosa
Luxemburg Stiftung (South Asia)_

_TRICONTINENTAL: INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH is an international
institute guided by popular movements and organisations. We seek to
build a bridge between academic production and political and social
movements in order to promote critical thinking and stimulate debates
and research with an emancipatory perspective that serves the
people’s aspirations._

* Sri Lanka
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