Research Paper

B A R T K L E M

Sri Lanka in 2019

The Return of the Rajapaksas

A B S T R A C T

Sri Lanka was confronted with three interrelated crises in 2019: the unre-

solved gridlock of last year’s constitutional crisis; the Easter bombings and

their turbulent aftermath; and the coming to a head of fiscal shortfalls and

debt burdens. Growth is stalling, living costs are rising, deficits are widening,

and the price of Sri Lanka’s debt is weighing heavily on the government

budget. In the presidential elections, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, heir of the Raja-

paksa dynasty, prevailed with a landslide.

K E Y W O R D S : Easter bombings, middle-income trap, debt crisis, illiberal

democracy, Rajapaksa

A D V E N T O F T H E G O T A B A Y A R A J A P A K S A P R E S I D E N C Y

Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president on November 16, 2019, with a 52% majority. Sajith Premadasa, son of former president Ranasinghe Pre- madasa, trailed him with 42% of the vote. These elections ended a year-long political impasse. The “good governance” coalition of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, which had assumed power in 2015 with much fanfare, had become almost entirely dysfunctional after the 2018 presidential coup, in which Sirisena unsuccessfully tried to jettison his prime minister.

The presidential election was unprecedented: the list of candidates was longer than ever but had no incumbent candidate. It also marked a major shift in Sri Lanka’s party-political landscape. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party,

BA RT KLEM is Senior Lecturer in Peace and Development Studies at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. Email: <bart.klem@gu.se>.

Asian Survey, Vol. 60, Number 1, pp. 207–212. ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1525/AS.2020.60.1.207.

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a pivotal political force since its 1951 creation, did not field a candidate. After the Rajapaksas left the party in 2015 to form their own, Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (People’s Front), Sirisena’s dismal record as president shipwrecked the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

Sri Lanka’s other traditional political force, the United National Party, is struggling to recover its eroded support base among Sinhalese voters. With no electoral victory since the early 2000s (except in 2015, when he ran with archrival Sri Lanka Freedom Party), party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe made way for a younger generation, and for a rival party dynasty, when Sajith Premadasa became the United National Party candidate.

While Premadasa was able to largely retain his position in central Colombo and among Tamil and Muslim communities in the north, east, and high- lands, Rajapaksa secured the vote with unusually large majorities almost everywhere else. His victory was sealed with the attrition of United National Party support in former party strongholds in the center of the island (around Kurunegela and Kandy), in urban hubs along the southwestern coast (Mor- atuwa, Panadura, Beruwila, Matara), and in a belt of constituencies between Colombo and Negombo (with a large Sinhala-Christian community). The majorities of these electorates had turned their back on Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2015 but now voted for his younger brother, Gotabaya.

With Gotabaya Rajapaksa inaugurated as president at a Buddhist site infused with political symbolism in the ancient capital city of Anuradhapura on November 18, and his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed prime min- ister three days later, Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna is well positioned to shore up its political position in forthcoming polls at the parliamentary, provincial, and local levels. Both supporters and opponents anticipate an approach that seeks to replicate the 2005–2015 Mahinda Rajapaksa presi- dency: a strong-arm, hyper-centralized government that amended the con- stitution for its political convenience.

The Tamil and Muslim communities, as well as civil society activists and political opponents, are bracing themselves for the militarized governance, the illiberalism, and the Sinhala-nationalist extremism that characterized the immediate aftermath of the 1983–2009 civil war in Sri Lanka, although the historical context is clearly different. President Rajapaksa’s support base plau- sibly expects him to consign the aspirations and accomplishments of the “good governance” coalition to the dustbin of history and deliver on his promises of security and economic prosperity.

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E A S T E R S U N D A Y B O M B A T T A C K S

Sri Lanka’s troubled record of postwar ethnic violence reached a new escala- tion point on Easter Sunday (April 21, 2019). A small network of Muslim extremists used suicide bombers in a well-coordinated sequence of nearly simultaneous bombings at two Catholic churches in greater Colombo, an evangelical church in Batticaloa, three top-end hotels in the heart of the capital, and a small guest house in Dehiwala (after a failed attack on a fourth high-end hotel). At least 277 people (including the eight suicide bombers) were killed, and over 400 were wounded.

Speculations about a major international plot were defused; no links to the Islamic State or other global terror networks have been substantiated. As was corroborated by the Parliamentary Select Committee, the terrorist attack was carried out by a group of Sri Lankan Muslims who were primarily driven by dismay over recent episodes of anti-Muslim violence, including in Aluthgama (2014) and Digana (2018).1 Those attacks, by Sinhala Buddhist extremists, brought a lackluster government response. The main culprit of the Easter bombings was identified as Zaharan Hashim, once a leading figure in the Wahhabi-inspired cluster of organizations known as Thowheed Jamaath (Oneness-of-God Assembly), from the eastern Muslim town of Kattankudy, a known religious hotbed. Two other members of the plot belonged to a middle-class family from the Colombo suburb Dematagoda, owners of a metal manufacturing factory, where the suicide vests were reportedly produced.

The bombings had grave effects. They fueled strong anti-Islamic senti- ment, hate speech, calls to boycott Muslim shops, and an official (but tem- porary) burqa ban. Days after Easter, Sinhalese mobs attacked a Muslim refugee community of mostly Ahmadis in Negombo who were themselves on the run from Muslim extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.2 Several anti-Muslim attacks, in Gampaha, Kurunegala, and Puttalam, followed in

1. Parliamentary Select Committee, “Report of the Select Committee of Parliament to Look into and Report to Parliament on the Terrorist Attacks That Took Place in Different Places in Sri Lanka on 21st April 2019,” Colombo, October 23, 2019, <https://www.parliament.lk/en/featured-on- the-sri-lanka-parliament/1715-sc-report-april-attacks>.

2. Ahmadiyya is an Islamic revival movement that originated in nineteenth-century British India and has since spread across the globe. Ahmadis are widely stigmatized (by Wahhabi groups in particular) and sometimes persecuted; Ahmadiyya’s claim that its founder was the Muslim messiah is deemed heretical.

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subsequent weeks. All this happened although the Muslim community had been the first victim of Thowheed violence (with several attacks on other Muslim sects, Sufis in particular, since the 2000s), and they had warned the police about Zaharan and promptly and unreservedly condemned the bombings.

The public shock and grief over the attacks immediately became entangled with a fierce political dynamic and a lengthy spectacle over apportioning blame, claiming victimhood, and asserting guardianship. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, it became apparent that there had been a sequence of security lapses and inaction despite local and international warnings about the plot. These failures were exacerbated by the complete breakdown of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government in the aftermath of the 2018 constitu- tional crisis. The government response to the April 2019 attacks was similarly haphazard, with contradictory statements and chaotic measures.

The political tug of war continued under a state of emergency that lasted four months and fueled the subsequent presidential election campaign. Lead- ing opposition nominee Gotabaya Rajapaksa presented himself as a law-and- order candidate, under whose watch such woeful security lapses would be unthinkable. His role in whipping up and condoning anti-Muslim violence in the recent past, the context that precipitated the Easter plot to begin with, was overridden by a narrative of national unity.

E C O N O M Y G R I N D I N G T O A H A L T

In July, the World Bank declared Sri Lanka an upper-middle-income coun- try on the basis of the previous year’s gross national income of US$ 4,060 per capita.3 This marked the end of an impressive growth trajectory, with an increase of 331% since 2003 (US$ 940) and 220% since 2009 (US$ 2,010).4

At this threshold, it is incumbent on countries to consider an economic reorientation to avoid the so-called middle-income trap. Sri Lanka’s reliance on relatively cheap labor, the expansive public sector, weak fiscal revenue, a growing debt burden, and limited capacity for innovation and research

3. World Bank, “New Country Classifications by Income Level: 2019–2020,” July 1, 2019, <https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/new-country-classifications-income-level-2019-2020>, accessed November 21, 2019.

4. World Bank, “Sri Lanka,” <https://data.worldbank.org/country/sri-lanka>, accessed Novem- ber 21, 2019.

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are likely to delay the stated dream of becoming the next Singapore or Malaysia.

But the Sri Lankan economy has graver and more immediate problems than how to traverse the upper-middle income bracket. The postwar eco- nomic boom was driven by the decompression of a war-constrained economy (an effect that has worn off) and large-scale non-concessional lending, includ- ing from the Chinese government. This costly cure has now run its course, and the debt burden has started to weigh in. The government now spends one-third of its expenditures on interest.5 Efforts to increase fiscal revenue have failed, the budget deficit has widened to 6%, and a global economic slowdown darkens export prospects.6

The debt grind was a long time coming, but the combined effects of 2018’s presidential coup and the Easter attacks have made the situation more serious and acute. The constitutional crisis shattered Sri Lanka’s effort to showcase itself as a stable investment destination with a reliable policy environment. The April 2019 bombings tarnished the island’s reputation as a tourist par- adise, and the subsequent return of checkpoints and roadblocks under emer- gency law stifled domestic economic circulation.

These effects are likely temporary, but they leave Sri Lanka a debt-ridden economy in dire straits. Public complaints of the cost of living are rife, and the government is short of options. Past sources of relief—Western develop- ment donors, Chinese loans—are harder to come by. Political prestige pro- jects, like the Port City and the Central Expressway, which rely heavily on Chinese funding, have run into controversies and delays. The government secured a new US$ 165 million tranche of emergency funding from the International Monetary Fund and a US$ 480 million grant from the US government’s Millennium Challenge Account (which spawned political con- troversy over perceived Western imperialism). But despite these lifelines, the country’s debts and deficits will continue to weigh heavily.

C O N C L U S I O N S

For Sri Lanka, 2019 was a year of setbacks, with the unresolved gridlock of last year’s constitutional crisis, the Easter bombings and their blowback, and the

5. Parliamentary Select Committee, “Report of the Select Committee.” 6. World Bank, “Sri Lanka.”

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culmination of fiscal shortfalls and debt burdens. These interconnected crises left the island with a Gordian knot. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s election has ended the protracted political stalemate. He has a track record of cutting Gordian knots with strong-arm tactics, rather than seeking to untangle them through consultative deliberation.

Modest economic growth is projected for the coming years, but the struc- tural underpinnings remain unresolved. Delivering on the high hopes and expectations of his constituencies will be significantly harder than in the immediate postwar years. President Rajapaksa inherits a half-built house of constitutional and governance reform—which he will likely rebuild, rather than finish. The previous government curbed executive power and strength- ened checks and balances in public administration, but electoral reform was aborted, and it has fallen well short of a new constitution and a grand bargain for the unresolved ethno-national conflict. Rajapaksa also inherits a country with tense ethnic and religious relations that is bracing itself for the next violent skirmish—a bitter postwar harvest for which he himself sowed some of the seeds by fueling and facilitating anti-minority violence when he was defense secretary (2005–2015).

At the end of the war, 10 years ago, Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government faced major international pressure and used its two-thirds-plus majority to close ranks in an illiberal, highly executive government. Today, neither the domestic constellation nor the international context necessitates such a siege mentality, but there also appear to be fewer constraints: Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s illiberal outlook is in sync with current administrations in Washington, New Delhi, and other capitals. The government’s supporters thus have rea- son to believe their new president will enforce his version of growth and security. And its opponents have reason to believe that this will come at the cost of democratic space, the rule of law, and the safety of minorities.

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