Though the aragalaya or the uprising achieved what it had aimed for, was brought to an abrupt end through military crackdown by the government in power.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe is everyone’s problem, and hostility to his presidency has been
mounting from day one. He didn’t help things by cracking down on Galle Face protesters in a brutal fashion. There is a massive amount of distrust on either side. Where do we go from here?
Ranil Wickremesinghe is full of contradictions, but the Aragalaya, the people’s tsunami wave which ousted the formidable Rajapaksa clan from politics, rewriting the political map in a way unthinkable pre-April 2022, too, is guilty of that. Let’s try and get some perspective here.
President Wickremesinghe may have been politically a zero sum in the recent past, but he didn’t become president illegally. His presidency is constitutionally legal. It is seen by some as a deal with the Rajapaksas with an unwritten clause to protect them. But it’s hard to see how he’s going to do it at this point, even if he was willing and able.
It is also not true that Ranil has defended the Rajapaksa clan at every turn. As the pandemic began to look threatening in late 2020, he issued several warnings and criticized Gotabaya’s Covid control plan, including putting the army in charge of vaccinations instead of the medical sector. Also, after being made prime minister by a desperate Gotabaya, he painted a bleak picture of the near future to voters, instead of trying to gloss things over. Basically, he was telling the truth.
But that has not been enough to allay a deep-rooted suspicion many people have that Ranil is Rajapaksas’ best friend. The ongoing crackdown on activists for ‘entering public institutions forcibly and occupying them’ (people are selected in an arbitrary manner) only goes to make people distrust and hate Ranil even more.
Mr. Wickremesinghe began calling the protesters fascists once he became president, conveniently forgetting that it’s the Aragalaya which paved the way for his political comeback. Calling them fascists is ironic, since it’s the neo-fascist ex-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa who made him Premier. Like many of our politicians, Ranil too, seems to be confused and disoriented about which is left and which is right. Fascism is the far right. There are no fascists in the Aragalaya, unless they are reformed neo-fascist Rajapaksa loyalists. Neither trade union icon Joseph Stalin nor Fr. Jeevantha Pieris, the new face of national religious unity, are even remotely fascists. But Fr. Pieris has been barred from travelling abroad after being arrested. He’s being treated like a terrorist suspect.
Trying to play both sides, Ranil is now holding out an olive branch. He has allocated a new space for protesters while evicting them from Galle Face. He has phoned Joseph Stalin after his arrest. Unfortunately, this olive branch is bonsai. With his humanistic training via his predilection towards literature and the arts, he must realize that he was dealing with a traumatized people with nowhere to turn, and act accordingly.
"President Wickremesinghe may have been politically a zero sum in the recent past, but he didn’t become president illegally. His presidency is constitutionally legal. It is seen by some as a deal with the Rajapaksas with an unwritten clause to protect them"
I have always said that occupying the president’s house or the state television studios was absurd and counterproductive. I said that burning down President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s house with its valuable art and book collection was wrong. But one must understand at least the former actions as the inevitable, even logical, culmination of a months-long protest which was always in danger of being annihilated by a state crackdown. This didn’t happen because the feared Gotabaya lost his nerve in view of the unarmed Aragalaya’s sheer determination and momentum.
John Lennon said decades ago that, if you confront the state with arms and violence, it has all the answers. But, if you face them non-violently and with smiles and flowers (the aragalaya was that until Mahinda Rajapakse’s goon attack in May), the state has no answer. This is precisely what happened to Gotabaya, whose inherent thinking and modus operandi is based on violent answers to violent situations (or even non-violent protests such as at Rathupaswala and elsewhere when he was defense secretary under his brother’s presidency, but that was a different political climate altogether).
The final push that made the politically illiterate Gotabaya read the writing on the wall, that he had to go, was non-violent if we put aside the torching of Ranil’s house, an aberration that those responsible should be ashamed of. But no one threw stones or Molotov cocktails to occupy the presidential secretariat or adjacent Queen’s House. People had a psychological need to get inside, to be physically present inside power centres from which they had been barred for decades.
After that night, the protesters should have left these buildings. The general public too, had a moment of catharsis and went sight-seeing. It should have been stopped by the Aragalaya people after a few days at most. When they didn’t, Ranil Wickremesinghe reacted equally carelessly as soon as he became president. Now it’s time for both sides to take stock, and look for ‘compromise and consensuses’ to quote President R. Premadasa’s favourite phrase.
Finally, for those who don’t want Ranil as president, the question arises: Who is better? This question exposes the Achilles’ heel of Lankan politics. The brainier national leader class politicians were wiped out by terrorism during the Eelam wars. This is what paved the way for mediocrities like the Rajapaksas. If we take the leading candidates for the presidency last month (leaving aside their political ability and sincerity), none of them have been tested anywhere close to this level. It’s a Hobson’s choice.
Ranil has also been vocal and positive on reducing the powers of the executive presidency. He has not been all negative, though the negatives far outweigh the positives at this point. The real test for Ranil Wickremesinghe, if he wants to be a statesman and not just another portrait hanging from the walls of government offices, is to increase the positives. Let’s also not forget he must be feeling a bit lonely at the top, with a largely hostile population and a parliament of Rajapaksa loyalists watching his every move. Mangala Samaraweera could have been a great source of strength to Ranil at this moment, but he’s no more.
Stay focused, Mr. President, because it’s not a slippery slope you are on. You are walking a tight rope, and the future of Sri Lanka as an enlightened nation depends on you.
