Sri Lanka has spent recent weeks listening to a curse. Vas Kavi, anonymous verses invoking malevolent forces against the country’s rulers, have spread rapidly across social media.
The latest calls on Vajrapani, a fearsome form of the deity Sakra, to strike down an unnamed ruler accused of gaining power through falsehoods. The verses followed a campaign by a group of Buddhist monks demanding the release of a fellow monk sentenced to six years’ rigorous imprisonment for contempt of court. During the protest, participants reportedly drove wooden nails into a clay effigy in the name of the demon Maha Sona.
It is tempting to treat this as a curiosity, or as proof that a nation proud of its Theravada heritage has strayed from the Buddha’s rational teachings. A former Central Bank Deputy Governor argued as much in these pages this week. Yet the more useful explanation may be economic rather than doctrinal.
Decades ago, the anthropologists Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich set out to explain why sorcery and spirit cults were flourishing in and around Colombo, not in remote villages. Their answer, in Buddhism Transformed, was that the post-independence economy had failed to keep pace with rising expectations.
People became poorer and more mobile, and the village community that once cushioned hardship began to disappear. These new stresses created new psychological needs. Gods with fewer moral scruples gained followers, and the sorcery deity Huniyan rose from demon to divinity in urban shrines. Obeyesekere returned to these themes in ‘Placating the Demons’, examining how ideas about demonic misfortune, possession and sorcery persist in new guises.
The point is not that Sri Lankans are unusually credulous. It is that people who feel they have little control over their circumstances look for other ways to explain misfortune and seek redress. When institutions appear unresponsive, the curse becomes a form of protest. When the economy offers no clear route upward, the shrine at least promises intervention.
Seen this way, the Vas Kavi episode is less a cultural throwback than a symptom. The economic crisis of 2022, when the country exhausted its foreign exchange reserves and could not import basic necessities, left deep scars.
Stability has since returned, but stability at the macro level is not the same as recovery for every household. Where gains from the turnaround are unevenly shared, the gap between those who have regained their footing and those still struggling breeds resentment that viral verses can easily tap.
That matters for growth. Once the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program ends, Sri Lanka will need sustained growth to consolidate its recovery. Growth depends on broad confidence in institutions, in the rule of law and in the prospect that effort will be rewarded.
A society that turns to curses to settle political disputes is signalling that such confidence is thin. The same column rightly noted that pressure to pardon a person convicted of contempt of court sits uneasily with the predictability that serious investors require.
Sri Lanka has spent centuries placating demons. The surest way to make them redundant is to give its people fewer reasons to call on them.
The answer cannot simply be to urge people to be more rational. Obeyesekere’s work suggests superstition recedes as insecurity does.
That points to growth that reaches beyond Colombo’s upper tiers, education that rewards understanding over rote learning, social protection that reaches those still recovering from the crisis, and institutions that citizens trust to hear their grievances without help from Maha Sona.