If a country is guided by the right ideas about the main things, it will not go too far wrong, but if it is not, it won’t succeed sustainably-whatever assets it may have.
All it takes is one big bad idea. For example, there was never any chance that the tiniest fraction of the daily output of global knowledge flowing through the world in the English language, the closest humanity has to a universal language, could ever be translated into Sinhala. Therefore, ‘Sinhala Only’ would have been a disastrously counter-productive idea even if the entire island had been populated only by Sinhalese or Sinhala-Buddhists. Each day is a day of loss of the most precious commodity-knowledge-for the nation. This is mostly so for the Sinhalese (unlike Tamil) because it is a native language spoken by a large collective only on this island.
Currently Sri Lanka is adrift, misled by five falsehoods:
1. Corruption is the main problem and root cause of the economic crisis. Combatting corruption is and should be the main priority.
2. The present Government has been elected after a 75-year post-Independence decline.
3. This Government represents the first ever rule of the non-elite ‘subaltern’ classes and must be preserved by any means necessary (including a grossly a-historical misperception and grotesque misapplication of China’s political model).
4. Above all there must be no return to the post-Independence past or the old elite as represented by the established or mainstream Opposition parties, either singly or in whatever permutation or combination.
5. With all its defects the JVP-NPP is more progressive than the Opposition and is therefore to be preferred.
In an essay on ‘Hannah Arendt and Evil’ in the anthology ‘Reappraisals’, Tony Judt observed that:
‘…In various essays and later in ‘The Human Condition’ and ‘The Life of the Mind’ she [Arendt] argues that evil comes from a simple failure to think.’
Sri Lanka is headed for another calamitous cycle towards the end of this decade because of the simple failure, unwillingness or inability of our society-especially its intelligentsia-to ‘think through’ these currently dominant false doctrines.
Red herring
Corruption and its elimination have never been the top priority in the history of political or economic thought. It has been moved to the top of the agenda by a strategic ideological move from the global metropoles, to counter the focus on structures, strategies, policy models and regimes of accumulation. ‘Corruption’ is a diversion from ‘big picture’ thinking.
Sri Lanka’s economic crisis isn’t the result of corruption. We are trapped in a debt crisis, the core of which is private foreign debt. This is compounded by the constrictions of an IMF program. We don’t produce and earn enough to pay for our imports without recourse to international loans, which we find burdensomely difficult to repay, so we borrow more to repay old debt. It is a vicious circle/cycle. The most literate Marxist economist of Sri Lankan origin alive today, Prof. Howard Nicholas has pointed to President Premadasa’s rapid province-based industrialisation drive as the only time we had a strategy which could have avoided a debt trap or got us out of it rapidly and placed us on a sustainable high-growth trajectory, similar to Vietnam. Under President Mahinda Rajapaksa this country earned enough to pay back any international private debt it incurred.
AKD chose not to use the pool of experts he had ready access to in the form of the ‘Debt Justice’ signatories (Joe Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh et al), to strive to negotiate a better deal from the IMF and the international private creditors. Instead, he uniquely chose to appoint Duminda Hulangamuwa, at the time Chairman of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, as one of two presidential advisers on Economics and key negotiator with both the IMF and the private creditors (why Hulangamuwa rather than Howard Nicholas?). Hulangamuwa now heads the Board of Investment (BOI). AKD secured one of the most minimal ‘debt haircuts’ on the global record.
The AKD Government has compounded the problem of foreign debt by engaging in foreign borrowing-to be repaid with interest of course. The Government’s stated intention is to upgrade its international ratings so as to facilitate return to the international money markets.
Exiting this or any future IMF program or staying in one whatever the cost, is a debate for dogmatists of left and right. Instead, we should assess each program on its own merits and in its context. The crucial line of demarcation lies elsewhere: whether our economic strategy entails a return to the private international money markets as distinct from bilateral (State-to-State) and/or multilateral (institutional) loans. While selective, exceptional, tactical recourse to the international money markets is permissible, we must eschew strategic dependence on such a return.
‘Declinist’ lie
The JVP-NPP didn’t inherit and isn’t bearing the burden of a 75-year decline. There’s almost no sector in which the AKD administration has bettered its predecessors, and certainly not as a totality, except for the calamitous three years of the Gotabaya Presidency. In one respect even Gotabaya was better than AKD: he didn’t take foreign loans, increase foreign debt.
There are many sectors, especially in terms of what the UNDP calls ‘multidimensional vulnerability’, i.e., intersecting and interacting poverty, inequality, malnutrition, school attendance etc-in which we are doing worse under this Government than we ever have. CEPA’s Prof. Sirimal Abeyaratne says that in the matter of poverty and its alleviation we have regressed a quarter-century. I’d say we are undergoing a process of social underdevelopment on the JVP-NPP’s watch.
Furthermore, this Government has made numerous damaging moves on major strategic issues that no other government thought of or dared to. The plethora of agreements with neighbouring behemoth India (with its Ramayana-ideology and Akhand Bharat doctrine), the contents of which still-outrageously-remain secret. From what can be gleaned from the Indian media, Anura Dissanayake has granted India a larger footprint in areas of strategic importance to Sri Lanka, than has any predecessor. The military entanglement with the USA is greater than before. Morally most despicable, is Vijitha Herath’s proud announcement of the export of 10,000 Sri Lankan workers to genocidal Israel-to occupy jobs that Palestinians used to be employed in and were evicted from (this on top of apparent immunity for Israelis who behave with boorish impunity in Arugam Bay, Weligama, and our streets and sidewalks).
Sri Lanka has lost more of its sovereignty-and more rapidly-under the AKD-JVP-NPP administration than at any time before and after the IPKF presence on the island. It was easier to be rid of the IPKF than it will be to disentangle ourselves from the trap that Anura has walked us into with the India-USA-Israel triangle.
Meanwhile, by keeping the Provincial Councils in a deep coma, the JVP-NPP has not only made the combatting of dengue more difficult, it has made politically impossible the ‘containment’ and constraining of (increasingly manifest) immoderate Tamil nationalism .
Political economy: JVP model
The biggest lie or the most dangerous half-truth is that the JVP-NPP Government is the first ‘non-elite’ regime to hold State power. It is a lie because President Premadasa broke the class-caste ‘glass ceiling’. It is a half-truth because the JVP-NPP model is one in which the ‘subaltern classes’ have been allowed to take over political, i.e., governmental/ State power, while economic power and control of economic decision-making, as well as the economic direction and destiny of this country have been transferred to the top corporate capitalists, the big comprador bourgeoisie, as never before in Ceylon/Sri Lanka’s post-1948 history.
There’s been a massive structural transformation in the relationship between Sri Lanka’s big capitalists and the State. Never before has the State and Government ceded such a degree of direct control, power and influence to a microscopic elite whose chosen vocation has been the accumulation of immense private profit and wealth, rather than serving the broader national and public interest.
With the intermittent exceptions of Peradeniya’s Dr. Kalpa Rajapakse, product of the New School for Social Research, New York, and veteran Marxist political economist, Dr. Sumanasiri Liyanage, most left intellectuals camouflage the structural changes in political economy with a portrait of the ‘leftwing’ AKD-JVP-NPP Government as victim, trapped by the evil IMF and US imperialists.
However, the stark reality obfuscated by leftist intellectuals been grasped by the editorialist of a mainstream liberal English-language Sunday paper. Tellingly entitled ‘The Rise of The Oligarchs’ (5 July, 2026) it provides a clear scan:
“…More troubling is the growing perception that political power is increasingly intersecting with concentrated corporate influence. Across several of the country’s most important economic institutions, senior executives and influential figures from some of Sri Lanka’s largest private conglomerates have of late assumed prominent advisory and decision-making positions, as opposed to mere lobbying in the past. Individually, many of these appointments can be defended on grounds of competence and expertise. A bankrupt nation undoubtedly requires capable professionals to help steer economic recovery. But expertise is not a substitute for independence.
When individuals with extensive commercial interests participate directly in shaping policies affecting their own sectors, legitimate questions arise about conflicts of interest. Even where no impropriety exists, public confidence depends upon transparency, accountability, and the absence of undue influence. This is how oligarchies announce themselves. They do not seize power overnight through coups or constitutional crises, they emerge gradually through the fusion of political authority, economic power, and privileged access, under the language of efficiency, expertise, and national service.
The danger lies not in any single appointment but in the cumulative concentration of influence among a relatively small circle…”
Students of political history are aware that such a division of labour, i.e., political control ceded to a lower-middle class movement with socialistic pretensions or provenance, and economic control handed over to monopoly capitalists, was precisely the Faustian bargain between big capital and fascist movements in Europe in the crisis-ridden 1930s. That was the nature of the fascist bloc: the Krupps, Thyssen and the National Socialists (Nazis).
The drastic shift in political economy under this administration is driven by choices and changes made freely, unprecedentedly and locally by AKD, his Cabinet and his party-not imposed on them by the US or the IMF.
The shift which structurally endows the capitalist oligarchy with greater overlordship over the economic agenda and decisioning than before, cannot but impact on two other sectors: policy and politics. There is a causative correlation between the greater role of the big bourgeoise and greater and growing poverty and inequality under this administration. The bigger the role, influence and stakeholder share of decisioning unprecedentedly enjoyed by the 1%, the greater the shift and share of national wealth to that 1%, away from the 99%.
The evidence of the worsening of material conditions and prospects under the JVP-NPP’s new political economy is the accelerating migration of the educated, especially from the State universities and most employable professions (medicine, agriculture etc).
The second domain upon which the larger weight and ‘specific gravity’ of the top corporate owners cannot but impact, is the political ‘superstructure’, causing an orientation towards centralisation. At a time of global economic volatility, the top corporates are likely to recommend or endorse greater political authoritarianism, or at the least push for measures, e.g., liberalising land and labour markets and slashing agricultural subsidies, which would generate discontent and require greater authoritarianism to tamp down. This isn’t mere speculation:
‘…Traditional agricultural subsidies will be replaced by capital co-investments in precision farming, drip irrigation and cold storage logistics to create sustainable agribusiness…’
Normality is the lesser evil
Given that the loss of national sovereignty, the rise of the top capitalist oligarchy and the proliferation of poverty have been unprecedented under AKD and the JVP-NPP, it is wildly illogical to maintain that the post-1948 past is the worst of all possible political multiverses and the mainstream Opposition is the worst of all available choices which should never be permitted to return.
If a left provenance rather than actual practice makes the JVP-NPP more progressive than the mainstream Opposition, then Hitler’s ‘National Socialist Workers’ party or Mussolini’s Socialist Party roots (formerly Editor of Avanti, the Italian Socialist newspaper), made them more progressive than the older, pre-war bourgeois-democratic and liberal-conservative imperialist parties. Mercifully the Communist International didn’t reach that conclusion.
When the European left aligned with their own bourgeoisies during WWI, Lenin ruptured with those parties, however large, old and respected. His analysis of imperialism took as a distinctive vector the mutation of capitalism such that it could foster an ‘aristocracy’ in the working-class movement and co-opt/corrupt the Marxist left into betrayal.
When Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of the radical-left Syriza pivoted sharply to the right under the patronage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and accepted the EU debt repayment program the very night of winning a national referendum against those repayment terms, Yanis Varoufakis didn’t continue to define his old friend, leader or Cabinet colleagues as leftists unavoidably entrapped by imperialism. His point was that a better deal could have been negotiated leveraging but respecting the result, and that he had already made progress towards it.
In a short text captioned ‘On Ascending a High Mountain’ in a longer piece entitled ‘Notes of a Publicist’ (1922) Lenin argued that if one is stuck in an impossibly impassable place while mountain-climbing, one simply has to retrace one’s steps, however risky, complicated and heartbreaking it may be, to one’s original point of departure and then hope for and attempt to find a better path up the mountain to the summit.
Lenin was referring to the ruling Bolsheviks, but his general methodological principle is true for societies and individual lives too.
With the solitary exception of the irrational Gotabaya episode, Sri Lanka and its people fared developmentally, materially, better under every previous post-Independence administration than during the current dispensation. The ‘forces of production’ grew appreciably, unlike today. There wasn’t a massive outflow of university-educated young people, especially young Sinhalese, from the island even in the worst of wartime.
The Buddha insisted that actions not origins (birth) determine definition (higher/lower caste status). Samir Amin frequently quoted with delight, Stalin’s dialectical flip (‘Foundations of Leninism’,1925) that given their comparative practice in the world arena, ‘the Emir of Afghanistan is more progressive than the British Labour Party leadership’.
The Emir represented an archaic elite and the British Labour Party leadership a modern, trade unionist elite or British non-elite. Clearly then, the JVP-NPP line that the emergent elite or non-elite should by definition be supported against the older elite, is counterfeit Marxism.
The JVP’s leftism, closest in the late 1980s to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, never rose to approximating universal left standards such as those (currently) of Spain’s Pedro Sanchez or Brazil’s Lula.
In power, the JVP-NPP isn’t progressive or leftist but has degenerated to abnormality, an aberration, making the Opposition which can return us to the democratic and developmental mainstream, the distinctly lesser evil.