The 4th Anniversary of the triumph of Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya falls today, 9 July. I regarded the Aragalaya then as now, as on balance a greatly positive, progressive phenomenon-though I also saw its errors and excesses, blunders and crimes.
The Aragalaya belonged to the category of a people’s uprising which did not fall into the categories of armed rebellion/revolution or military coup of right or left. Except for some utterly inexcusable incidents of lethal and near-lethal mob violence provoked by-and constituting an overreaction to-an attack on the Galle Face protest by some elements of the ruling party of the day, it was peaceful for the most part.
The Aragalaya was mostly positive because it was an emancipatory struggle; an unarmed revolt or rebellion against a ruler. It cannot be discredited on account of the policies of the political leaderships that followed it (Ranil, Anura), any more than Hartal 1953 can be blamed for Sinhala Only 1956.
The Aragalaya must be judged, like any struggle, by the criteria of whether or not the primary objective of that struggle was achieved and whether that objective was legitimate, i.e., was the struggle a just one and did it win. The concrete aim of the Aragalaya, the one most widely shared by the participants and those who supported and sympathised with it, was very clear-and it wasn’t ‘System Change’; it was ‘Gota Go Home!’
The battle was victorious on 9 July 2022. The crowd of almost half-a-million that flooded Colombo during the day, occupied the Presidential Secretariat and stormed the President’s House, dwindled to about fifteen thousand by nightfall. The main aim of the struggle having been won, they went back home.
Those who legitimately remained in temporary occupation at Galle Face and other liberated official buildings, was the more radical-democratic and leftist ‘System Change’ constituency.
What had triumphed was a justifiable unarmed rebellion focused on and limited to ousting a democratically elected leader who had acted like a despot, violating his mandate and overriding the sensibilities of the citizenry. The people of Sri Lanka taught the people of South Asia and the world a most important lesson, which John Locke had set out several centuries before: that the people have the right to rebel if the ruler violates the Social Contract. Locke justified even armed revolution and civil war under those circumstances, but the Sri Lankan people did it without firing a shot and with a minimum of lethality.
What colour revolution?
Deposed political elements and ultranationalist ideologues denounce the Aragalaya as a ‘Colour Revolution’.
I was a speaker at the special session on ‘Colour Revolutions and Hybrid Warfare: General and Specific Features’ of the 8th Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS), 24-25 April 2019, at the personal invitation of Russia’s Deputy Minister of Defence Colonel General Alexander Fomin (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=830293130648055).
I have little hesitation in dismissing the crassly ignorant denunciation of the Aragalaya as a Colour Revolution.
‘Colour Revolutions’ are organically linked with the Western strategy of ‘Hybrid Warfare’. There are no purely unarmed ‘Colour Revolutions’. They all unfold through a chain reaction of riots and violent, even lethal clashes with the authorities. They all contain an armed subversive, provocative or interventionist element. The Aragalaya didn’t.
No Colour Revolution had a Marxist-Leninist or leftist agency or driving force. The Aragalaya did-the FSP-IUSF-rather similar to the Hartal of August 1953.
The most prominent leading personalities of Colour Revolutions are openly pro-US or pro-EU, usually Western-educated, have attended US-run NGO training programs, or work for Western companies.
By contrast the leading figure of the Aragalaya, so prominent that Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV featured a documentary about him, was Wasantha Mudalige, member of the New Left FSP and (at the time) leader of the Inter-University Student Federation (IUSF), the radical-left oriented, militant, all-island university student movement.
The Aragalaya didn’t belong to the ‘Colour Revolution’ model but to the progressive-populist Occupy Movement model ranging from New York’s Wall Street to the streets of Madrid (the tent cities of which my wife Sanja and I strolled through when I was Ambassador to Spain and Portugal, while based in Paris).
‘Colour Revolutions’ are the latest variant of the US counterrevolutionary strategy of creating domestic disturbances as a prelude to engineering a power-grab. In the 1970s, it was notorious as the policy of ‘Destabilisation’ authored by Dr. Henry Kissinger to ‘make Chile’s economy scream’, and create the conditions for a military coup.
In Sri Lanka in 2022, the economy didn’t ‘scream’ because of what the West did. It screamed because of what the Gotabaya administration did. There was no sign of external ‘de-stabilisation’ but plenty of evidence of ‘self-destabilisation’ (to borrow a phrase from my father Mervyn de Silva regarding the Jayewardene administration in the 1980s) through decisions taken by the ruler.
Another defining marker of a ‘Colour Revolution’ is that the purely domestic factors taken singly or together could not explain the successful outcome of public protests and the scales are tipped by external factors/actions, but in Sri Lanka’s case the chain of causation is clearly domestic.
Mao Zedong insisted that a hen may attempt to incubate a stone but it won’t produce a chicken; it is only if it incubates an egg that a chicken will be the product. He emphasised that an external factor (the hen’s heat) can work only through an internal factor (egg, not stone). The internal factor explains why the Gotabaya presidency was overthrown.
Fidel Castro told Sandinista Co-Founder and Commander Tomas Borge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was ‘a case of suicide, not homicide’. The same is true of Gotabaya Rajapaksa rule.
In the Sri Lankan case, everything that made the people rise up against Gotabaya came from Gotabaya and his administration: the overnight ban on agrochemicals which crashed local agriculture and rural incomes; shelling out $ 50 million for refurbishing old Israeli jets; paying out on ISBs leaving predictably exhausting foreign exchange for essential imports; changing ratios in the composition of the contents of gas cylinders, etc. As the Buddha taught, by himself was he defiled.
Significantly, a ‘brake’ which could have prevented the headlong plunge into the abyss was removed by Gotabaya and his loyalists: the 20th Amendment which stripped his elder brother Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa of his powers and functions, leaving him (as Ranasinghe Premadasa said of himself as PM) with ‘the powers of a peon’. It was the culmination of the long process of a conspiratorial political coup.
During the Aragalaya there were no counter-demonstrations in support of the Gotabaya administration even in the Deep South. Police barricades had to be erected to stop the marching farmers-whose families would have loyally voted for the Rajapaksas for decades-from heading towards Medamulana.
The paranoid ultranationalist allegation that the Sri Lankan army did not act forcefully against the Aragalaya demonstrators due to an externally-driven conspiracy, ignores the rising discontent in the barracks among soldiers who came largely from rural backgrounds and had been informed by their families of the economic devastation and suffering due to Gotabaya’s arbitrary agrochemicals ban. Gotabaya destroyed his own military support base with his irrational fertiliser policy-which may have been wrongly implemented by organic fertiliser producer and JVP-NPPer Asoka Ranwala but wasn’t Ranwala’s idea, and in any case, was sadistically persisted in by Gotabaya despite farmers’ protests.
Any order to the soldiers to fire on demonstrators would have turned into a military rebellion against the Gotabaya regime, leading to slaughter. It is to keep the army intact that serving senior military officers in charge rejected the thinking of the hawkish security bureaucracy.
The ultranationalists’ denunciation of the Aragalaya as a conspiratorial Colour Revolution, damages the interests of Namal Rajapaksa and the SLPP because:
Gotabaya project
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s rule was not the culmination of an organic political history unlike Mahinda Rajapaksa’s. It was the result of a political coup by a network of ultranationalist, pro-Trump, pro-Israeli, Far Right Sri Lankans, including extremist Buddhist monks, ex-military brass and expatriates-some of whom openly applauded Adolf Hitler as a role model in mid-2018, with Gotabaya’s subsequent endorsement, while Mahinda Rajapaksa, Maithripala Sirisena and Dinesh Gunawardena were horrified.
Despite GR’s impressive electoral victory, his rule didn’t have anything like the mass base of a Chandrika Kumaratunga or Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The Far-Right network that constructed the Gotabaya cult from 2012 (‘Gota’s War’) bore suspicious resemblances to those who supported the Islamophobic Sinhala Buddhist organisations that suddenly appeared in the post-war years, weakening Mahinda’s re-election chances in 2015, and reappeared after the 2019 Easter Massacre.
Had Mahinda Rajapaksa supported President Maithripala Sirisena in a re-election campaign in 2019, the resultant administration with MR as PM would never have implemented policies which triggered an Aragalaya nor would an Aragalaya ever succeeded against it.
A Maithri-Mahinda slate was suspected by Mahinda’s siblings to be MR’s ‘Plan A’. A Maithri-Mahinda slate or a Mahinda-backed Chamal or Dinesh candidacy was blown out of the water by the Easter Massacre and Gotabaya’s almost ‘morning-after’ announcement of his Presidential candidacy.
The first mass demonstration on Galle Face against the Gotabaya presidency was by the SJB and culminated with Sajith Premadasa making a challenging speech opposite the entrance to the Presidential Secretariat. What provoked the moderate SJB and its cautious, mild-mannered leader? It was Gotabaya’s threat against the SJB’s Harin Fernando in which he reminded everyone of how he ‘brought Prabhakaran to his feet like a dead dog’.
In the first place that was untrue -GR spoke as if he, rather than Mahinda Rajapaksa (and Sarath Fonseka) had won the war, when the public knew otherwise. Furthermore, if Gotabaya and his extremist followers thought that such arrogant, authoritarian aggression directed at the Southern democratic mainstream, telecast on the evening news, would go without a response from the main parliamentary Opposition, they were wrong. Instead, with that, Gotabaya unwittingly set the Aragalaya ball rolling.
What amazes and appals me is that the Gotabaya Presidency scored two hugely negative ‘global firsts’, with no instigation from any external power-and yet, the ultranationalists in the Opposition insists on the ‘external conspiracy’ theory regarding the Aragalaya.
These two ‘world records’ were:
Did the Gotabaya Government think these choices would have no consequences? Did the Gotabaya cult believe that the citizens of Sri Lanka would put up with such absolutism on the part of a ruler? Do they still believe the citizens should have meekly complied?
Cult vs. church
The old Gotabaya cult hasn’t learnt its lesson. A loquacious ideologue member of the ‘hive’ recently threatened Fr. Cyril Gamini with legal action once a new Government comes into office. That he would openly threaten with future punitive legal action, the current spokesperson of the Sri Lankan chapter of the oldest global organisation (over 2000 years) with 1.4 billion members and a current leader (Pope Leo) who attracted an open-air audience of one million for Mass in Madrid, Spain, indicates a dangerous degree of irrationality.
The suspicions of the Catholic Church and community arose after the Cardinal and clergy had managed to ensure that there wasn’t a violent backlash against Muslims in the aftermath of the Easter Massacre in areas with significant Catholic communities, but a few weeks after the massacre, Muslims were attacked in areas outside the Cardinal’s geographic ‘sphere of influence’ which hardly had any Catholics. CCTV footage showed Police inactivity and the presence among the attackers (some travelling in flatbed trucks) of identifiable ultranationalists, some in monks’ saffron robes. Footage was even featured on RT, Moscow, where I watched it on the newscasts, aghast and embarrassed.
Third Aragalaya
2022 was not the first uprising that Ceylon/Sri Lanka has experienced which resulted in or opened the door to regime change.
The first Aragalaya was the Hartal of August 1953 in which unarmed working people answering the call for non-violent protest by the left parties caused the UNP Cabinet to retreat to a US ship in Colombo harbour, and Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake, popularly elected the previous year (1952), to resign. The 1953 Hartal wave swept Sir John Kotelawela out at the 1956 General Election and SWRD Bandaranaike and his coalition into office.
The second ‘Aragalaya’ was the nationwide uprising of university and school students in November 1976 following the deadly shooting of a Peradeniya University fresher by the Police. The student upsurge converged with a ‘wildcat’ railway workers strike which triggered a General Strike-the consequence being the walkout of the Communist Party from the coalition Government, the loss of the 2/3rds majority in Parliament, and with it any prospect of postponing elections-thus opening the door to the 1977 General Election and electoral burial of the economically disastrous Sirimavo Government.
2022 was the island’s third successful Aragalaya since Independence.
The Aragalaya succeeded because President Gotabaya Rajapaksa violated the laws of ‘political gravity’.
Taking his oaths as President in Anuradhapura, he did two indelible things.
While the Sinhala Buddhists are the preponderant majority in the country, they aren’t the totality. Sri Lanka has/is a multiethnic, multireligious, multilingual, multicultural, i.e., pluralist society. Gotabaya tried to govern a pluralist, heterogenous reality as if was a homogenous, even monolithic one. This caused a structural disequilibrium which made his rule a ‘throne’ with one big leg, not four, and prone to topple.
Refusing to wear the maroon shawl which represented the kurakkan (‘finger millet’) farmers of the Deep South which had been the Rajapaksas’ social base since the 1930s, Gotabaya turned his back on the majority of Sinhala Buddhist working people, i.e., the real majority of the majority.
Unlike for Mahinda and the Rajapaksa elders, Gotabaya’s ‘majority’ was strictly religio-cultural-linguistic, not socioeconomic. Therefore, it was not only the majority of the minorities but also the (socioeconomic) majority of the majority that refused to defend him and turned against him.
The Aragalaya at its zenith on 9 July, represented the plurality of the island’s society-except for the hard-core Tamil nationalist Northern enclave including the Jaffna university, which stubbornly, significantly, stayed separate from the struggle. The Aragalaya was, in that moment of May-July 2022, the authentic, pluralist, overarching, post-war Sri Lankan nation.