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A lazy Western media narrative on how and why Sri Lanka came to be inflicted by a catalogue of financial, social and Rule of Law catastrophes, most recently reflected in Bloomberg’s opinion piece by Ruth Pollard on ‘How Four Powerful Brothers Broke an Island Nation’ (March 18th, 2022), is significant in what it omits more than what it says.

‘Breaking’ the Sri Lankan nation

Pollard may have been better served by titling her writing, ‘How Sri Lanka’s Greedy and Incompetent Politicians of all Shades Destroyed a State’ or more to the purpose, ‘How a Nation of Fools Continually Elected Worse Fools to Fool Them – And Fell Upon Their Collective Swords.’ Satire aside, this piece is tiringly familiar. So we are told that, ‘In just over two years, Sri Lanka’s first family has presided over a series of crises mostly of its own making.’ From that gripping start, we are taken to ‘ill fated fertiliser bans,’ ‘foreign currency crises’ with the commentary making the centre of Rajapaksa power as its core critique.

This is eminently justifiable, I may hasten to add. President Gotahaya Rajapaksa’s cry this week that he is ‘not to blame’ calls to mind an unruly child complaining to his parents rather than the Head of State taking responsibility for ruinous policy failures that has cost us dearly. His brother, Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa’s injunction to the public, ‘not to think too far ahead’ as he returned with the state begging bowl from India is more of the same coin. That said, it is the bits that are omitted in the Bloomberg essay which are important. These omissions are reflective of a dangerous superficiality that is indicative of a general pattern. As such, that must be countered.

First and foremost, let it be said clearly that the Rajapaksas do not have the prerogative of ‘breaking’ the Sri Lankan nation. That ugly distinction belongs to the country’s entire political spectrum and beyond, with few exceptions if at all. It visits each and every President, each and every Prime Minister during the past few decades, counting also, a Chief Justice or two and the clergy into the bargain. It reaches out to the country’s professionals, in law, medicine and other disciplines, in media and civil society. All these worthies who hitched their wagons to failing stars of failing politicians, a Kumaratunga, Rajapaksa, Wickremesinghe or Sirisena as the case may be, must accept responsibility.

Systemic fault lines, not familial politics alone

For the perfect storm of disasters that we now face has been long predictable. Those of us who continually raised warnings, irrespective of Governments in power at various times, were castigated as cynics and doomsayers. Regardless, deep fault lines in a formidably corrupt and racist political establishment which crosses Rajapaksa lines, must be acknowledged at least now. That is the central missing element in Bloomberg’s Friday essay in its eagerness to latch on to the obvious bogeyman. Indeed, that is the reason why ‘yahapalanaya’ (2015-2019) was doomed for failure, if the writer had probed deeper.

Not understanding this reality was the fundamental mistake by those in embassies stationed in Colombo as well as Western governments in uncritically applauding the advent of ‘yahapalanaya’ in 2015. While this delighted movers and shakers behind that ‘regime change,’ its end was writ large on the wall from the start itself.  Predictably, the Bloomberg analysis contains a woefully inadequate one-liner to the ‘yahapalanaya’ era. This is why criminal prosecutions of emblematic killings of civilians during the conflict years did not go beyond dormant files in the Attorney General’s Department, between 2015-2019. This is also why bribery and corruption prosecutions of Rajapaksa frontliners later collapsed by the wayside with basic lack of due diligence by officers of the Bribery and Corruption Commission in failing to obtain signatures of the Commissioners.

Systemic failures in political systems, in legal systems and now, finally, in financial systems have brought us to this state. In place, what we have is a highly effective patronage network that is, at once both infinitely simplistic and infinitely sophisticated, if the obvious oxymoron may be forgiven. Crudely put, that network is governed by the mantra of ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your’s’ whether in government or in opposition. Pollard pronounces with relish that ‘75% of the budget is under the control of Rajapaksa Ministers in government. It is dynastic politics at its purest.’

Our Brand is Crisis

That does not have the same ring when the focus is boringly of systems, institutions and collective political failures. That bit about dynastic politics is true. But that is a truth that an A-level student would realise. The actual underpinnings of how that dynasty came about runs deeper than a superficial story of how a man, three brothers, three sons and numerous relatives came about to have an iron grip on a country. That said, her closing point is telling; ‘with a two-thirds majority in Parliament and elections not due until 2024 and 2025, opposition protests are unlikely to loosen the family’s grip on power…’

This is an assessment that many Sri Lankans would (albeit reluctantly) agree with. As children starve for want of food and mothers collapse in queues waiting for cooking gas, this is a singular version of ‘Our Brand is Crisis’ (2015), the dark political drama which chronicled manufactured political chaos as a vehicle to a radical capture of the State. What is currently taking place in Sri Lanka speaks to a more sinister pattern in play than mere gargantuan political incoherence. In recent months, individuals have been visiting homes, handing over forms purporting to be issued from police stations but with no stamp, seal or identification. These require homeowners to include names, identity card numbers and contact phone numbers.

What is the purpose of these forms? What is the issuing authority and under what provision of the law are these details being asked? For sure, candlelight protests across Colombo asking the President to ‘go, go, go’ if he cannot govern, are well and good. But it is not enough by any means that the (bad) 20th Amendment is replaced by the (less bad) 19th Amendment. With systems and institutions unreformed, we will only have a repeat of 2015-2019, with this same constitutional circus back in town along with its clowns, heaven forbid. Neither does the answer lie in a band of the Rajapaksa regime’s ‘loyal and the faithful’ toiling over a constitution with little answers to a nation in crisis.

Constitutions cannot be drafted in secret. This was true in 2015 as it is in 2022. And placing foolish faith in a ‘leader’ as a figurehead of ‘political change’ or engaging in hunts for ‘Common candidates’ most of whom are as ‘common’ as they can get, has been demonstrably futile. The answer lies elsewhere. Reform movements must challenge a corrupt political establishment, comprising the Government and the collective Opposition alike. The sole purpose and objective must be the cleansing of systems of governance, including and most importantly, the institutions of law and the judiciary.

Public bitterness and a new beginning

To be clear, we are not talking of “Arab Springs’ or ‘100 days performances’ with the inevitable international realpolitik that these phrases give rise to. Crucially, the vehicles of racism and communalism on which Sri Lankan politicians periodically rode to power must be discarded. Perhaps the commonality of the awful prospects of starvation may bring that point home to desperate Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims waiting in the same queues for fuel, diesel, cooking gas and milk powder. The bitterness with which they lament on how they have been beguiled by false promises of men and women of straw is real.

That may yet form a new beginning for a new Sri Lanka.