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On a dusty road from Monaragala to Siyambalanduwa in the Uva Province where scenes of extraordinary natural beauty contrast with the extreme poverty of the population, a man sitting idly by his small tea shop tells me a few days ago that, ‘…these Presidents and Ministers in Colombo do not even know that we exist. We have lost everything. Now we do not care what happens to us, we only want to teach them a lesson.’

Bitterness in the North and the South

That quick burning anger, in a nutshell, will determine the trajectory of the results of Sri Lanka’s Presidential Elections, September 2024 as ballot boxes are transported to counting stations even as these words are penned. Listening to him speak, I was forcibly reminded of the same desperation on the faces of the Wanni’s Tamil mothers fifteen years ago as they wailed, searching for their children whom they said, ‘…were innocent but had been arrested by the army, never to be seen again.’

That anger was both coruscating and overridden by hopelessness in the aftermath of the Government’s bloody victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009. It was as if they knew already that there was no point exhibiting their grief and calling for answers, yet they had no choice but to do so. Following Sri Lanka’s economic collapse in 2022 under the disastrous Presidency of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and despite being ethnicities, languages and cultures apart, the Sinhalese of the South through to Uva and the Central highlands, have that very same bitterness in tone as they bewail their plight.

That this fate had been brought about by a Rajapaksa President, a ‘warrior leader’ who they believed, ‘saved them from the Northern invader’ and would usher in a golden future for the ‘chosen Sinhala Buddhist faithful’ made their plight all the more bitter. Now, caught up in a karmic battle to correct the ‘injustice’ done to them by the ‘men in Colombo who do not know that they exist, they say, ‘we will let them know that we exist, that we have power even though we are poor.’

‘Who can we believe in?’

But even as that sentiment is being articulated, they also recognise that the miracles promised by the men competing for their votes, ranging from bringing about a ‘thriving nation, a beautiful life’ (National Peoples’ Power) or ‘eradicating poverty’ (Samagi Jana Balavegaya or the SJB) as the case may be, are far from realistic. Whoever is elected as the nation’s 9th Executive President in the coming days, Sri Lanka’s mountain of debt will be a heavy burden on each citizen, their children and generations to come. That sobering reality is felt hard on the ground.

‘Who can we believe in?’  the tea kiosk owner in Monaragala asks despairingly, ‘Earlier it was the leaders of the United National Party (UNP), Jayawardene and Premadasa who developed these areas, then we thought that Mahinda Rajapaksa who won the war, would lift us up but now, what do we have left?’ To that extent, the difference in the voter turnout in Sri Lanka’s South between the (exuberant) presidential polls of 2019 and the (lesser percentages) in 2024 is starkly illustrated.

Even more to the point, a ‘system change’ that was the demand of the 2022 peoples’ protests (the ‘aragalaya’) can only sit uneasily on the head of whoever wears Sri Lanka’s Presidential crown in the coming days. Deeply entrenched corruption by the political class, decades of non-governance glossed over by majoritarian fear mongering and vainglorious political projects that have had little development impact are too much a part of that ‘system’ to be ‘changed’ by one political party alone.

That requires a sustained effort by the few remaining ‘great and the good’ across the Government and the Opposition (whichever party forms either) in the coming Parliamentary elections.

Is the NPP suffering from amnesia to score political points?

But the vicious jockeying for power between the contenders will not allow that. This is clearly evidenced by the manner in which contenders change their positions on matters of fundamental national importance.  One particular example was NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s startling pronouncement in the closing days of his election campaign that, ‘former)President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was not at fault, he is innocent, it is (President) Ranil Wickremesinghe who must be held responsible for the consequential economic crisis, Gotabaya is only a scapegoat.’

But as we may remind him and his band of loyal followers, this was not the mantra that Dissanayake’s party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) chanted when they waved flags outside the Presidential Secretariat in 2022, demanding Rajapaksa’s ouster.

That chaos was brought about, as we may recall, by a series of disastrous missteps taken by the Rajapaksa regime including its failure to approach the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in time to prevent the calamitous collapse of the currency and imposing asinine policies that destroyed the country’s agricultural base including an overnight ban on the use of chemical fertiliser.

Has the JVP/NPP suffered amnesia in regard to these sequence of catastrophic events, we may ask with reason? Such politically charged shifts in rhetoric do not bode well for the party’s commitment to ‘principled’ leadership. On the part of the SJB, the fact that it accepted compromised members of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa ranks into its party and put tarnished former parliamentarians of the UNP who justified the infamous ‘yahapalanaya’ bond scam (2015-2019) of the Wickremesinghe Government is scarcely reassuring either.

Giving ‘the devil’ his Presidential due

That being said, Sri Lankans may be deservedly proud of themselves that, at the close of polling day this Saturday, incidences of election violence were remarkably low. Despite dire predictions of disorder and the amusingly routine pattern of Colombo’s supermarkets being ransacked in the days before the polls by anxious citizens fearing an upsurge in violence, the Sri Lankan voting public showed maturity in their behaviour during a highly emotive election.

This political maturity must continue in the tumult of the post-election weeks when victory and defeat is declared and the result percolates to the party ranks in Sri Lanka’s hinterlands where village rivalries may be used for revenge attacks. To that end, incumbent President Ranul Wickremesinghe must be given his due when he declared after casting his vote that, ‘we have stabilised the government, brought about this state where an election can be peacefully held. I am happy that I was able to contribute to that.’ Even his detractors must agree with that claim.

And whatever may be the final result, my conversationalist in Monaragala put it very well when he said that, ‘how can the land prosper when the difference between the powerful and the powerless is so great? That has to be changed.’  That call will be all the more powerful when the Sinhalese realise as to how much their woes and grief is shared by the Tamils and the Muslims, all victims of historic power rivalries between Sri Lanka’s rulers to a greater or lesser extent. In that context, there are no ‘majority’ and ‘minorities’ in the land, political rhetoric apart.

Certainly, the slow and painful road to democratic rule must start with the call for justice, common to the people of the North and the South.

That should have been the inspiring core taken forward from the ‘aragalaya’ protests in 2022.  It is still not too late, even now.