Factum Perspective: The Aragalaya, a Year Later – Part I
By N. Sathiya Moorthy
Over a year later, a public debate has begun to brew over whether last year’s Aragalaya was a budding social revolution or a botched-up security lapse, with the armed forces in particular (wantonly?) failing to discharge their duty.
In a way, it is only an academic exercise or a post mortem report, but there are lessons to be learnt from such an exercise, it should not be discouraged either.
Up front in Parliament recently, “ruling” SLPP member and one-time Internal Security Minister, retired rear-admiral, Sarath Weerasekara, focussed near-exclusively on the unprecedented incidents of arson on the evening of 9 May 2022.
In that incident, over a hundred properties belonging to government party leaders from President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, ministers, MPs and local leaders, were torched in what had the imprint of a well-coordinated operation, lasting one to two hours, in multiple locations almost across the country, barring the Tamil North.
Weerasekara referred to two earlier incidents as pointers to the 9 May arson, which was as unprecedented as the Aragalaya struggle was. In the first one on 19 April, the government ordered the arrest of a senior police officer directing his men to open fire at a mob that was setting fire to a fuel bowser.
He claimed that the armed forces stationed nearby refused to intervene despite the police appealing for assistance. The refusal of the army to intervene, and the abject surrender of the government to the mobsters’ call for action against a duty-bound officer demoralised the entire police force, he argued.
The second incident that Weerasekara recalled related to the mob killing of SLPP parliamentarian Amarakeerthi Atukorale and, yes, his police body guard, on the very morning of nation-wide arson, if it could be called so.
Of course, Weerasekara, who is also the chairman of Parliament’s Oversight Committee on Internal Security, seemed to have left out one detail – that on the morning of coordinated arson, his party cadres, who had driven down to capital Colombo in dozens of buses, to dissuade Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa from resigning, as sought by younger brother and President Gota, had beat up everyone and everything in sight, as if to vent out their anger and frustration.
It is another matter that across the city, they got beaten up instead. It is worth remembering that those who attacked the “outsiders” in their buses were holding a long list of registration numbers of those vehicles that had driven in that very morning. Again, a coordinated move, or was it a dry-run for what awaited them all and their leaders only a few hours later?
Though Weerasekara, a rabid Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian contemporary icon, did not actually spell it out, the implication is that but for the failure of the government to pep up the morale of the policemen in those difficult days, and that of the army to rush to the assistance, again of the policemen, things might have been different on the Aragalaya front.
Of course, they could have stopped the “mob occupation” of the President’s official residence and also the burning down of successor Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s personal residence. This is so, even granting that the mass blockade of the President’s Secretariat for days had democratic sanction.
Goal and purpose
Even during the course of the Aragalaya, there were feeble voices that claimed that but for the wanton laxity of the army bordering on dereliction of duty, the mass struggle would not have achieved what it actually achieved – the delayed but overnight exit of President Gota from the country first, followed by his resignation.
The way the people behaved, or did not misbehave (!) when he returned to the country a few weeks later would show that the mass struggle was not about attacking Gota the man but only about having him removed as President. That raised certain questions about the goal and purpose of the protest. Those questions too remain unanswered to date.
Call it a coincidence or what, JVP’s presidential candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake, addressing a political rally in suburban Dehiwala, possibly thought of re-injecting “social revolution” into the national politico-electoral discourse in the long run-up to the presidential poll next year.
According to news reports, AKD, as he is popularly known, claimed that with each passing day, the nation’s “polity makes rapid advances towards a social revolution.” He claimed that “social revolutions cannot be achieved by a change of government. People yearn for the change of social revolution.”
To rub and revive fading memories of what all happened and what more were said during the long weeks of the already-forgotten Aragalaya struggle, the JVP and AKD had all along talked of the mass movement as a “social revolution” for systems-change, and not just government or leadership-change. Even after the successive resignations of Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, and ultimately, President Gotabaya, they kept on chanting the slogan of “social revolution.” Even when Parliament gathered to elect a new President in Gota’s place, and endorsed the SLPP-UNP candidature of Prime Minister and Acting President Wickremesinghe, they stuck to their guns as consistently and as persistently as the JVP alone is known to have done through the past nearly 60 years of the party’s existence, first as an exclusive-insurgency group and later as a mean and lean democratised version.
The timing of Dissanayake’s revived reference to a “social revolution” involving the nation’s polity begs for greater attention. According to some published private mood-of-the-nation poll, he has scaled new heights in popular acceptance levels.
A pollster has claimed that 51 per cent of the nation’s electorate now prefer AKD as the next President. The number is significant, not only because it represents a stand-alone majority, but also because the figure is a little more than the mandated minimum of 50-percent-plus-one vote to become the nation’s first full-fledged socialist President. Whatever be the JVP’s other failings, at least as of now, theirs is the only political party in the country that is a thorough-bred in socialist ideology.
Of course, the tag once belonged to the SLFP and then more so the breakaway SLPP, but for long along the route, their socialist positions got diluted along the way. It does not refer or relate to the inevitability accepting past IMF conditionalities for fiscal assistance from time to time – or, rather, end there.
Of course, the JVP, too, as a part of past SLFP-led dispensations under Presidents Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga, CBK, and Mahinda Rajapaksa, had compromised on certain ideological values, but exited before they had been completely “polluted.”
The question today is if in an effort to scale the impossible height of taking its traditional 3-5 per cent vote-share to a whopping 50-plus per cent, the JVP would have to moderate or compromise on their basic principles, if not ideology per se.
As the nation’s electoral past has shown, only by taking the middle-path have political parties and their leaders captured democratic power. Of course, there is a distant precedent. The first SLFP-led government of 1956, where all left-leaning parties — the JVP was a decade away from its birth – of President S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike called itself a blue-blooded socialist dispensation. Considering that some of his SLFP’s fellow travellers with a more conventional leftist/socialist past had strayed away from international communist ideology and identified with a supremacist cause like the “Sinhala Only” law, the “socialist revolution” had already lost its purity, then and there.
The beauty or pity is that those traditional leftists, from time to time, have been talking about a three-language formula and the like. Whenever any or all of them signed up for an SLFP/SLPP government, they ensured that the ministry of official languages fell under the care of one of them — as if they were proving a point. It is a dichotomy that AKD and the JVP will have to negotiate in the coming weeks, months, and maybe years, if the Sri Lankan voters look elsewhere for a new President, between now and the polling day.
Either they move away from their entrenched leftist position especially on economic issues to the moderate middle-path or convert the larger electorate to their way of thinking through the short and medium path, leaving the longer timespan to negotiate with the self. They need to evaluate which is more achievable and how.
If nothing else, AKD’s willingness to visit the “capitalist, right-reactionary” US, his willingness to meet with US Ambassador Julie Chung and more than once, apart from his expressed willingness to negotiate with the IMF (on re-drafting the conditionalities) if elected President indicate the likely future course that the JVP leadership is willing to take and/or negotiate, even if only up to a point.
When ideas, ideologies and details need to be discussed and decided upon, there could be very many hiccups, but they may all come up with hidden solutions, explanations and justification, however unconvincing by the party’s past predilection.
Success or failure?
All of it pertains still only to the JVP, its future plans, including those for a “socialist Sri Lanka” as visualised and (to be) marketed by them to a nation that is two or three generations away from the JVP’s birth, ideology and methodology. The latter, the party had given up very long ago, with the Sri Lankan State crushing the second and last insurgency of theirs, which culminated in the death of the party / movement founder, Rohana Wijeweera.
The party let its place taken by moderate, democratic politics and elections that were always inclusive, and provided for a new-face JVP, too. Over the past three decades or so, the JVP has found out the usefulness and relevance of the democratic moderation or moderate democracy, but for which, the movement would have been wiped out post-insurgency, as happened to the LTTE on the Tamil ethnic front, postwar, post-elimination of founder Velupillai Prabhakaran, along with hundreds, if not thousands of his last batch of cadres, in May 2009.
When the discourse is still about Aragalaya, the question remains if it was a success or failure, or if it at all achieved what it aimed to achieve. This leads to the prime and preliminary question on the perceived aims and goals of Aragalaya, as thought of and/or indicated by its organisers.
That takes us to an even more rudimentary question: Who were the organisers of Aragalaya? It is now broadly acknowledged that Aragalaya was a self-prophetic, self-motivated mass movement that evolved on its own. Recent examples of the kind can be cited in the ‘Arab Spring”, “Orange Revolution”, etc, in the past decades elsewhere, but their successes (or, failure in some cases) was qualified by claims that the West, particularly the US and its intelligence agencies were behind the scenes, in their commitment to installing or restoring the democratic cause (as the West has understood and propagated in the decades after the two Great Wars in the previous century).
In Sri Lanka’s case, Aragalaya had begun as a house-to-house, street-to-street protest by the capital’s “urban middle class” and the city’s “educated elite”, who over the past several decades, and possibly centuries under the colonial master, had developed a cynical view of things, local. Politics and public administration was on the top of their list. From time to time, INGOs and NGOs funded mainly by the West had fuelled their cynicism.
A section of the local media also played along. It all reflected the deep schism in the attitude and approach of the urban elite on the one hand and the rural masses on the other.
Be it the past governments, capitalist or socialist, their contributions to the nation’s developmental path, especially in education and healthcare, the opening of semiskilled job opportunities to the rural population, and the consequent life-style improvements in subsequent generations, they all have contributed to the creation of a new “rural middle class” in the past decade or so, without the political class especially noticing it. What began as an arithmetic progression achieved geometric scales in this IT era, where communication became the key, not only to achievements but more so to aspirations.
The question is how street-front human chains, if they were that, moved onto the Galle Face Green sea-front, and encircled the President’s Secretariat? Even in the early days of such action, there were no reports of many protestors staying back through the night.
In fact, some social media posts even described it as a beach-front outing for families, as they also brought their children and even infants, in the absence of much else to do. It was a critical, rather derisive way of looking at the real expression of anger, agony and annoyance — all rolled into one — at the Sri Lankan State’s utter failure on yet another front.
Already, the Colombo middle class eternally despised the political class for reasons that they could put their finger on – or, otherwise, too. Yet, food and fuel supply were not on their cards thus far since Independence, though there had been murmurs of protest about the ever-increasing prices. They would satisfy their daily quota of dinner-table discussions or academic expressions by expanding the scope of the internal dialogue to conclude that it was “anyway a global phenomenon” and that they too needed to “learn to live with it… and maybe worse in the coming years.”
Initially, according to reports, the urban middle class panicked when imported milk sachets and then their breakfast staple, namely, bread and other wheat products, began disappearing from store-shelves. It is anybody’s guess how and when Colombo’s upper class and middle class began adopting the European breakfast their own when rice was the island’s staple diet.
It used to be said that in the years immediately before and after Independence, Colombo elites used to pull out their woollens when it was winter in London. In later decades, their numbers grew, and they would dust and dry their woollens when it was winter, across the Atlantic, in Washington, DC.
To that extent, their panic at the sudden exit of their staple diet was understandable. So was their plight when fuel for cooking and driving began scarce first and unavailable not much later.
According to Sri Lankan and foreign journalists, traditional food like puttu, hoppers and spring-hopers and native tea (with or without milk) was very much available deep south and north, without any price-hikes, as they drove down across a country that was familiar to many of them from past visit and reporting. In fact, they were waiting for the “worse thing” to hit the roof as the daily gatherings on the Colombo beach-front began larger, more purposeful and determined, with each passing day.
From nowhere then appeared the “Gotagogama” protest site, a name typically derived from the Sinhala word “gama”, meaning “village.” They were here to stay, until their goals were achieved. It was also when the urbanites began feeling that they had been overwhelmed by people whom they did not know, people whom they had not come across on the streets of Colombo earlier.
Some of them withdrew, others did not want to give up, a few others at least wanted to believe that their presence would moderate the proceedings, as they too feared – and witnessed – things going out of control. From an expression of people’s anger on Galle Face Green, the nation’s prime rallying-point and literally so, to an “acceptable” blockade of the President’s Secretariat to violence and arson, they began finding that something was amiss and had gone totally off their hands and hold.
The question is who were these people? Who led them? Who gave what message(s) to them, why and how? The urbanites, in the early stages, did not have any identifiable goal other than venting their anger and frustration, which had turned into utter helplessness in about a week or fortnight. If someone had told them, or even whispered in their ears that Gota would have to go here and now, they were ready to accept it, their well-nurtured democratic values of generations going out of the window, and with that the process of changing governments and Presidents only through nation-wide elections every five years. This one was going to be different.
N. Sathiya Moorthy is a Policy Analyst and Political Commentator based in Chennai, India. He can be reached at sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com.
Factum is an Asia Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.