“A country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the idea to which it gives birth; it is the thought of love, the sense of communion which unites in one all the sons of that territory” – Giuseppe Mazzini 

Power – everybody wants it, but campaigning is not the same as governing; the National People’s Power (NPP) will now be beginning to appreciate this fact of political life. 

Whether you come from the Right or Left of the spectrum, governing from the Centre is a political art. “Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile,” said Tony Blair, one of the poster boys for Third Way Centrism and a key figure in the moderation of the Labour Party. While Jeremy Corbyn attempted to shift the emphasis of Labour back to the working class, it is once again a brand of Third Way that has brought Labour to Downing Street.

The NPP was presented as a Centre-Left progressive organisation; much of its rhetoric was devised around distancing itself from the politics of the past and identifying with a form of ideological purity, especially when it comes to governance. 

However, we already notice a moderated tone; whether with Peter Breuer and his colleagues at a meeting with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or with the campaign promise and manifesto pledge of repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the Interim Government has been more involved with steadying the ship than with its much-advertised system change. 

Governing from the Centre also carries risks, especially for a Left-progressive outfit, as the NPP is purported to be. Sri Lanka’s Centre-Right comprises Ranil Wickremesinghe’s acolytes and some former Rajapaksa acolytes who seem broadly aligned; whether they can become a force in Parliament remains to be seen. 

It is likely the ‘gas cylinder’ will join the Mawbima Janatha Party (MJP), the Dilith Jayaweera vehicle, on some part of the political fringe in Parliament. This foothold will allow that party to once again develop a base of support, but that will be for a later election. 

The NPP juggernaut will seek to take full control of government and many expect it to consolidate the Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) base and even grow it. Certainly, the NPP will need to attract some new voters to ensure it is able to build a coalition; currently, the AKD base comprises mainly of Gotabaya Rajapaksa voters, which is the nationalist base that has consistently backed the winner, at least in my lifetime, beginning with Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (CBK) and subsequently the Mahinda Rajapaksa era through Maithripala Sirisena to Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The Centre-Left nationalist base is the most consistent majority in Sri Lankan politics. 

The Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) has little time left, but whatever time remains must be well spent. Who is the SJB trying to attract and what is its overall product and brand? 

There are certain core features of the SJB; a popular Centrist liberal in Sajith Premadasa alongside his close team of technocrats, economists, and vastly experienced former MPs with reputations intact. The disadvantage of being a Centrist formation is that in a moment of public anger, with emotions running high and a climate that calls for radicalism, there is little a liberal party can offer. 

However, once the insurgents win and begin their moderation, a Centrist party like the SJB can certainly be flexible enough to shift a few paces in either direction from the Centre, meeting the needs of the median Sri Lankan voter without compromising its political foundations.

The disintegration of the Left-of-Centre Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and its replacement, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), means that a broad swathe of the Centre-Left is wide open, some of it now filled by the NPP’s more progressive proponents. It was fascinating listening to former President CBK allude to the media during some recent, brief remarks: that it was her father who first gave voice to the dispossessed Sri Lankan youth.

System change or personnel change?

The SJB, as a Centrist, liberal formation, has the innate flexibility to create attack vectors from both the Right and Left of the political spectrum.

From the Right of the spectrum, the SJB might question the wisdom behind the NPP abandoning divestiture or privatisation of SriLankan Airlines. The Treasury accepted some $ 500 million in SriLankan Airlines loans from State banks with the explicit intention of making the airline more attractive to foreign investors. Completely cancelling divestiture in the current economic context and climate seems to be an ideologically driven decision. 

Airlines like Malaysia Airlines, Thai Airways, South African Airways, Alitalia, and Philippine Airlines, all previously successful brands, have struggled financially and not just due to Covid-19. 

Notwithstanding the arguments for and against divestiture, just consider the context for this decision. An Interim Government of three Cabinet Ministers and no standing Parliament should not be the basis for making such crucial decisions. In the absence of a standing Parliament, where is the deliberative and data-driven approach to governing? Why could this decision not wait until the Parliament is formed? 

The appointment of a new Chairman at SriLankan Airlines, Sarath Ganegoda, a respected member of the business community, is unlikely to change the facts on the ground: oil prices spiked 10% in the aftermath of Israel’s October invasion of Lebanon, threatening an already challenging airline sector. This is before we consider that Ganegoda, with a long career at Hayleys PLC, has a close connection to former MP Dhammika Perera who is closely connected to the Rajapaksa-led SLPP. Hayleys was itself one of the unsuccessful bidders for SriLankan Airlines.  

The appointments of Shani Abeysekara as head of criminal investigations or business tycoon Hanif Yusuf as Governor of the Western Province have garnered sufficient praise. Institute of Democratic Reforms and Electoral Studies (IRES) Executive Director Manjula Gajanayake has already issued a statement regarding the appointment of Abeysekara as the Director of the Central Criminal Intelligence Analysis Bureau due to his having actively campaigned for the NPP. This appointment represents a politicisation of the Police force and also contradicts the NPP’s own pledge to be ‘non-partisan’ in its governance and appointments. 

Aspiration and agony

There are also debates to be had regarding plans for reform and privatisation of the energy sector and telecommunications. The SJB must clearly define its stance on these very specifically while critiquing the NPP more broadly on its as yet ill-defined economic plan. AKD himself explicitly rejected foreign investment in certain sectors and instead called for an exchange of technology whilst on a visit to India’s Amul factory in Gujarat. 

The SJB must take a more pragmatic stance, acknowledging the need to attract foreign capital into tradeable sectors with the kind of ownership structure that will actually entice investors. This must be a long-term strategy of overt and covert technology transfers, not an ideologically narrow vision of investment. 

The AKD Government, even in this interim and limited form, must be pushed to define its plan to ease the burden of a high cost of living – a major driver of dissatisfaction towards the political establishment. The SJB must necessarily frame this as an urgent crisis that requires immediate action. 

AKD now holds an office with extraordinary power, yet he and the NPP more generally, have significantly moderated their discourse on the IMF, and the SJB must act as a counterweight, stressing or reflecting the NPP’s own critique. 

The NPP’s discourse had emphasised its own alternative Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA), a major theme of its campaign and the basis for the NPP’s version of renegotiating the IMF programme and reassessing the debt restructuring deals. Yet this alternative DSA has all but disappeared from the NPP’s rhetoric; it was the NPP that had the most incisive conceptual critique of the IMF and the programme overall. 

There is little worse in a democracy than a political movement abandoning its ideals and diverting from its campaign rhetoric so soon after gaining power. Insurgent candidates and parties that use their rhetoric as a key differentiator but end up governing so far from it must be pushed to the edge of their rationalisations. 

The SJB can frame its own brand of progressivism, not as a reaction to the AKD victory but as a counter. It might refer to Émile Durkheim, a 19th century French philosopher and foundational thinker of sociology who introduced the concept of social ‘anomie,’ a phenomenon of social isolation and degradation that results from economic or political turmoil. 

Specifically, Durkheim discusses the breakdown of trust in and engagement with the institutions of society and the state alongside the impacts of the division of labour on labour solidarity, due to decreased interaction between the different parts and how their lived realities divert from each other. 

This commentary is essential as part of the perspective of those Sri Lankans formerly of the middle-class and how they might feel about their reduced circumstances and the breakdown in their medium-term aspirations. What does this do for the relationship between institutions of the State and the middle-classes? What form might the political radicalisation of this aspirational segment of society take?

The SJB can tap into this segment. AKD voters might not all be NPP voters; some significant portion of Wickremesinghe voters are pro-‘Aragalaya’; many candidates within the SJB can represent some aspect of the aspirational classes, especially in the urban and suburban areas of certain districts. 

Progressive nationalism

The SJB has a base of support among minority communities but, in order to win, must expand its support among moderates in the nationalist base, popularising a more progressive brand of Sri Lankan nationalism that is lacking in our discourse. 

The Sri Lankan nationalist wing envisages a form of nationalism that is chauvinistic, ethnocentric, nativist, and explicitly exclusionary, while the liberal wing has no discernible concept of Sri Lankan nationalism, only a transcultural/liberal vacuum. 

Nineteenth-century political philosopher Giuseppe Mazzini was part politician and part revolutionary, playing a key role in the development of republicanism in Europe and leading part of the movement for the unification of Italy. 

What distinguishes Mazzini’s form of nationalism from what we might recognise today is that his conception of the nation state was of one that is essential to the progress of humanity, and that such units, though sometimes necessarily ethno-political, would be the basis for a form of self-rule beyond the oppressive structures of monarchy. 

“So long as a single one amongst your brothers has no vote to represent him in the development of the national life, so long as a single man, able and willing to work, languishes in poverty through want of work to do, you have no country in the sense in which country ought to exist – the country of all and for all.”

The SJB must utilise a form of nationalism that might even challenge the NPP’s own vision. Note that the NPP, as a moderation of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), has proposed the full implementation of the 13th Amendment and the abolition of the executive presidency while muting its critique of Indian interventionism and supremacy in the region. 

In a Sri Lankan context, Tamil self-determination and the 13th Amendment are bound together because of Indian intervention through the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987. No political party has successfully distanced itself from the ‘accord’ while maintaining a substantive push for self-determination within a unitary state. This might risk the support of mainstream Tamil parties who have been pushing towards a federal model of government, but politics is about finding the right balance.  

Mazzini’s more idealistic concept of nationalism based on a collective sense of duty rather than the pursuit of power or a more abstract national interest can fit perfectly into a Centrist or Left-of-Centre discourse. Such a conceptualisation of nationalism could enhance the SJB’s pro-governance mantra. 

It would have been ideal for the SJB to construct a governance policy document that was just as central to its political campaign as its ‘Economic Blueprint,’ one that spells out explicitly why an SJB-led government would be far superior to the NPP, both conceptually and technically. Blending an all-encompassing governance document with some form of Mazzinian nationalism would differentiate the SJB from its rivals. 

What is clear is that the SJB is once again confronted with a political wave at a General Election. Part of that wave has already crashed on to the shores in the form of AKD’s victory and its accompanying excitement. 

The SJB must not oppose this organic feeling of excitement but instead should feed into it and become part of it. It has a vibrant, experienced, and qualified field of candidates, but instead of being disparate units, these candidates must engage the campaign as a collective, as representatives of a ‘team’ ethos, the one we heard so much about during the Presidential Election. It is time for that team to deliver for the people. 

(The writer has 15 years of experience in the financial and corporate sectors after completing a Degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of Kent [UK] and also holds a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Colombo. He is a media presenter, resource person, political commentator, and foreign affairs analyst. He is also a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. He can be contacted via email: kusumw@gmail.com and X: @kusumw)