In an effort to rally the momentum gathered during the election campaigns, the National People’s Power (NPP) Government launched Clean Sri Lanka as its flagship project on 1 January.
At its opening ceremony, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake announced that the aim of the project was to make Sri Lanka the cleanest country in Asia. Clean Sri Lanka echoes the idea of collective labour or ‘shramadana’ that the NPP likened the election to during its campaign, which captured and amplified the collective anger against the political establishment.
The project resonates with other similar initiatives in the region. Among those regularly cited in commentary over the Clean Sri Lanka project are the Clean India Mission, launched in 2014 as one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first national initiatives, and the Keep Singapore Clean campaign, which was one of Singapore’s first national campaigns under Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
There are other examples that occur with a strong political ideological backing. In China, for example, as a prelude to its Four Cleanups movement in the 1960s, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) carried out the Three-Anti campaign – anti-corruption, anti-waste, and anti-bureaucracy.
In Sri Lanka, there have been past attempts at beautifying the city to remove urban ‘disorder,’ mainly since the end of the war, from cleaning roads and pavements of beggars, the homeless, and stray dogs to displacing urban slum dwellers and unauthorised roadside peddlers.
Two of these ‘projects’ were closely linked to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who during his term as Secretary to the Ministry of Defence led the official urban beautification programme in a highly militarised fashion. This demand has augmented since, and the idea of a clean city became a signature demand of the emerging middle class in the urban and peri-urban areas.
After Rajapaksa was elected President in 2019, the civic ownership of this sentiment was manifest, as hundreds of works of street art and murals were voluntarily painted by mainly youth supporters in an effort to beautify their neighbourhoods.
Language of reform
Clean Sri Lanka is the first time that an official initiative of this nature has been given an English title. The slogan associated with the Clean Sri Lanka project is ‘Beautiful Island, Smiling People,’ an apparent rehashing of the NPP’s presidential campaign theme ‘A Rich Country – A Beautiful Life’.
The rhetoric surrounding Clean Sri Lanka indicates the ‘big tent’ and catch-all nature of the project. This results in the concept of ‘clean’ taking on the form of an empty signifier, which can be attributed many meanings, from eating a healthy diet to making roads safer to preserving traditional ways of life.
The catch-all rhetoric and conceptualisation of the Clean Sri Lanka project can be attributed to the NPP’s cross-class appeal during the two major elections that gave it resounding victories.
However, the demand for a clean city is spearheaded by a sizeable aspirational middle class. This critical electoral mass has, in elections since 2015 through a simple or overwhelming majority, backed different models of system change. This includes the liberal democratic model offered by the ‘Yahapalana’ Government in 2015 to the more authoritarian developmentalist state model under the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency to the social justice movement under the present NPP Government.
Incorporating the rural
The implementation of Clean Sri Lanka is conceptualised in the following manner. These details have been obtained from a powerpoint presentation evidently shown to heads of departments from various ministries in January as part of an awareness-building programme on Clean Sri Lanka.
At the apex is the Clean Sri Lanka Presidential Task Force, comprising 18 (all Sinhala) members. The task force heads the Clean Sri Lanka Secretariat, and the bureaucratic chain of command operates through 24 ministries and the Provincial Council system, through District Coordinating Committees down to the Grama Niladhari Division level.
In order to ensure civic engagement in the project, district- and village-level Clean Sri Lanka sabhas (councils) operating directly under the Clean Sri Lanka Presidential Task Force have been proposed.
In the division of tasks, local-level State institutions are expected to restructure themselves to be open to civic engagement in collaborative planning and prioritisation. The village-level councils are tasked with discussing local policy issues, ensuring ‘approved’ projects are included in local public institutions’ action plans, and reporting the progress and problems to the national Clean Sri Lanka Presidential Task Force.
This creation of parallel structures to the public sector is significant. The perils of bureaucratism have been felt for a long time, and a persistent demand of the emerging post-2009 Sri Lankan citizenry has been for an increased space for civic engagement in administrative structures, especially in terms of collaborative decision-making at the rural level.
Successive governments responded to this demand by establishing parallel civic structures to the bureaucracy, such as ‘Jana Sabha’ in 2011, ‘Grama Shakthi’ in 2016, and ‘Jana Sabha’ again in 2023. The political authority’s desire to increase its legitimacy by hegemonising the civic space was a key driving impulse behind these initiatives. None of these previous efforts saw their fruition due to policy discontinuity and bureaucratic resistance.
The Clean Sri Lanka village councils appear to be the newest step in this direction. During the election period, the NPP set up Grama Niladhari Division-level committees to mobilise voters. If these village level electoral structures are repurposed to serve as Clean Sri Lanka village councils, an increased level of conflation between the politics of the NPP and Clean Sri Lanka could be an outcome.
Middle-class capture
As part of the initial drive of the Clean Sri Lanka project, the Police launched a mediatised operation to remove modifications and fixtures on buses and three wheelers, colloquially called ‘thorombal’ (which means kitsch and gaudy paraphernalia).
This resulted in pushback by bus and three-wheeler taxi owners’ associations, which stated that the Police action was based on an overinterpretation of existing laws on road safety. The drive was subsequently suspended for three months in order to give time for the modifications to be removed.
The implementation of Clean Sri Lanka appears to have taken on a different form to its catch-all rhetoric. The initiative has significant middle-class support, as the lack of ‘discipline’ of public transport operators is framed as the main threat to public safety.
Several other structural issues plague the industry, from the lack of a coordinated timetable for public transport, inability to afford good-quality buses and three wheelers, poor road conditions, outdated regulatory frameworks, and governance institutions immersed in petty corruption.
The anti-‘thorombal’ drive also shows the contestation between more middle-class aesthetic conceptions of ‘sleek,’ ’minimalist,’ or ‘classy’ versus the ‘kitsch’ or ‘gaudy’ taste the middle class associates as one of the markers of the lower-income classes.
Delivering the dream
The NPP’s most prominent articulation of system change during the elections was to clean up the higher echelons of political office and to make the ‘chaura walalla’ (kleptocracy, a system of governance by thieves) accountable.
The first phase of Clean Sri Lanka delays this original mandate and focuses on ‘disciplining’ the lower-income classes. This has an effect of taking the very specific anti-elite critique that the NPP mobilised during the elections, promising to recover stolen money and bring to justice those who were responsible for the economic crisis, and extending it to a ‘whole-of-society’ critique.
There is a politics of who comprises the ‘chaura walalla,’ pre- and post-election. Before the election, NPP candidate Dissanayake succinctly coined the term ‘chaura walalla’ to refer to a close-knit network of politicians, some high-ranking civil servants, and businesses.
Since coming to power, the blame is being ‘democratised’. Among the latest targets are public sector inefficiency, which is portrayed as the key hindrance to policy delivery. Crony businesses, local and foreign, which were once portrayed as corrupt agents of capitalism are now being engaged for pragmatic reasons.
The proponents of Clean Sri Lanka seek to find ‘low-hanging fruits’ where expectations built during the elections can be met for the moment.
Delivering the ‘middle-class dream’ has been a consistent demand that developed in the post-war period. This manifested in a sizeable demographic of an aspirational middle class demanding a system change which caused regime changes in 2015, 2019, 2022, and 2024.
Currently, there are other articulators of this middle-class dream, such as Namal Rajapaksa and Dilith Jayaweera, who have little legitimacy at the moment. Given Sri Lanka’s present economic trajectory and limited fiscal space and time, the delivery of the ‘Singapore dream’ is a tall order.
The NPP is a Government with a large mandate. It is well poised to become the ambassadors of the challenges and limitations of this dream to the grassroots and build a discourse around an alternative model that is able to ‘meet in the middle’.
(Dassanayake is a researcher and policy analyst at Muragala: Centre for Progressive Politics and Policy. Gamage is a researcher in political science at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore)