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Dr. Chamindra Weerawardhana is a political and international affairs researcher and analyst. She has taught in France, the Netherlands, UK and Canada. She is also a political organizer and human rights advocate, focusing on intersectional feminist and de-colonial practices. 

Devana Senanayake is a journalist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She focuses on labor from a marxist perspective. Her articles have been published in the Washington Post, The Guardian, Aljazeera and Foreign Policy. 

For issue #96 of The Internationalist, Weerawardhana and Senanayake write how a potential NPP victory in Sri Lanka's 2024 election could signify a shift from the traditional elite-led politics to a more inclusive, grassroots movement. 

Sri Lankans will go to polls on 21 September 2024, to elect the country’s ninth executive president. The National People’s Power (NPP), a political coalition led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and several left-leaning partners including the Progressive Women’s Collective (PWC), has emerged as the front-runner. 

In recent years, a number of factors have led to a complete standstill in Sri Lanka. A history of structural problems such as a budget deficit, current account deficit, and decades of external debt, primarily from International Sovereign Bonds, had been instituted by successive governments. External shocks such as a constitutional coup in 2018, Easter Sunday terror attacks in 2019 and the pandemic created fissures in the system. Bad domestic decisions such as the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration’s fertilizer ban, the payment of external debt from foreign reserves, and the Ukraine-Russia war all coalesced into a severe economic and political crisis in 2022. In response, an unprecedented mass movement called the aragalaya (struggle), ran for several months in Colombo’s Galle Face Green. 

This popular movement called for the dismissal of all 225 members of parliament and an overhaul of Sri Lankan politics. Members of the smaller Marxist parties, such as the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) and Inter-University Students Federation (IUSF), could be seen in the protests as they led marches, held teach-ins and brainstormed tactics to meet core demands. While the state brutally suppressed the protests and the political class retained their hold on the country, the space that opened up for radical action has continued. It is in this space that the NPP has risen as a major contender and has since then, consolidated its support base across the island. 

Today’s NPP is best classified as a considerably bourgeois and cosmopolitan party. However,  the presence of radical coalition partners in the alliance heralds the arrival of a transformative political climate in South Asia’s teardrop-isle. 

The Rise of NPP 

Unlike India, Ceylon’s ‘independence’ process lacked a mass movement and happened constitutionally—it received Dominion Status in 1948. Parties depending on the personality of their leaders did not formulate clear positions or policies in the form of manifestos. Instead, political parties ran on informal relationships, such as family, and lacked formal mechanisms for the election or disposal of leaders. As a result, authority has been concentrated in the hands of an aristocratic political elite. In the post-colonial context, the country is a malformed democracy that has undercurrents of feudalism.

Politics has been a game of musical chairs, whose primary players were the center-right United National Party (UNP) and the center-left Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In such a context, the NPP represents a marked departure from this brand of elite politics and includes members from a variety of socio-political backgrounds. Notably, the NPP’s presidential candidate and JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD), hails from a rural hinterland in the North-Central province. The public discontent of the elite, borne out of the protests, has been to the benefit of the NPP. In this sense, a potential NPP victory in the September 2024 presidential election could see the passing of the baton from the old elite to everyday people. 

The JVP first came to being in the mid-1960s when the old left in Sri Lankan politics joined ruling coalitions. Over the years, the party has had a turbulent impact on Sri Lankan politics, mainly through the youth insurrections it orchestrated in 1971 and 1988–89. On both occasions, the JVP was violently suppressed, with many party members subjected to physical and sexual violence. The state’s anti-JVP counter-insurrection in 1988–89 led to the assassination of JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera in November 1989. Recovering from this state-sponsored repression, the JVP re-emerged in the mid-1990s, securing one parliamentary seat at the 1994 general election. At the general election in 2000, the JVP won 10 parliamentary seats in the island’s 225-seat unicameral parliament. In the years that followed, they emerged as a significant third force in Sri Lankan politics. 

In 2019, the JVP created the NPP, a coalition composed of 21 partners, including political parties, trade unions, women’s groups, youth groups and civil society organizations. One of its most prominent coalition partners is the PWC which has revolutionized women’s political mobilization on the island. This includes zooming in on issues such as unpaid care labor, the inclusion of vulnerable members such as (dis)abled and elderly people in policy and the creation of a care economy. 

The NPP was, by and large, an effort to expand the JVP’s traditional petit-bourgeois vote base. This strategy bore little fruit at the 2020 general election, with the NPP securing only three seats in parliament. In its present iteration, it has morphed into a bourgeois, cosmopolitan political party. As a result, they have compromised some of their revolutionary ideals to appeal to circles such as executives, industry leaders and entrepreneurs. 

Challenges

Most importantly, AKD is far from marketable to the island’s ethnic minorities, primarily the Tamils. Many in the Tamil community are dismayed by the JVP’s dismal record of racism, especially its vehement opposition to the 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution, a by-product of the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord. In the mid-2000s, the JVP again opposed a negotiated settlement to the National Question. JVP also backed Mahinda Rajapaksa, a Sinhala supremacist, in the 2005 presidential election. There have been limited means to contextualize or apologize for these stances to present-day voters. 

The NPP also does not have the support of Muslim parties such as the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, National Congress and All Ceylon Makkal Congress. They have no Muslim representatives in their frontline and only appeal to them by mere lip service.

Women who joined the NPP in recent years and older male members of the JVP seem to be unable to reach a consensus on policies. Historically, the JVP, like other Marxist parties in the Indian subcontinent, has had a patriarchal hierarchy. Despite the substantive progress made by PWC through its series of conferences entitled “Gahanu Api Eka Mitata” (We, The Women, As One Whole) over the last year, representation and inclusion inside the party are limited. While the JVP’s 6-member Politburo does not include any women, its 28-member Central Committee only has two women members. The NPP’s 73-member Central Committee has only 8 women members. The inclusion of younger and more progressive comrades has led to an internal divide. 

This is reflected in their policy on the sex trade, for example. The NPP supports partial decriminalization, but not full decriminalization such as the abolition of the Brothel Ordinance that prosecutes those that “keeps or manages or acts or assists in the management of a brothel”. Instead, they intend to abolish the material conditions that lead people to the sex trade. This is a fair position if backed by a clear economic plan that seeks to end economic precarity, provide an alternate safety net and connect vulnerable people to essential resources such as social housing and social protection. The better option is to decriminalize the sex trade completely and enshrine it under existing labor mechanisms such as pro-labour tribunals so that the laborers are in control and could then unionize around their demands. 

While AKD’s 24-year track record as a member of parliament fits the bill—he is a Sinhala Buddhist man from the Goigama (farmer) caste, criteria that are generally perceived as necessary for a head of state. Yet, the JVP’s legacy as a violent militant outfit continues to haunt the Southern provinces. Memories of murdered family members and enforced disappearances initiated by the state in the counter-insurrection also play a part in their collective psyche.

Can the NPP win?

In recent years, an avalanche of events such as the end of the Civil War in 2009, Rajapaksa-led repression, and the NPP’s strategic organizing have lightened the toll of their past.

In their manifesto release, the NPP spoke extensively about Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “social contract”, particularly in the post-aragalaya climate that rejected the ruling classes in 2022. They characterized it as a document borne out of “public consultations”, a full departure from previously released documents that failed to consider the existing material realities and made false promises. The NPP spoke as if AKD’s bid for the presidency could herald a “renaissance”, or rebirth from the dual economic and political crises. 

Nevertheless, there are doubts about AKD’s ability to secure a majority in the first count. For one thing, the party has failed to formulate a clear path to transitional and retributive justice, crucial to securing the Tamil vote. Measures are also needed in their policies to stimulate economic development in the North-East such as demilitarization, the return of occupied land, an end to the repression of social movements and assistance for victims of microfinance schemes. 

While the NPP’s stance on a cabinet composed of 25 ministers is commendable, there needs to be more clarity on the appointment of members to these ministries and an announcement of a potential prime minister in advance of a parliamentary election. When it comes to foreign affairs, Sri Lanka’s old political elite has clear bilateral allies: the incumbent president is a close ally of the USA, Japan and India. Who are the NPP’s allies? Historically, Sri Lanka has had a non-aligned stance on foreign policy. With the current socio-political climate, this has become more complicated but the debt crisis has exposed the need for a decolonial and feminist foreign policy that prioritizes the subaltern. 

Unlike the US and Europe, Sri Lankan elections are not a contest of ideas—they cannot be secured by merely checking ideas out of a checklist or mediocre catchphrases. Sri Lankan politics is a complex dance of elites, party politics, the industrial-aid complex, trade unions and religious actors. There are backdoor deals, proxy candidates to create confusion and tools for instability such as election violence. It is unclear if the NPP is ready to navigate this complex domain and meet further challenges that are invisible to everyday eyes. The incumbent president entered the parliament through the National List and became prime minister and then president, despite the loss of his seat and his entire party in the 2019 presidential elections. This speaks volumes about the invisible hands and hidden trapdoors of the Sri Lankan political landscape. 

Why should the NPP win? 

In July 2022, trade unions, student unions and young people broke into the chambers of the Presidential Secretariat, President’s House and the prime minister’s residence. Authority, for the first time, in the country’s post-independence history, could be held tangibly by the masses. Former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, “Gota”, fled the country in response. When Wickremesinghe became president, he crushed the Gota Go Gama (Gota Go Village), the apex of protests and the proletarian spirit entrenched in it. 

Interestingly, the parliament, built in the Regional Modernist style, has been positioned on an island in the midst of a lake and has the illusion of symmetry—just like the country's so-called ‘democracy’. With an NPP victory, they can break this facade, crack the glass ceilings and open up ornate chambers of the parliament to truly radical parties. This includes the FSP and People’s Struggle Alliance which can, in turn, initiate the radical transformation of Sri Lankan society.

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