Fixing Sri Lanka’s deep-rooted problems will be NPP’s real test

Each day begins with renewed hope in Sri Lanka as the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition government gets to work following the resounding two-thirds majority it secured in the November 14 parliamentary election.

However, the NPP has been subdued in celebrating its victory, just as it was after the coalition won the presidential election on September 21. The coalition also avoided all pomp and elaborate ceremonies ahead of the parliament session on November 21. The NPP clarified that this was no time for ostentation or celebrations as the country was still trying to mitigate the effects of the economic crisis. All these have been widely welcomed by the people.

A shift in power

The ascendency of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the NPP, the coalition led by it, to power marks a clear shift in direction for Sri Lanka. The JVP has never been in power before but has often spoken about the common man’s rights and had claimed that the party was led by communist ideals. This is the first time a single combination has achieved a brute majority under the proportional representation system.

In fact, after the election, the JVP-led coalition has gone from 3 seats in the last parliament to an unprecedented super majority in the 10th parliament. The NPP won 159 seats in all, including the seats allocated to it by way of proportional representation. Its nearest rival is the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), which won 40 seats. A very distant third is the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), the party that represents the Tamils of the North and the East, with 8 seats.

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“We did not just clean parliament, we bulldozed it,” Trade Minister Wasantha Samarasinghe said, soon after the results were announced. While congratulating the NPP and the President, former Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka made it a point to highlight that the election “marks a decisive shift as the era of old politics that ignored the public’s call for meritocracy and clean governance comes to a close”.

Ranawaka was pointing to the fact that both the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP), long-standing players in the island nation, have been obliterated. The SLFP has no seats in parliament, and the UNP has one. The political party formed by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa after gutting the SLFP—the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, which secured a majority of 145 seats in the 2020 parliamentary election—was reduced to 3 seats (including 1 national list seat) in the 225-member parliament this time. The UNP’s offshoots are the SJB and the New Democratic Front (NDF). The SJB retains its place as the main opposition party while the NDF, supported by former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, has managed only a single digit.

Despite the massive mandate and the temptation to accommodate key performers, the NPP has managed to keep the Cabinet size in check. The new 22-member Sri Lankan Cabinet was sworn in on November 18, with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake retaining the key ministries of defence, finance, planning, and digital economy. This lean Cabinet is a clean break from the past. Soon after winning the presidential election in September, the NPP had appointed only its members to the Cabinet—three in all—and the President dissolved the parliament to call early elections.

On November 21, Dissanayake appointed 29 Deputy Ministers. The Cabinet, which has professionals, activists, and career politicians, is aimed at “marking a transformative chapter for the nation”, the President’s Media Division said. Of the 159 MPs that the NPP has, as many as 145 are first-time MPs.

After the Cabinet was formed, a former activist who participated in the Aragalaya (the June 2022 protest that led to the ouster of Gotabaya Rajapaksa) and who was among those rejected by the people told the media: “Now you [NPP] have no choice but to walk the talk. You have a two-thirds majority.” No member of the People’s Struggle Movement, which conducted the June 2022 protests, was elected in the parliamentary election. This is a clear indication that there was a wave in favour of the JVP, an established political formation, because it had never formed a government since the Sri Lankan independence.

It helps that almost all the members of the Cabinet, including the President, are from humble backgrounds. Dissanayake was born in a village, Thambuttegama. His father was a marginal farmer and his mother, a housewife, and they lived in a rented house. He attended a local village school, became a student activist after 1987, and came to the limelight when he forcefully opposed the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement. Dissanayake speaks only in Sinhala, but his campaign was effective even in north Sri Lanka, where Tamil is spoken, because he had a translator. He speaks with the ease of a preacher, picking up from where he left off and not wandering from his line of argument.

The coalition picked a woman academic with a doctorate in social anthropology, Harini Amarasuriya, as Prime Minister soon after the presidential election. She was one of the three MPs in the parliament, and the NPP did not want to induct anyone from outside. Soon after the parliamentary election in November, Amarasuriya, who won with the second highest number of preferential votes in Sri Lankan history, was reappointed as Prime Minister. She is also the first woman with no family members in politics to become the Prime Minister.

A day after the Cabinet formation, Dissanayake met a delegation from the IMF and held discussions on the path to economic recovery. “I stressed the need for a balanced approach that addresses citizen hardships and restores public trust. Our focus: tackling child poverty and malnutrition, supporting the differently abled, and fighting corruption with stringent reforms,” the President noted in a statement later.

Given the way things have unfolded, the minorities have much to look forward to. For example, the election of an Indian-origin Tamil, Ambika Samuel, from Badulla, is being hailed as a major achievement for the plantation Tamils. In fact, in the hill country where most of the Tamil plantation workers reside, the NPP made significant gains. In Nuwara Eliya, the NPP won five of the eight seats, while the SJB won two and the UNP, one. But there is no Muslim representation in the Cabinet, and this has drawn a lot of criticism. “The JVP has always had a Sinhala nationalist spine, and the new improved NPP remains the same,” Sarah Kabir, a voter, said on social media platform X.

Representation of minority

There is hope in the Tamil areas as well, given the fact that there were no racial undertones in most of the speeches and messages during the campaign period. Ahead of the last presidential election in 2019, an enormous amount of money was spent on pushing the narrative that the minorities, both the Muslims and Tamils in Sri Lanka, were the reason for all the problems in the country.

“The optimistic view is that a broad cross section of Sri Lankan voters have realised that ethnonationalist politics have not been in their interest, even if the rhetoric was seductive,” said David McKinnon, a former diplomat who served in Sri Lanka. “The reality of governing in the face of sustained economic crisis will be very different than campaigning. Nonetheless, the new government certainly has an opportunity to take the country beyond the tragedy of its governance since independence, and that should be welcome,” he added.

It has to be noted that for the first time in the island nation’s history, the Tamils in the Northern Province district of Jaffna have voted for the JVP, a Sinhala-Buddhist party. Tamils ignored the bickering Tamil political parties, signalling a fundamental change in the way politics is conducted in Sri Lanka. The NPP won in Vanni and Jaffna, both hard-line Tamil areas. It now has an opportunity to prove that it can adopt a different approach with minorities.

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In Jaffna, the NPP won three seats with others: the ITAK, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, and an independent group. Although there are over 5.93 lakh registered voters in Jaffna, only about 3.25 lakh turned up at the booth. Nearly 10 per cent of the votes (over 32,000) were rejected because the voting is a complicated process. In all, over 5 per cent of the votes were rejected across the island. Former Foreign Minister M.U.M. Ali Sabry had this word of advice for the new government: “Let this be the moment when Sri Lanka turns the page and fulfils its promise as a nation united in purpose, enriched by diversity, and inspired by its shared vision…. May the new government and President Anura Kumara Dissanayake draw upon the courage, wisdom, and foresight required to lead us toward true reconciliation, peace, and progress.”

Kaniyan Pungundran, editor of Jaffna Monitor, a publication that concentrates on Tamil issues, in his note, underlined the fact that Sri Lanka had “undergone a seismic political transformation.” He added: “The parliamentary election of 2024 will be immortalised as the epoch when the populace obliterated the deeply entrenched ramparts of ethnicity, religion, caste, and class.”

There has always been a huge distance between words and action when it comes to issues concerning minorities in Sri Lanka. This time, the NPP has made the right noises about them. This means the people of the North and the East will be watching every step of the new government to see if it delivers on its promises.