“Hope is a dangerous thing,” Red (played by Morgan Freeman) tells Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) in the movie The Shawshank Redemption. “Hope can drive a man insane,” he adds. Andy does not react, but he leaves a letter for Red to find, much later: “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, may be the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

If there is one word that defines the people of Sri Lanka today, it is hope. Hope in a new President and hope for a better future for them after the presidential election of September 21 saw Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the candidate of the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, emerge as the winner.

Dissanayake, who heads the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), contested the 2019 presidential election and garnered just over 3 per cent of the votes. A mere five years later, he added nearly 40 per cent of votes and emerged the winner after the second round of counting on September 22—a feat that many dub an electoral miracle.

“I am not a magician,” Dissanayake said soon after the election results made it clear that he would be sworn in as President. But, he would strive to do his very best to live up to the expectations of the people, he added. In fact, hope is the buzzword in Sri Lanka currently, something that a popular meme seemed to capture succinctly. It read—in Sinhala, Tamil, and English, the three languages spoken in the island nation—“We got freedom from the British on February 4, 1948; we got freedom from the bandits on September 21, 2024.”

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At the end of the first round of counting, Dissanayake was ahead with 42.31 per cent of the votes and Sajith Premadasa, head of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) alliance and Leader of the Opposition, was in second place with 32.76 per cent. A candidate has to get 50 per cent plus one vote to win. At the end of the counting of the preferential votes, Premadasa (1,67,867) was ahead of Dissanayake (1,05,264), but he could not cover the huge gap that Dissanayake had established in the first round of counting.

A vote for change

There is a lot of euphoria over the improbable victory. Ashok K. Kantha, the former Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, said: “Dissanayake’s victory represents a vote for change and a repudiation of the conventional political parties, SLFP [Sri Lanka Freedom Party], UNP [United National Party], and their offshoots. He tapped into the popular anger, mass discontent, and the desire for systemic change articulated during the aragalaya [struggle], which began in March 2022, but lingering apprehensions about the JVP’s past came in the way of his getting through in the first round.”

The aragalaya that Kantha talks about must be seen in the context of the “bandits” highlighted in the meme mentioned above. The people of Sri Lanka strongly believe that rampant corruption was at the root of the economic mismanagement that has today forced the average Sri Lankan to cut back on all expenses. “The aragalaya was the beginning of our independence,” said Saman, a travel agent, who was vocal in his support for Dissanayake for over a year before the election. He said that he was not a JVP member but had started believing that the JVP, which was not a part of any of the coalitions that led to the economic meltdown, might be the better option for the people of Sri Lanka. Saman’s home town of Kaluthara voted overwhelmingly in favour of the JVP.

The key to understanding the Sri Lankan mandate is in its recent political history, after the obliteration of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. The then President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, called for a snap election and won the 2010 presidential election with a massive mandate. Until Rajapaksa took on the LTTE, Sri Lankans had thought that the Tamil Tigers could never be defeated. At that time, the JVP had thrown its weight behind the opposition candidate, Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka. Fonseka had led the army during the last Eelam war and is among the officers accused of the mass murder of Sri Lankan Tamils and captured LTTE fighters. The JVP, which calls itself leftist and Marxist, strongly supported Fonseka.

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s 2010 inauguration was akin to an emperor’s coronation: there was massive celebration, including an impressive parade of personnel from the three services; there was also a 21-gun salute, and more than a thousand dancers performed under the hot sun. But soon things started coming apart, and the Cabinet itself, which expanded to 107 Ministers in a 225-seat parliament, represented a fountainhead of chaos and mismanagement. This correspondent, who was stationed in Colombo at that time, lost track of the number of Ministers after it crossed 100, and had to rely on parliament staff to keep track of which MP had most recently crossed over and become a Minister.

Fed up with this regime, people voted against Rajapaksa in the 2015 election even though he had defeated the LTTE. From 2015 to 2019, Sri Lanka witnessed a bickering reign, with President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe not seeing eye to eye on a host of issues that affected the country and the coalition.

2019 blasts and subsequent disaster

The April 2019 bomb blasts across the island led people to vote for security, and resulted in the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency in November that year. In just over two years, the “safety and security vote” turned out to be a nightmare for the people as a whimsical president led the nation on a path of economic destruction. It was after Gotabaya left the country in July 2022 that Wickremesinghe was again appointed President by the Sri Lankan parliament to restore stability.

In fact, Wickremesinghe’s path to the presidency is a lesson in perseverance. No one in living memory, contesting for a major political party, has ever lost more electoral contests than he has. In fact, the UNP, which he has led since 1994, has never lost as many times as it did under him.

He stayed on, despite numerous calls for his resignation: first after the 2005 presidential election and then after every subsequent parliamentary election. In the 2020 parliamentary election, he could not even win his seat. He later nominated himself to the lone seat that the UNP was entitled to. Although he was Prime Minister half a dozen times (the latest being in 2022), he could never win the coveted post of President through an election. He was appointed President on a technicality on July 20, 2022.

In short, Sri Lanka has never had a President like him, one who was in the seat of supreme power because he was at the right place at the right time. To his credit, however, he has managed to shore up the macro-economy. But at the ground level, food and basic necessities are far more important than how the stock market performs or what kind of investments come into the country.

Wickremesinghe is a Colombo-7 Royal (Colombo-7 is an upmarket neighbourhood in the capital and Royal is the name of the college he went to) who might have sympathised with the poorer sections of the public but could not comprehend their problems, observers say.

The runner-up in the 2024 presidential race was Premadasa. His problem is his earlier ties with the UNP. Despite breaking away and forming the SJB coalition in 2020, his role as the Leader of the Opposition made people look at him as part of the system and, therefore, as someone who was responsible for the country’s economic decline. Dissanayake, on the other hand, was the only acceptable Sinhala-Buddhist govigama in the opposition benches, who ticked all the boxes, apart from making all the right noises about the poor and the needy sections of society. (Govigama is a Sinhala caste that constitutes nearly half the country’s Sinhala population.)

Mustering the numbers

Before the election, although it was clear that he would be ahead of all the 38 candidates in the presidential election, Frontline, after a ground assessment, had reported that there was no clear path for him to attain the 50 per cent plus one vote mark to make it in the first round. This proved to be right, and for the first time in Sri Lankan history, second preference votes were counted.

This is worrisome for Dissanayake as he heads into a parliamentary election in November. His first challenge will be to get a majority in the 225-seat parliament. This is an uphill task. If the same sentiment about him reigns across the island, and if he picks up the same percentage of votes, he will be able to clear only the 100-seat mark and will fall short of a majority. Premadasa could get close to 80 seats.

Many commentators and Sri Lankan politicians are happy with the smooth conduct of the election. Kantha said that the seamless transition of power augured well for Sri Lanka. But Dissanayake will have to deal with “huge economic challenges and political expectations”, he added. “He will benefit from the fact that Wickremesinghe managed to stabilise the economy from its free-fall situation with considerable help coming from India, the IMF, and others,” Kantha said.

Dissanayake’s biggest strength is his calm and measured approach to things. For instance, he instructed party cadres to desist from ostentatious celebrations after the victory, even requesting them not to light fireworks. And the cadres, by and large, heeded his request. He also made the oath-taking ceremony, held at the Presidential Secretariat on one end of Galle Road, a simple affair attended by a few hundred supporters.

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And soon after the resignation of Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, he appointed the smallest Cabinet in the country’s history with just three members (all JVP MPs). Incidentally, in Harini Amarasuriya, Sri Lanka has got its third woman Prime Minister.

Lastly, after visiting the Temple of the Tooth Relic in Kandy and taking the blessings of Buddhist monks, Dissanayake made it a point to meet maulvis (Muslim scholars) and the Colombo archbishop.

The Tamil question

But how Dissanayake will treat the minorities in general and the Tamils in particular remains a concern. Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, leader of the Tamil National People’s Front, told mediapersons: “If the Sri Lankan government is truly [committed] to changing the situation, Dissanayake has to tell the truth [about the Tamil people] to the people of the south…. Without recognising the Tamils’ right to self-determination, without offering devolution [of powers] to address their problems, change can never truly happen.”

Dissanayake is also seen as being closer to China than to India. In fact, the Chinese Embassy in Colombo was actively supporting his candidature and had even made enquiries with Tamil political parties to ask if they would be open to supporting the JVP. Clearly, the JVP’s hand in the Tamil genocide, protests against the India-Sri Lanka accord, and Dissanayake’s own anti-Tamil stance in 2005 (on the question of providing support to the tsunami-affected via the Tamil Tigers who controlled the territory at that time), meant that no Tamil party would have risked entering into an arrangement with the JVP.

What India needs to do

As for the JVP’s closeness to China, Kantha had a different take. He said: “The government of India had clearly anticipated the likelihood of Dissanayake emerging as President and reached out to him by inviting him to visit India in February, and NSA [National Security Adviser] Ajit Doval met him in Colombo on August 30. Our desire to engage closely with him and the incoming government is reflected in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s prompt and warm message and the High Commissioner calling on him immediately. Dissanayake’s initial responses suggest his readiness to work with India and respect its security interests, but we will have to see how the more ideologically oriented leaders of his party approach India.”

In fact, Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Santosh Jha was the first foreign diplomat to meet Dissanayake soon after the results were announced on September 22. It was also not lost on any politician in Sri Lanka that the High Commissioner’s Nehru jacket sported the JVP’s colours.

On the way forward, Kantha had a word of advice: “It is sensible policy for us not to play favourites in the neighbourhood, avoid the temptation to get too deeply involved in domestic politics of our neighbours, and deal with the government of the day, recognising both their agency and objective realities that shape bilateral relations. An overly India-centric view of developments in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the region is not helpful.”