 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we'll be talking about the political, social and economic crisis in Sri Lanka right now. Now, we're joined by Ahilal Kadirgamar, a senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna. We last talked to Ahilal in April at that point of time. There were already massive shortages, protests for breaking out, but a lot has happened since then. In May, the very powerful Prime Minister Mahindra Rajapaksev was forced to resign. A new Prime Minister, who's also a former Prime Minister, Ranil Vikram Singh, has come to power. There's been a lot of political churning. So, in this first section of the interview, we are going to be talking about the political situation, what the president and the government are trying to do, what is the kind of opposition that's emerging. So, Ahilal, thank you so much for joining us. So, one of the first questions really is about the political situation in Sri Lanka right now. Like I said, Mahindra Rajapaksev is a very powerful figure in the history of Sri Lankan politics actually being forced to resign and burst of people's outrage. In fact, I believe houses were burned, memorials were targeted and it seems like a massive rejection of the Rajapaksev legacy. And then we have a new Prime Minister, but again, someone who's not really new, Ranil Vikram Singh, has been around for the longest time. So, how do we do overall analyze the past two months in terms of the political configurations that are around right now? Since April, as the protests had been mounting, the demand was for the entire Rajapaksev family to go home. They have a number of strikes which culminated in a general strike on May 6, Friday, May 6, which shut down the whole country. And the president announced that day that on May 9, the Prime Minister, his brother Mahindra Rajapaksev, would resign. On Monday, May 9th morning, the Prime Minister had many of his supporters, a couple thousand of them, at Temple Trees, the Prime Minister's residence and had told them that he's thinking of resigning. And then the protesters left, sorry, the supporters left Temple Trees and went and started to attack the peaceful protesters both outside Temple Trees and in Golface Green. And the security forces and so on did not do anything about it. The tents of the protesters were burnt, violence ensued. But then there was a backlash on that day. A lot of people came to the defense of the protesters and beat back the supporters of Mahindra Rajapaksev. And not only that, that night, a number of Mahindra Rajapaksev's supporters in Parliament, MP's houses were torched. And a lot of the, even the kind of symbolic house of the Rajapaksev and the memorial to their father was vandalized and torched by very targeted measures of violence. And in fact, protests were mounting very heavily outside the Prime Minister's residence where they had to evacuate the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister resigned as well. Now this sent sort of a shock through the ruling class, right? They did not expect this kind of retribution and it showed the anger among the people. The Rajapaksev's were visibly shaken. Everybody had resigned except the President. Now a few days later, while, you know, there was a few for a couple days and President Gottabai Rajapaksev appointed Prime Minister Ranil Vikram Asingar, right? Now Ranil Vikram Asingar had been Prime Minister five times before that, you know, comes from the the largest political party in the country, the United National Party, to whom the British had handled over power in 1948. You know, one of their leaders, J. R. Jaiwadhana, took Sri Lanka in the neoliberal path when Ranil Vikram Asingar entered Parliament. And it had been, you know, the symbolic of the ruling class for decades. But in the last parliamentary elections, that party was wiped out. In fact, Ranil Vikram Asingar also lost his seat and the United National Party only gained one seat through proportional representation. And Ranil Vikram Asingar, nobody was appointed MP. And only about a year ago, Ranil Vikram Asingar shamelessly came to Parliament on that sole seat. Now he has been appointed Prime Minister, right? Partly, I think most people believe in Sri Lanka that even during the previous government, when the Rajapaksas were out, Ranil Vikram Asingar was Prime Minister and he saved the Rajapaksas. And so this is seen as a political deal between the Rajapaksas and Ranil Vikram Asingar to sort of save the Rajapaksas. So that is one criticism of it. And two, Ranil Vikram Asingar seems to have considerable international support from the diplomatic community who have been very quick to support his appointment as Prime Minister. And the the message was sent that he is the credible negotiator for an INF agreement or to gain support from the international actors. And since his appointment and his promises of getting international support and so on, the protests have been somewhat subdued, but they are still continuing in golfers. So now over the last almost a month since Ranil Vikram Asingar was appointed Prime Minister, he has not been able to deliver much. The same shortages are continuing in terms of fuel, in terms of cooking gas, price spikes are continuing. There are negotiations going on with the IMF, but nothing substantial has changed on the ground. And in fact, they were to bring a 21st amendment to the constitution, greatly reducing the powers of the president and ensuring independence in terms of governance and so on, independent institutions such as commissions and so on. But even a lot of that has been stalled because the reality in parliament is that the Rajapaksa's SLPP still has a majority. So they are still calling the shots with a semblance of stability brought about by the subdued character of the protests over the last month. So we are kind of in this stalemate now. And it's to be seen what is going to happen over the next couple of months where the Ranil Vikram Asingar will be able to survive. He seems to be steadily losing the little credibility that he had when he was appointed. Would the IMF agreement go through what would happen in parliament? So these are the questions before the country. Now, I must say a few days ago, the federation of university teachers associations, all our universities in Sri Lanka, state universities, and this is their union. And I must also say I'm the vice president of Futa. We launched our proposals for political and economic stability in which we are continuing to call for the resignation of President Goethe Bayer Rajapaksa. We feel that the appointment of this prime minister is undemocratic. But we would like to see interim government formed within parliament that would be credible and acceptable, a national government of sorts. And whether that kind of process is possible. And along with that we are saying both in the immediate term and going forward there should be some kind of a people's council that works with parliament because the government has lost legitimacy. People are not respecting the government, the parliamentarians, the president. So there has to be some way in which people's representation is brought forward because behind this contradiction, we would want the path to be constitutional at the same time there's no political legitimacy for the parliament and the president. So some kind of a compromise to bring about some stability because to immediately go for elections in this moment will also be difficult. One, we are in the midst of a severe economic crisis. And two, the people are not ready for elections. You know, we want people to have the space to think of their representatives and to put forward somebody who can actually give leadership. Otherwise, in a year's time, we might again be going into for another elections. All right. In this context, just wanted to sort of, you know, ask you further about two sets of oppositional spaces. So the first one is the official parliamentary and political opposition. We have the SJB, which is a major opposition party. The JVP is well quite active. So what has been the position these parties have taken in this context have they have been able to present, you know, some kind of an alternative or a meaningful alternative to the people. And on the other hand, we've also seen that over the past few months, there's been this flowering of democracy as many people have called it. There have been a lot of small protests, a lot of debates, discussions. The main protest space, of course, in Colombo itself, as you mentioned, huge gatherings taking place like a public square. So what has been taking place in some of these spaces as well over the past few months? Yeah, if you take the parliamentary space, parliamentarians for the most part have been discredited. But, you know, the opposition consists, of course, of the SJB, which broke away from the UNP during the last elections led by Sajid Premadasan. There is the NPP, this is a coalition of the JVP with three parliamentarians. And then there are the minority parties, the TNA and the other temple parties and the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and some of the Muslim parties. Now, one problem is that the opposition really has not taken advantage of the situation to put forward their vision of how to move forward. If you take the SJB, they really have not addressed the food crisis. They are also very much tied to this sort of neoliberal solution of going to the International Monetary Fund and agreement austerity. So they have not put forward an alternate view of how they're going to address this crisis from what is left of the government in terms of the Central Bank and the Foreign Secretary are putting forward. So there is a leadership vacuum in that sense. The JVP and the NPP have been mobilizing quite a bit, but they have mainly been sticking to the issue of corruption, that the Rajapaksas have been corrupt, that various members of parliament are corrupt. And they are hoping to make their gains perhaps in the next elections and they've been pushing for elections sooner rather than later. They're hoping to make some gains, but mainly on the corruption issue. But Sri Lanka is going through one of the worst economic crises since independence and it looks and it's a time for very drastic alternatives which are not coming forth from the parliamentary realm. Outside the parliament, it's very fragmented. The protests are being taken forward. I must say that in the lead up to May 9th, the trade unions played a critical role. They finally entered the protest space, the general strike was hugely successful. But in terms of the politics outside, it's still very much fragmented. The frontline socialist party which broke away from the JVP about a decade ago, the student movement is with them. So they've been very militant in continuous protests and the students have been constantly tear gassed by the police in these very militant protests. But coherence isn't there in terms of what kind of alternative these protesters are asking for other than for the resignation of the president. So how these two political spaces are going to contribute towards putting forward a vision of an economy that has to address this huge crisis and increasingly people are also convinced that it's going to be a very long drawn out crisis. Just six months ago, various policymakers think tanks said, well, once you go to the IMF, three months, six months, you'll be back to where we were, say two, three years ago. But I think it's amply clear to everyone that this is going to be a long drawn out crisis. I'm seeing it as a crisis like in Greece, they're going to have a lost decade. If you remember in the 2010s, there was the revolving door of parliament to politics in Greece. They had seven prime ministerial changes. So we might be also looking at something like that. We could go for election soon, but then we might have to go for another election again in another year or two. So political stability is also linked to the economic questions and what comes of this very broad protest movement, which I think will continue to come in waves because the underlying causes both economically and politically are still there to propel this protest movement onwards. Absolutely. And before on to some of the economic questions, I learned one question regarding the Rajapaksas themselves because we do know that over the past more than a decade and especially during the Civil War through the kind of militant majoritarian politics they built, which there was a lot of human rights violations. But over the years, even after the war, we saw a number of instances and they built a very powerful majoritarian support block, especially in the South. And today we see that a lot of this seems to have kind of fractured also. So has that politics basically sort of run reach the end of its course, so to speak? Or is there a possibility of revival? How does it look like? Yeah, the Rajapaksa regime itself has been thoroughly delegitimized. So I think it's going to be very hard for them to come back to power in another elections, right? And by regimeized means the family and their supporters, people have completely lost faith in them. But the ideology that they mobilized, Singhala Buddhist nationalism with the support of certain sections of the business class and the military, this mix, even though currently it's on the path of descendants at some other point, some other actor may try to bring a mix of this and emerge on a nationalist platform. So that's my big worry. If you look at Sri Lankan politics, we've never had a military coup. It has always been through this kind of nationalist mobilization. And there is the danger that currently there's a swing towards the liberals, right? Away from this kind of authoritarian power, there's a process of democratization going on. And Rani Aditya Singh are representing that liberals has been appointed as a compromise. And even if Rani Vikram Singh doesn't stay very long, let's say either with or without elections, the SJB or remnants of it, some kind of a liberal regime comes to power. They are probably not going to be able to address this economic crisis. They are not forthcoming with the kind of policies that could add to it to solve this problem. And in that context, say in two, three years time, there can again be another swing to the right. And it could be against some kind of authoritarian populist or even a fascist who mobilizes the failure of the liberals. And we've seen this a number of times before. And ironically, it's been under the under the stance of Rani Vikram Singh as Prime Minister. In 2002, you know, after the war had been raging for almost two decades, people were tired of the war. In 2001, the Tamil Tigers attacked the Katnaika Airport. And Sri Lanka for the first time went into negative growth. I think there was minus 1% GDP growth. And we were in a severe crisis. There was Rani Vikram Singh as watered in as Prime Minister. And there was a ceasefire agreement heavily internationalized. The Norwegians came back by the United States, European Union, and Japan as co-chairs of a peace process. And Rani Vikram Singh tried to combine these peace negotiations with the Tigers with neoliberal reforms. There was the Oslo donor conference, the Washington donor conference. And finally, in June 2003, there was a Tokyo donor conference where 4.5 billion US dollars were pledged, provided the peace process proceeds along with these neoliberal reforms. But Rani Vikram Singh had completely neglected the singular constituencies. And within nine months, he was out of power. And that was the ascendance of Mahindra Rajapaksa, first as Prime Minister and then as President. Similarly, in 2015, the Rajapaksas were thrown out. President Sri Sena came to power. Rani Vikram Singh came as Prime Minister. A golden opportunity for Sri Lanka. Vikram Singh decided to go with the Rajapaksas in order to ensure his power and to sort of marginalize Sri Sena. There was, you know, in the next two years, 2016-17, there was a drought in the country and disruption of agriculture, paid no attention to it. And in 2018, January, we saw a massive comeback of the Rajapaksas. They even launched their own party, SLTP, and swept the local government elections. Right? And that was, you know, that preceded their kind of regime change with presidential victory in 2019. So we've seen Sri Lanka swing from the right to the liberals. And my worry is that, again, there can be a swing like that. And when that happens, you know, it comes with a certain xenophobia. And now, particularly with all the kind of western support for Rani Vikram Singh and the kind of IMF agreement, there's likely to be a backlash. And, but initially it can be kind of xenophobic against the west and possibly India, but then it turns inward against the minorities, divides them. So we've seen this scenario before and of course, you cannot predict history, but, and my worry is that we might end up with something like that, unless we use this moment, this huge political opening towards the process of democratization, you know, while building interethnic relations. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Ailan. And that's all we have in the first segment of this interview. In the next part, we'll be looking at some of the details of the economic crisis that continues to hit Sri Lanka. Stay tuned.