By Kusum Wijetilleke Courtesy The Morning

To say that Vaithilingam Sornalingam alias Colonel Shankar was an important member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is a gross understatement. As laid out by D.B.S. Jeyaraj in an October 2022 article, Col. Shankar pioneered several projects for the movement,” including setting up the LTTE’s Office of Overseas Purchases (OOP), later taken over by Selvarasa Pathmanathan alias KP. 

As well as establishing a global communications network for the LTTE, he personally oversaw its first-ever purchase of a trawler, thus becoming the Founder Commander of the LTTE Marine Division, also called the ‘Sea Tigers’. As Commander, he initiated the LTTE Undersea Attack Unit and the LTTE Anti-Aircraft Unit, and was involved in conceptualising and planning what would become ‘Vaanpuligal’ – the Air Tigers. According to Jeyaraj, Shankar was the first member of the LTTE to attain a pilot’s licence.  

Col. Shankar was killed on 26 September 2001 by the Army’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) in the Vanni. The LRRP was acting on intelligence provided by a ‘deep cover’ intelligence unit that operated within such LTTE-dominated areas. Col. Shankar had just left a meeting with Velupillai Prabhakaran, possibly the intended target of the claymore attack. 

The dismantling of such networks was necessary as part of the requirements for the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) negotiated by Ranil Wickremesinghe’s Government. A new book from author and public intellectual Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha captures many such small details, the sum of which presents a disturbing pattern of behaviour that seems to be a recurrent feature of many members of Sri Lanka’s political elite. 

Wickremesinghe also presided over a similar trajectory in 2015; a weakening of intelligence networks, the sidelining of experienced agents, breeding a culture of disinterest in matters of national security. This trajectory, coupled with the dysfunction created by competing power centres in a coalition government and underlying administrative inertia, led to the deaths of some 250 people in the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks – a manifestation of the worst possible outcomes of Wickremesinghe’s political wrangling. 

A few years prior, Prof. Wijesinha published ‘J.R. Jayewardene’s Racism, Cold War Posturing, and the Indian Debacle,’ which presented a striking analysis of one of Sri Lanka’s most enduring leaders. President Jayewardene was not only prime minister but also Sri Lanka’s first finance minister; indeed he presented the country’s first five budgets. There is no understating his impact on our country’s politics and economy, via the concentration of power within himself through constitutional manoeuvring, resisting political pacts with Tamil leadership, and his use of a referendum.

Victims of history

JR was in some sense a victim of history, captive to the complexities of Sri Lanka’s situation: the Indian dynamic, Sinhala and Tamil nationalism, and revolutionary insurrections. 

However, during his periods at the centre of power in Sri Lanka, meaningful efforts at power devolution were ignored; there was an outright refusal to consider even minimal autonomy in the mid-1970s as well as a failure to engage on District Development Councils.

Jayewardene presided over the failure to quell the 1983 pogroms and was made to deny his Government’s alleged complicity in those pogroms, as well as failing to manage the Indo-Lanka relationship and subsequently being strong-armed into the Indo-Lanka Accord. Indeed, the concentration of power in his own self was a key feature of JR’s periods in leadership and it is fascinating that it is precisely JR’s authoritarian streak that is now most admired. 

Wickremesinghe and the only other person to stand against him (and defeat him) in a clean leadership contest for the United National Party (UNP), Gamini Dissanayake, were both JR’s proteges and were ever-willing to preside over his triangulations. 

Prof. Wijesinha notes in his most recent book that it was Ranil who played a major role in JR’s other plot with regard to the referendum, getting undated letters of resignation from UNP Members of Parliament”. It was Wickremesinghe who distributed these cyclostyled letters of resignation,” later used to enforce ruthless campaigning during the referendum”.

Prof. Wijesinha states that the result was a farce, and the perpetuation of a Parliament that no one considered legitimate, so that over the next few years the country spiralled into excessive violence, in the south as well as in the north”. 

Consider this factoid in the context of President Wickremesinghe’s unnecessarily violent crackdown on unarmed protesters at ‘GotaGoGama’ (GGG) on 22 July 2022 and the suppression of dissent that occurred thereafter. The nonsensical detention of bystanders, activists, and YouTubers and the overall harassment of university-linked protest groups were precisely to ensure that no dissent was tolerated. 

Devious and obsequious

Consider the various examples of grift that occurred during his brief period in power as President and head of the Cabinet: the delayed cancellation of the Strategic Assets Development Bill, the immunoglobulin scam, the withdrawal of court cases against several politically-connected persons, the Mannar Wind Farm, corruption at the Bureau of Foreign Employment, the VFS scandal, controversy over fertiliser import contracts, etc. 

Wickremesinghe also most likely acted in contravention of the Constitution by cancelling or postponing mandated elections, something that also occurred under Prime Minister Wickremesinghe during the ‘Yahapalana’ era.

The smaller details matter, those less appreciated, such as Jayewardene’s failure to reform the 1970’s standardisation policy that lowered entry requirements for Sinhalese students, thus disadvantaging Tamil students. Comparisons to Singapore are now commonplace and, given the divergent trajectories of our economies, it is often noted that Sri Lanka failed to adopt English in its education system at a time when Singapore did so to better integrate with the growing global economy. 

While Wickremesinghe is sometimes celebrated for being a progressive Minister of Education, Prof. Wijesinha is much less flattering in this regard, pointing to the senior civil servant Victor Wirasinha being asked to oversee a more equitable distribution of English teachers around the island. While the popular narrative had been that there was a shortage of English teachers, this was in fact not the case; English teachers were regularly using their influence to remain in urban areas instead of some far-flung corner of rural Sri Lanka.

Prof. Wijesinha writes that when Wirasinha developed a scheme and those with influence lobbied the President, the process was stopped and Victor was got rid of. I still remember him sitting in the side verandah at my home, relating the story with some asperity, my first inkling of the devious and obsequious personality behind Ranil’s upright façade.” 

Prof. Wijesinha was Sub-Warden of S. Thomas’, having taken up the post just before the last batch permitted to do the Ordinary Level in the English medium took their examination… permitted until 1981 for Burghers and Muslims and those of mixed parentage, but by then there were few of these to take advantage of the provision”.

It was during this period that international schools began, with Prof. Wijesinha invited to help organise and establish such institutions by their promoters. This was not to my taste though I had nothing against international schools and indeed am glad that they have helped our students to better opportunities. But I felt it was also important to extend these opportunities more widely, to those whose parents had no way of affording expensive fees.”

Prof. Wijesinha was part of the lobby, so to say, for introducing English medium education for the lower classes, but since the ministry had put a stop to this, the Warden suggested I consult the Minister. I did so, and was told by Ranil that it was illegal. When I asked him why then he had permitted an international school, he told me that he had not done so and had sent the papers to the Attorney General to prosecute them.”

Of course, English medium international schools have thrived in the past three decades, but Prof. Wijesinha prepared a paper for the Board about how English medium classes could be conducted, with students entering privately for public examinations, but by then neither the Warden nor the Board were interested in productive initiatives”.

According to Prof. Wijesinha, Wickremesinghe consistently blocked English medium education throughout his career, vehemently opposing an English medium programme and directing his Minister of Education to halt such programmes, which the then Minister Karunasena Kodituwakku refused to do. 

Prof. Wijesinha believes that the rationale for Wickremesinghe’s indefatigable opposition” to the English Medium are revealing of his general approach to the calculus of politics. Jealousy, pure and simple… that Chandrika had started the programme and a personal hostility” towards Prof. Wijesinha, who was himself a consultant on the project.

Prof. Wijesinha suggests that Wickremesinghe sought to restrict opportunities to his own class, following in the footsteps of his uncle, JR, who, in his early political career, pushed for Sinhala to be the mandatory medium of instruction, thereby limiting English access to only the students of elite families. 

Personality cults

The societal impacts and the economic lag created by Sri Lanka’s delayed and muddled adoption of the English medium are difficult to assess. The utilisation of the language issue by elites of all stripes for their political ends led to the disenchantment and disillusionment of large swathes of the country. 

This has now transformed into a general distrust of institutions of the State more broadly; if institutions are not trusted they must be placed under the control of those deemed trustworthy, which is how concentrations of power begin, how institutions become dependent on a force of personality, rather than professionals working within a clearly defined system. This is what led to a single family, the Rajapaksas, controlling between 60-70% of the national budget at the peak of their power with hardly any substantive pushback.

In the aftermath of the crash, Wickremesinghe, as President, took on the Minister of Finance portfolio, thereby making himself central to the process of International Monetary Fund (IMF) negotiation. 

In such a situation, Sri Lanka should have had an independent finance minister, not the President who was politically exposed and thus had incentives towards political expediency. The IMF noted specifically this practice of the executive president holding the Finance portfolio as an urgent governance deficit. 

To this day, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake remains Executive President and Minister of Finance. On a recent episode of a political debate programme, National People’s Power (NPP) National List Member of Parliament Lakmali Hemachandra responded to a query by stating that the President was the most capable and trusted person to take on the Ministry of Finance and denied that this was even a concentration of power. 

Politics in the macro has become increasingly more personality centric. American politics has always been so, at least since the famous ‘TV campaign’ of 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Both the rise, return, and longevity of President Donald Trump owe much to his personal brand; it is not uncommon now for the Republican Party itself to be referred to as a ‘cult of personality’. 

The Trump phenomenon within the Republican Party resulted from the failures of that party whilst in Government; candidate Trump in 2016 was a popular base candidate, and indeed every election cycle, both parties tend to utilise the energy of an insurgent candidate to propel a more establishment-friendly candidate in to the White House: Newt Gingrich in the ‘Republican Revolution’ of 1994 as well as in 2012 as a ‘Tea Party’-aligned firebrand; Ted Cruz in 2016, who, if it were not for Trump, was a close contender for the nomination; Rick Santorum, again from 2012; and Pat Buchanan in the mid 1990s.

Whims and fancies

Economists from varying points on the spectrum have noted that the US most likely did not truly recover from the 2008 financial crisis: Lawrence Summers and his Secular Stagnation Theory; Richard Wolff who noted the divergence between real wage growth and corporate profits; and Michael Hudson on the ‘Rentier Economy,’ the State bailing out the shareholders of large corporations. 

Economist Nouriel Roubini has warned that the US recovery was partly the result of artificial asset bubbles, unsustainable debt, and low interest rates, not investments in industry or infrastructure or any other productivity gains. The NPP victory was the result of the failure of mainstream parties. Trump’s victory, while under certain unique circumstances, fuels this idea that mainstream political solutions are no longer viable, with societal issues such as housing and rent, healthcare, personal debt, care-giving, etc. becoming more pronounced and urgent.  

In Sri Lanka’s case, the failures of both the Centre-Right UNP and Centre-Left Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) have led to different formations which have an anti-establishment quality. 

Meanwhile, the failure of both breakaways, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), has further created and/or facilitated the shift towards the NPP, a party that was supposed to be a Left-progressive movement, geared towards transparency and governance but also with a pledge to fundamentally alter the economic equation and structure of our economy. 

There has been much criticism of the new Government, this column included, with the caveat that it requires the necessary time and space to implement its manifesto. Any failure on the part of the NPP to deliver on that winning manifesto and satisfy its mandate leaves it vulnerable to the next cult of personality. 

As Prof. Wijesinha notes, the failures of JR to mitigate the worst impacts of political and ethnic divisions of the 1970s and ’80s and Wickremesinghe’s inability to manage political coalitions have all led to wild swings in our politics. 

Perhaps the NPP will eventually find and utilise its compass of political economy; if it does not, if it insists on simply riding the coat-tails of its charismatic and popular leader, without taking the difficult decisions at the right time, the pendulum of Sri Lankan politics will swing once again. 

If it does swing to a more extreme position on the Right of the spectrum, Sri Lanka, its economy, and governmental administration might once again find itself in the clutches of some kind of personality cult, generating yet another cycle of trying to negotiate effective policy in spite of personal political priorities.

(The writer has 15 years of experience in the financial and corporate sectors after completing a Degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of Kent [UK] and also holds a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Colombo. He is a media presenter, resource person, political commentator, and foreign affairs analyst. He is also a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. He can be contacted via email: kusumw@gmail.com and X: @kusumw)