By Himal Kotelawala
There is an incredible photograph doing the rounds these days of a lone, older man, supported by a walking stick, pointing his phone’s camera at the recently leased Airbus A330-200 as it flew low over Colombo on a bright Wednesday morning to much fanfare. The caption to the photo reads, loosely translated, “a Sri Lankan who has never been on a plane but has to pay off the losses of an airline”.
This is a familiar refrain. For some years now, the pro-liberalisation camp has pointed out how the vast majority of Sri Lankans who are forced to bear the burden of our beleaguered national carrier has never seen the inside of a commercial jetliner. This is plainly, undeniably true, and it isn’t limited to SriLankan Airlines. Just about every household, rich or poor, has had to set aside a good chunk of change to directly or indirectly support way too many white elephant projects launched by way too many governments. This is now well known. But what is rarely discussed, even after the devastation of the 2022 crisis, is the kind of flawed thinking that brought us to this sorry point: left-nationalism, the ideological springboard that shaped Sri Lanka’s development trajectory.
Before we proceed, let’s get a couple of quick definitions out of the way. For the purposes of this piece, by ‘left’ I mean the economic left, who advocate for greater public ownership or state intervention in multiple sectors of the economy, are “sceptical” of markets, and are so very disdainful of the free trade-driven global economic order. ‘Liberal’ here simply means support for free markets with adequate regulatory oversight.
A growth killer
What is left-nationalism? It’s more or less what it says on the tin: a heady mix of lefty, “heterodox” economics and run-of-the-mill, chest-thumping nationalism. It’s basically been our national ideology for decades, except for a brief window or two of sort-of-(economic)-liberalism.
On the surface, this combination does make some sense. Leftist ideals of egalitarianism and redistribution combined with a healthy dose of national pride can’t be all that bad, surely? Unfortunately, it can, and Sri Lanka is a prime example.
The recipe for left-nationalism, in very simple terms, is a potently high dose of statism and a spadeful each of protectionism, majoritarianism, identity politics and isolationism – oh, and a pinch of xenophobia dressed up as anti-imperialism. If, at this point, you’re thinking “wait, leftists are progressive, so how can they be nationalist”, that’s because Western leftists have successfully monopolised progressive politics (which a lot of people conflate with “socially liberal”) in the public consciousness. This means that most people outside the global south would never associate a leftist or even left-leaning political formation with anything resembling chauvinistic majoritarianism. Since it’s reasonable to assume that most English-speaking readers influenced by Anglosphere discourse are unaware of the deep linkages between left economics and nationalism in Sri Lanka, we simply must plough through the historical context for this piece’s central thesis. Yeah, it’s going to be a long one. Apologies.
So what’s so bad about left-nationalism anyway? In very broad terms, it’s bad because it stifles growth. It doesn’t have to, ideally, but it does. Sure, you can find a few examples to the contrary, but if you’re a struggling post-colonial economy defined by low productivity and serious resource constraints, more often than not, it kills or at least severely undermines long-term economic growth. Worse, if you’re a multicultural society with a history of conflict, well, it can’t be great.
In the beginning
Let’s go back a bit. Sri Lanka embraced left-nationalism in the 1950s. Good ol’ S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and the MEP campaigned for and actually delivered state-sanctioned ethno-linguistic nationalism with a generous serving of populist left economic policies on the side. Later, his widow Sirimavo, this time with the LSSP, went on a nationalising rampage, with a less pronounced but still-very-much-present emphasis on Sinhala Buddhist entitlement supremacy. It was Mrs B’s United Front (UF) government that helped deeply entrench left-nationalist thinking in the Sri Lankan sociopolitical psyche in the ’70s, to disastrous consequences both on the economic front and in other domains.
In the late ’60s, a rising Maoist upstart named Rohana Wijeeweera formed the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). The then Marxist-Leninist JVP rained scorn on Sirimavo’s UF government, which rose to power in 1970 on a vaguely democratic socialist platform, for not being radical enough, for being too soft on the bourgeoisie. In the eyes of the JVP, the youth yearned for a people’s movement that would completely dismantle Ceylon’s post-independence capitalist structures. Wijeweera’s main gripe with the UF, essentially, was that they were phoning-in the revolution. Sirimavo was no Mao. Our boy had to take matters – and a galkatas – to his own hands.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history. Wijeweera and his band of merry men’s insurrection was quashed, Sirimavo overreached in her response to the insurgency and overcorrected in her attempts to address legitimate youth grievances, and Sri Lanka made international headlines for food rations and growing queues for essentials. Capitalising on this, the UNP won the 1977 parliamentary election with the mother of all landslides and President JRJ soon opened up the economy, and the country got its first taste of actual economic liberalism. Sort of.
But before liberalisation had a real chance to work its magic, war broke out in the north, Black July sent investors packing, and a few years later, thanks at least in part to (not entirely unfair) youth disillusionment in the promise of economic emancipation and opposition to growing UNP authoritarianism but primarily triggered by “Indian expansionism”, a second and far more destructive insurrection was launched by Wijeweera and the comrades. (I’m grossly oversimplifying here, but bear with me). The economy never stood a chance.
A not so fresh start
In 1994, the SLFP-led People’s Alliance kicked out the wildly unpopular UNP and a new social democratic coalition government was sworn into power under SWRD’s and Siramavo’s progeny CBK, who continued to steer Sri Lanka down a somewhat watered-down liberal path (with some privatisation efforts) as war raged on, interspersed by unsuccessful attempts at a truce. Things got to an all-time low around 2000, following several military setbacks (for the south), and the currency all but crashed in a kind of spoilery teaser trailer for 2022.
Enter Ranil Wickremesinghe. His stint as PM of a cohabitation government under an increasingly hostile President CBK saw a controversial ceasefire and the attempted launch of a fresh liberalisation campaign named Regaining Sri Lanka. This programme was intended to facilitate the kind of market reforms that would’ve made JR blush, attract a fair bit of foreign investment, promote private sector-led growth and also combat poverty through FDI-driven growth. There was even a catchy, feel-good theme song: “ඉතින් හදමු අපි අලුත් රටක්” by Rukantha Gunatilake.
Unfortunately for Ranil, not many were singing along. The left was extremely critical of the programme, as was the nationalist camp, who swore up and down that it was neo-liberal poison. The United National Front (UNF) government’s ceasefire agreement (CFA) with the LTTE, cast by political rivals as a betrayal, also became a focal point of growing opposition to the government and to RW personally.
To speed-run through major historical events during this period, CBK used her executive powers to take over three important ministries citing the trusty old “national security concerns” and subsequently dissolved parliament. By this point, the JVP had returned to the political mainstream, having long given up its violent ways. While it made sense for the then far-left JVP to be harsh critics of the UNF government’s liberalisaton agenda (though the JVP had become more populist than doctrinaire by then), where it really started to make a name for itself in the early 2000s was in providing ideological leadership to a broader nationalist movement rooted in Sinhala Buddhist identity politics. As a party, having quietly mobilised support over several years, the JVP was able to score a major coup, winning itself 39 seats on the SLFP-led United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) ticket in 2004 and establishing itself as an influential political force.
In spite of the UNF’s defeat and the apparent unpopularity of the CFA, however, RW only narrowly lost the 2005 presidential election – by some 180,000 votes, a hair’s breadth – thanks in large part to an LTTE-enforced boycott. Guess who campaigned for rival candidate Mahinda Rajapaksa on a decidedly hawkish platform? Yep.
The JVP’s involvement didn’t end there. Despite not being active participants in the Rajapaksa government, the party had already begun to exert considerable ideological influence on the policy trajectory of the country. In fact, its influence can be traced back to the late ’90s as trade unions and student bodies affiliated with the party came to gradually shape the economic outlook of the political mainstream and thereby the Sri Lankan state.
By popularising anti-privatisation, anti-liberalisation and anti-FDI sentiment, by the early 2000s the JVP had shifted the Overton window decisively leftward, making even the most basic right-leaning policy positions politically untenable. Terrified of union-led backlash, successive governments, centre-right or centre-left, would scale back on if not altogether abandon attempts at meaningful structural reform. For all its anti-establishment rhetoric and talk of a 76-year curse, the post-insurrection JVP arguably did more to shape the country’s economic destiny than any other party. While they never managed to translate this influence to electoral success, it speaks to their much enviable grassroots strength that the JVP accomplished this without conventional political power and without firing a single bullet.
The meme years
When the UNP found itself back in power in 2015, it was once again as part of a toxic cohabitation arrangement, this time with President Maithripala Sirisena who, just like his old boss CBK, went on to pull the rug from under PM RW, sabotaging the entire Yahapalana project in one fell swoop. Not that the UNP wasn’t also to blame. In fact, there was a lot of self-sabotaging going on during the entire term. The bond scam, an apparent reluctance to deliver on its promise of accountability for Rajapaksa-era excesses, a generally lacklustre approach to establishing good governance and finally the Easter Sunday bombings spelt certain doom for the government.
The UNP, which has historically been poor at comms since its defeat in 1994, failed to adequately communicate the positive impact of democratic gains such as the 19th amendment which should’ve been the true legacy of the Yahapalana regime. On the economic front, possibly due to a crippling fear of lefty finger-wagging, the government tip-toed around deep economic liberalisation, wary of protests and strikes fanned by the forces the JVP and the broader left-nationalist movement had legitimised in the public imagination. Even modest attempts at restructuring loss-making state-owned enterprises or attracting FDI were either delayed, diluted or derailed. The ideological terrain for this had already been set. Populism reigned supreme.
Technocratic ineptitude
The Rajapaksa comeback was as decisive as it was inevitable. Once again, left-nationalist sentiment informed the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration’s ideological framework. Underneath its “technocratic”, “apolitical” salad-dressing was a fundamentally economic nationalist foundation which rejected liberalisation, opting for an ill-advised state-driven industrialisation agenda. Import substitution and protecting “national assets” and “strategic” domestic enterprises were the central tenets of the Gota regime. There was also a general air of total incompetence about, which didn’t help. Much has been written about that government’s fertiliser ban, price controls and stiff resistance to fiscal reforms, all of which contributed to the 2022 financial crisis, so we won’t get into all that here. Suffice it to say, populist nationalism and protectionism won out ideologically, and the country suffered the consequences.
Enter Ranil Wickremesinghe. Again. We won’t go over the recovery process and the reform agenda here, but it is worth noting that left-nationalism once again stood as a roadblock to meaningful change and it almost succeeded in scuttling the entire process. Had it not been for circumstances (and the IMF’s strict conditions) helpfully forcing our hand, things might have turned out rather different – quite bleakly so. Opposition to the RW administration’s structural reforms were drawn from the very depths of the left-nationalist playbook: statism, protectionism, populist resistance to anything “foreign” and even the ol’ ethno-nationalist framing of sovereignty. On top of this, the framing of IMF engagement as “neocolonialism”, populist obstruction of long overdue tax reform and protectionist pushback, all threatened to stop progress in its tracks.
As it turned out, the UNP was rewarded with a stunning defeat at the 2024 elections, but, in a comical twist of irony, the JVP-led NPP, which went on to receive a historic mandate, has been compelled to stay the policy course, largely sticking to the same IMF-backed reform agenda. But for how much longer? The NPP is stumbling already, but, encouragingly, its early gestures suggest a refreshing pragmatism, at least outwardly (which I suspect is purely down to AKD).
Even so, the irritating contradiction at the heart of the NPP’s meteoric rise remains unresolved. You can’t rail against “neoliberalism”, foreign debt, FDI and SOE reform for years and then suddenly pretend everyone was born yesterday. Although, I’ll admit there is a certain poetic justice in the JVP having to eat its words and implement the very policies it had spent decades demonising. There has to be some sort of reckoning, but I doubt this is coming. The NPP was clever enough to ride a post-Aragalaya populist “anti-corruption” wave to power, which had reduced the vast complexities of our economic woes to a single convenient issue. If the current spate of arrests and convictions continue, the NPP can use the glow from the media blitz to shield itself from any accusations of hypocrisy. No one will care or even notice that they are the new neo-liberals.
What now?
So that’s a best-case scenario. But the NPP government simply must do this, for its own survival. It has to gradually shed its left-nationalist skin. An ideological makeover, at this point, has become a political necessity, lest it buckle under its own rhetorical weight. A failure to do this would only open the door once again to instability and, worse, a populist backlash of a very different kind.
At the risk of pulling a No True Scotsman, the truth is that “real” liberalism has never been tried in Sri Lanka, never mind neoliberalism. Plus, we never quite seem to finish the job, which is the real tragedy here. All past attempts at honest-to-God liberalisation has been half-hearted, half-completed and, worst of all, disowned by their very architects. What critics of the liberal outlook seem to miss is that, in the real world, without private sector-led growth, there can be no poverty alleviation. Not really. The left-nationalist dogma, sold as pro-poor, invariably ends up hurting the very people it claims to protect, by killing growth, repelling investment and fuelling inflation.
Well-intentioned but ultimately unsustainable subsidies and ceaseless state expansion only makes the poor poorer in the long run. There is also a self-defeating ideological incoherence here that has come to stand in opposition to liberalisation, which, ironically, only serves to enable the excesses of actual neoliberalism, which no one wants. Those sympathetic to the left-nationalists’ anti-liberal agenda, cloaked as it is in populist outrage and “patriotic” sloganeering, must realise that it’s only going to further pauperise the nation. The inevitable end result will not be a dictatorship of the proletariat followed by a communist utopia. If our history is any indication, it may be something far less pleasant.
