People’s power was displayed spectacularly in Sri Lanka on July 9 when tens of thousands of people stormed the Presidential Palace, the President’s Secretariat, and the official residence of the Prime Minister and took them over, sweeping aside the police and soldiers guarding them. Men and women from all over the country, numbering at least two million, came into Colombo determined to end the authoritarian-corrupt rule of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the Rajapaksa clan. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, after being spirited away from the Presidential Palace to a military base, announced that he would resign from the Presidency on July 13. On that day, in the early hours, Gotabaya fled the country in a military plane to the Maldives, thus ending one part of the people’s uprising against the hated Rajapaksa clan.
However, while leaving the country, Gotabaya appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as the acting President. This was a last desperate maneuver to keep some line of control over the State. Ranil Wickremesinghe had promised to resign as soon as an all-party government was put in place. This was a delaying tactic to remain as Prime Minister till Gotabaya resigned, as the constitution provides for the Prime Minister to become the acting President in the absence of the President. Wickremesinghe assuming the acting Presidentship has enraged the people who see him as equally culpable as Rajapaksa for the mess the country is in. After all, Wickremesinghe who is the sole representative of his party, the UNP, in parliament was chosen by Gotabaya to head the cabinet after his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa was forced to resign on May 9. As popular discontent mounted, whatever legitimacy that the government had, got completely eroded with even the army, the police, and the judiciary becoming unwilling to take any coercive action against the popular movement. Sri Lanka had reached a dead-end after two decades of politics dominated by the Rajapaksa clan. Earlier, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as President, had consolidated an authoritarian regime relying on Sinhala Buddhist majoritarianism. The executive presidency became the instrument for the concentration of power and the creation of an authoritarian regime that had its corrupt networks in the State institutions.
The Aragalaya (struggle) began on March 31 when people from all walks of life gathered at the Galle Face Green, outside the President’s Secretariat, to protest against the severe economic crisis which has resulted in food shortages, lack of fuel, and rampant inflation. As the economy collapsed and the country defaulted on its foreign debt, the peaceful protest movement calling for Gota go gama (Gota go home) swelled in numbers at the encampments at the Galle Face and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s official residence. May 9 marked a turning point when Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s thugs belonging to the ruling party were brought in to attack the protestors. The mass retaliation that followed saw the ouster of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister. The current economic crisis is not only due to the mismanagement of the economy and wrong policies but also due to the massive corruption involved in all spheres of economic activity. The Aragalaya is far from over for the people of Sri Lanka. But what they have achieved so far is a warning to the authoritarian regimes which flourish on ethnonationalism and communal polarisation. However, stable and entrenched you may seem, the people will not forever remain in your thrall. They will see through you, sometime.
