Aragalaya arrested or Aragalaya unfinished?

By DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

If not for the Aragalaya, the world would only have seen the Sri Lanka, which had been reduced to charity from a generous beggar in Tamil Nadu, who had obviously managed his personal finances better than the Sri Lankan state had managed ours. Sri Lanka had become a pathetic place.

Our dignity was restored not by the unelected Ranil Wickremesinghe but by the Aragalaya. The world witnessed a renaissance of Sri Lankan society of the public space, thanks to the civic resistance movement, drawn from all age groups, and finally, starting April 3rd, 2022 on Galle Face green by the Aragalaya. The world saw on July 9th, the people of Sri Lanka, led by the youth, liberating the President’s House and then swarming up like a tsunami wave up the steps and through the doors of the Presidential Secretariat.The Sri Lankan story was turned into a dramatic triumph of social self-assertion by the people of the island.

Does – will – the Aragalaya story, the story of the most massive and successful popular uprising in our history, the most successful assertion of democratic-republican popular sovereignty since Independence, end with the Constitutional coup, the Constitutional equivalent of the Central Bank bond scam, and the installation in the seat of power by the reviled Rajapaksa ruling clan, of Ranil Wickremesinghe, the most unpopular and hitherto unsuccessful political leader of our lifetime?

It will cause terrible psychological damage to our collective psyche, if we permit the story to end in that manner. It would be as if we had lost the war to the Tigers. We didn’t. We write this story and it needs to be completed satisfactorily, with the people as the rebellious, victorious heroes.

ARAGALAYA AND TERRORISM

Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s rule became untenable when the day he decided on an overnight ban on chemical fertiliser, pesticide and weedicide. It was not only the economic consequences that caused the slide. It was the moral crime involved. He had won on a manifesto that pledged to make things much better and as part of that, to undertake a decade-long transition to organic agriculture. Instead, he devastated the peasantry that had voted for him, in 2019, and his family, for seven decades. It was a moral upending. When Gotabaya lost the moral high-ground, it was inevitable he would lose his grip on power.

Wickremesinghe has made a similar blunder, committed a moral crime, under less affordable circumstances. He has turned on, and cracked down on, the very Aragalaya that unintentionally, but quite definitely, brought him to power by removing Gotabaya Rajapaksa in a massive collective heave-ho.

Of course, this is but a large-scale version of how he double-crossed Sirisena Cooray, former UNP General-Secretary, who gave him the Prime Ministership he was himself offered in 1993. I know. I was there when it happened, in 1997. He also double-crossed Karu Jayasuriya from the very moment he handsomely won the Colombo mayoralty. I was there then, too, and warned Karu J that it would happen. Treachery is the trademark political ‘step-style’– as Gail Sheehy puts in, in ‘Passages’—of Mr. Wickremesinghe.

This time, the political and historical price will be far higher. Mr. Wickremesinghe has betrayed a mass democratic revolution, the Aragalaya, in full view of the world’s media. And he has only just got started.

Already his Cabinet Ministers are talking about “terrorism” and “terrorists” lurking in or hiding behind the Aragalaya. This is not just stuff and nonsense; it is very dangerous stuff. “Terrorism” is the organized and intentional use of lethal violence for political purpose, against unarmed, non-combatant civilians.Not every armed struggle is terrorism or contains terrorism, though in Sri Lanka it notoriously did—and in any case there was no armed activity in the Aragalaya or in support of it.

Homicide or manslaughter by a mob, as on the afternoon/night of May 9th, though a heinous crime, which must be punished by the full force of the normal law, is not terrorism.There was and is no “terrorism” within, alongside or behind the Aragalaya.

RANIL AND THE RANCID RIGHT

President Wickremesinghe has inherited the burdens of the Rajapaksa-created economic crisis, and cannot be sympathized with for his predicament because he was chosen by the soon-to-be deposed autocrat Gotabaya Rajapaksa as PM and more conspicuously, was voted in by the Rajapaksa-dominated ruling SLPP parliamentarians, as the President.

The economic recovery is deadlocked not only by the obvious problems of the chicken-and-the egg, IMF and the creditors conundrum. It is deadlocked even tighter now, by President Ranil’s choices and actions. He should have stepped down and made way for a political leader with some mass base, who could have made a fresh start and had a better shot at managing the crisis. Since Sajith Premadasa bravely ran against Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in November 2019, and lost by only 10%, missing the magic 50% mark by only 8%, he would have been the logical first option.

Instead, Mr. Wickremesinghe discredited himself by being the Rajapaksa’s man in the race, thereby reinforcing the impression of continuity rather than discontinuity with the ancien regime, the Old Guard. He, therefore, causes the forfeiture of the global wave of support we could have obtained and can still obtain as the country where the young people rose up and threw out an autocrat.

Ranil does more damage than even this, by cracking down on the Aragalaya activists and being seen as the repressive unpopular ruler he is. Why should world opinion bail out a country with that kind of narrative; that kind of story? Where’s the catharsis? Where’s the bounce? Where’s the happy ending?

ARAGALAYA UNFINISHED

For this story to end with a real catharsis, the unfinished Aragalaya must be taken to a logical conclusion, with a generational shift from the 70-something Establishment. The Aragalaya was not meant to and cannot be allowed to end with the installation of an unelected leader who becomes, or reveals himself, as an autocrat overnight.

Ranil is trying to kill the Aragalaya by repression, suffocation. He must not be allowed to. That is not how this great story must end; must go into the continuous chronicle of this island’s history.

That is why “RANIL RESIGN!” must resonate and resound in the final phase of the great national liberation struggle for freedom and democracy in our lifetimes: the Aragalaya!