Digging into the politics of dissent

By Uditha Devapriya

Sri Lanka is a fractured state, divided along ethnic, economic, and ideological lines. It has seen its share of civil wars, insurrections, and pogroms. It has tried to learn the lessons of the past, only to fail miserably. It has tried to look to the future, but is yet to embrace it. What it will become eventually, no one knows. To pontificate on Sri Lanka is to speculate not just about what it has to turn to, but what it is now. An optimist will see it as a mosaic, a kaleidoscope. A cynic will see it as a divided country. That’s probably the cruellest irony: an island held together by groups at perpetual war with one another.

Yet commentators who depict the country as an “orientalist powder keg”, as Shiran Illanperuma memorably put it once, overlook its achievements, particularly those from the more recent past. Despite living under a succession of authoritarian regimes, people have exercised their will, turning out one government after another in record time. At times of crisis they have got together, rallying around a common cause. The most recent such cause, of course, was the resignation and removal of a deeply unpopular president. That he has been replaced by a man seen as a front for the family of the president they chased out has not deterred Sri Lankans from asking for further reforms.

I believe that when analysing the situation in Sri Lanka – not just the crisis, but any future development – we need to understand that while common causes bind people in their calls for these reforms, there are important differences that set some groups apart from others. Everyone wants change, but – and this is a point rarely acknowledged or appreciated – what change means can differ from person to person, or from class to class. This explains the lull among middle-class protesters after Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s exit on July 13 and the continuing agitation among student and Left activists. Such cleavages should not be ignored, much less trivialised. They need to be understood in all their complexity.

Popular uprisings against the establishment are made up of different interests and interest groups. They have different goals, and even if they share those goals with other groups, they seek to achieve them with different strategies and envision different outcomes. Sometimes these interests converge well, as when, in early May, trade unions promised an island-wide and indefinite strike and then backtracked on it with the excuse that if sectors like electricity and water went out of service, the protesters would be adversely affected. There was some solidarity there. But such dalliances are rare and temporary. We are living through what one could not have foreseen then: the fragmentation of these groups.

Such developments are hardly unique to Sri Lanka, or to contemporary social movements. China Miéville’s account of the October Revolution (October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, 2017, Verso) explains succinctly the fissures which emerged in the aftermath of the 20th century’s biggest anti-State uprising. These fissures never unified into a cohesive whole: that is why his ability to forge some unity makes Lenin one of the great political strategists of modern history. Yet the Russian Revolution required a Lenin to achieve some degree of unity. Sri Lanka as yet lacks such figures: they are nowhere to be found. What this means is that social movements here oscillate between superficial unity and underlying disunities, the protests at Gotagogama being perhaps the clearest example.

These disunities include a number of variables and factors, and are highly nuanced. Some, like political preferences, are obvious enough: if you want the UNP or the JVP come to power, you will go quiet – as most UNP supporters have now – when your preferred party takes over the government. Others, like cultural, religious, and social prejudices, are less clear, but are still evident if you look closely enough. Western commentators who wrote admiringly of the protesters’ commemoration of the war, of how the underlying attitude regarding May 18 had changed from uncritical celebration to sober reflection, failed to note that there was a group celebrating the war and demonising Rajapaksa for having betrayed the mandate that the war victory gave him and his family. What was being condemned here was not the war itself, but the distortion of it by the ruling political class.

Here we need to understand that the recent protests were unprecedented in the country’s history of protests and mass movements. Mark Beissinger of Princeton University has done some interesting research into modern urban civic revolutions. In The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (2022, Princeton University Press), he points out that the mood and tenor of such movements have changed since the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. While common interests do bring people of all shades and from walks of life to such movements, to the city – which has immense symbolic value for anti-government protesters – not all these interests are moved by democratic impulses. Civic though these movements are, they cannot be squared with narratives that depict them as being moved by liberal concerns. This is true of the Gotagogama protests.

Arguably the most important point Beissinger makes in his book is that revolutions do not necessarily bring about what they seek to construct or reform. More often than not, such movements focus on movements and institutions, rather than systemic changes. What this means is that whoever comes to power in the wake of urban civic uprisings are compelled, whether against their better interests or not, to work with the same establishment and set-up that his or her predecessor – the target of the uprising – worked with. This forces them into an alliance with groups which were heavily associated with that predecessor, thereby entrenching the State. We are living through such a phase now, here. While the protests have fragmented into a plethora of interest groups, the State still has and wields the upper hand: as it did in the Philippines after Marcos, and Egypt after Mubarak.