The centre that no longer holds

By Uditha Devapriya

Ranasinghe Premadasa’s policies broadly targeted two variables, growth and equity. His government did not view them as contradictory and oppositional. Instead, it framed them as complementary and concomitant. With that, it effectively squared the circle.

Premadasa was Sri Lanka’s first centrist, its only centrist. Yet today the Premadasa notion of centrism, in politics and economics, has been abandoned. During Premadasa’s time parties that identified themselves with progressive causes shifted to the right, justifying the shift on electoral grounds: if they did not tilt, they reasoned, they risked losing support. The Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US were among the first to make this move. Two years after Premadasa’s murder, the SLFP followed suit. The People’s Alliance, headed by the SLFP, threw Premadasa’s reforms to the dustbin. They focused on a new paradigm, a new set of policies. They called it structural adjustment with a human face.

In foreign policy too, there were major transformations. As the UNP’s presidential candidate Premadasa had prioritised two things: getting the IPKF out and defusing separatist tensions in the north and the insurrection in the south. These were all interconnected, and the new government realised that they could not be resolved in isolation from each other: they had to be viewed on a continuum, and they had to be addressed jointly. A key aspect of this was the country’s commitment to Global Southernism, which had won it a high place in the 1970s. Premadasa sleekly attempted to restore this aspect of Sri Lanka’s foreign policy, after it had been squandered by his predecessor on the pretext of getting closer to the West. The People’s Alliance government more or less abandoned that.

Thus, in domestic politics and foreign policy, successive governments after 1994 neglected if not undermined the Premadasa legacy, his notion of centrism.

Centrism in Sri Lanka today evokes, not the Premadasa paradigm, but the paradigms of two distinct political groups. First, the People’s Alliance. The People’s Alliance ostensibly sought a compromise between the UNP’s neoliberal policies and the SLFP’s centre-left credentials. This was merely window dressing for a capitulation to the right. It accompanied a broader shift within progressive circles, a shift which Rajiva Wijesinha describes in Representing Sri Lanka: by 1994, liberal groups that had once associated with progressive, centre-left politics, had yielded place to what he calls the “advocacy of wholesale withdrawal by the state from the social services necessary to develop a level playing field.”

The policy shift of the People’s Alliance had a purpose and a justification. Its purpose was ostensibly to liberalise the economy and its justification was that three decades of socialist experimentation had not delivered, particularly in a context where the Soviet Union, the crucible of world socialism, had collapsed. This turnaround spilt over to the country’s foreign policy: the People’s Alliance and the opposition UNP advocated a shift away from Global Southernism, in line with calls, articulated by powerful countries along with powerful foreign interests, to do away with organisations that had been the lifeblood of Global Southernism. Gamani Corea, whose advocacy of the Global South is yet to be equalled by a mainstream economist here, including those who claim to carry forward his legacy institutionally, spoke for many when he rubbished calls to abolish groups like NAM.

“You very rightly, Hon. Minister [Lakshman Kadirgamar], pointed out that NAM continues to retain its relevance despite the changed global scene. Many ask: since the Cold War has ended what is now the continuing relevance of NAM? They do not ask this about NATO however. NATO was nothing but a child of the Cold War. Yet NATO continues, and is being transformed to play a new role. But of NAM we are asked: why should you continue? What is your relevance? I think the answer is that NAM is an association of developing countries devoted to identifying and pursuing their common interests.”

Two developments contributed to this new status quo. The first was the passing away of an that generation of intellectuals, especially economists, who had been far more radical and assertive in their advocacy of Third World solidarity and nonalignment, and far more critical of orthodox neoliberal theory, than today’s lot. The second was the mushrooming of think-tanks and civil society groups which, if they did not endorse orthodoxy to the hilt, at least accepted it as the only plausible alternative. This is why civil society today, despite opposing political authoritarianism, is yet to take a definitive stand against the economic paradigms that tend to be marshalled in defence of such authoritarianism. That is why few economists today do not dare critique orthodox paradigms, or address their limitations.

This combination, of being critical of political authoritarianism and lackadaisical about the economic paradigms used in defence of such authoritarianism, is symptomatic of a broader malaise in our society: the deterioration of intellectual standards and the complicity of the intellectual elite in that same authoritarianism they so wilfully, and self-righteously, deplore. More specifically, I think it reveals a failure to integrate economics and politics, or to realise that economics was, in fact, once known as political economy. A simple example would be the establishment’s critique of the State clamping down on trade unions, versus its advocacy of liberal labour laws. I think Lakmali Hemachandra’s critique here is spot on.

“Employers’ proposals are predictably aiming at repealing legal protections enjoyed by workers and if entertained will completely leave the workers at mercy of the unilateral power of their employers without adequate bargaining power or state protection. The outcome of these proposals will be nothing but increased job insecurity and wage insecurity among workers already struck by rising cost of living eating into their real wages.”

Or as Dayan Jayatilleka observes in a recent DailyFT column,

“Labour laws cannot be scrapped without a major confrontation with organised labour. Land reforms were introduced by the Sirimavo administration as a response to the 1971 insurrection and were supplemented by President Premadasa’s Task Force on the Redistribution of state lands to the landless, after the second (1986-1989) insurrection. Reversing those laws and facilitating corporate agriculture on a small island creates pressure on the land, generate landlessness and sows the seeds of rural rebellion.”

All these contradictions and convulsions can, I think, be traced to a simple problem: the absence of a proper, progressive centre in our political space. The Ranasinghe Premadasa notion of centrism gave way to the People’s Alliance notion of structural adjustment with a human face. The Mahinda Rajapaksa administration reversed some of the more onerous policies of this paradigm, notably decades of privatisation: a policy that had entrenched the corrupt. Yet after a while it too embarked on policies that hardly differed from neoliberal orthodoxy. Meanwhile, the backlash against the Rajapaksas gained momentum, leading to a revival of centrism of another sort. This centrism can best be identified, not with the UNP, but with the Radical Centre, spearheaded by Mangala Samaraweera.

The politics and economics of the Radical Centre have been critiqued by different people from different perspectives. There is no need to recapitulate all of them here. My critique of the Radical Centre is the same as my critique of the post-1994 wave of centrism overseen by the People’s Alliance: that it accepted, even fought for, political liberalism, but overlooked the fundamental contradiction between the imperatives of political liberalism and economic liberalism. The latter was accepted by the People’s Alliance, mutedly endorsed by the (later) Rajapaksa administrations, and revived by the yahapalana regime. The Radical Centre, while critiquing the authoritarian excesses of the Rajapaksa government, failed to note just how aligned such authoritarianism was with the economic ideals its leader valorised, especially when he held important posts in the yahapalana regime. This is a contradiction that liberal ideologues do not seem to bother themselves with today.

What is urgently needed now, as Dayan Jayatilleka points out in another recent column, is a shift to a progressive centre. If we achieve this shift, he argues, we will be able to not only counter the preachers of orthodoxy, who remain complicit in the authoritarian machinations of the regime, but also pre-empt those promoting Manichean political visions on the pretext of convincing voters of being the only alternative out there. What is needed, in other words, is a new Radical Centre: one which invokes, not the People’s Alliance’s or the present Radical Centre’s flirtations with half-baked liberalism, but the policies of the only real centrist leader this country had, Ranasinghe Premadasa. Curiously, it is this very centrist leader who doesn’t get so much as a mention by Sri Lanka’s ubiquitous, self-avowed centrists.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.