What should we normalise?

By Uditha Devapriya

In 1977 J. R. Jayewardene came to power promising a weekly eta ata or eight kilos of grain. Perceived, rather unfairly perhaps, as an unmitigated disaster, the United Front government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike was accused by several groups – including Sinhala nationalists who faulted her for caving into minority interests and minority politicians who accused her of doing the same with chauvinist elements – of mishandling the economy.

Jayewardene was shrewd enough not to promise a complete turnaround from the United Front’s policies. Having expelled the LSSP and the Communist Party, the SLFP had, under Felix Dias Bandaranaike, turned to the right. Given these developments, it was obvious that any UNP government would take this shift further to the right.

For obvious reasons, Jayewardene could not promise continuity here. Instead he pledged to establish a righteous society, based implicitly on social democratic ideals. His promise of a guaranteed weekly rice ration was part of a wider strategy of demonising the Bandaranaike regime: he was, in effect, accusing it of failing to live up to its own ideals.

The result was a thumping victory for the UNP. The following year Jayewardene saw through the biggest constitutional overhaul in the history of the country. Having enthroned himself as its first Executive President, he quickly set in motion the policies he actually envisaged and embraced. These involved, if not centred on, the liberalisation of the economy. Hence, instead of increasing the rice ration, he did away with such subsidies.

In Sri Lanka’s post-independence history, it was the first real assault on Sri Lanka’s social services. Partly on the advice of the World Bank and the IMF, Jayewardene then let the rupee float. From seven to the dollar, it eventually depreciated to 30. In theory, this should have made exports more competitive. In reality, it made imports more expensive, turning a current account surplus of USD 142 million in 1977 to a deficit of USD 655 million in 1980. Except for a marginal surplus in 1984, we’ve been seeing deficits since then.

The impact on the poor was, to say the least, considerable. From 1978 to 1988 the real value of food stamps reduced by around half. From 1971 to 1981 social welfare spending as a percentage of total government expenditure fell from 40 percent to 11 percent. Imports of not just consumer, but also agricultural, goods dampened the market and crushed farmers: one reason why several electorates in Jaffna gave the Sinhala and Buddhist SLFP candidate, Hector Kobbekaduwa, a majority at the 1982 election. Sisira Jayasuriya (2010) has estimated that by 1981 over half the population had fallen below the poverty line.

And yet, despite his brutal crackdown of striking workers in 1980, Jayewardene obtained an easy victory in 1982. This had to do, partly, with the personality clashes in the SLFP: while one section of the Bandaranaike family supported Kobbekaduwa, another section, led by Anura, did not. But to a considerable extent, it also had to do with how people, in the face of a deteriorating economic situation, normalised the country’s descent into crisis.

Before making comparisons between 1982 and 2022 – for today, too, we are seeing a section of the population normalising a deteriorating economic situation – it would be apt to highlight the differences. Jayewardene’s policies had their biggest and most adverse impact on the poor. The middle-classes, by contrast, benefitted from them: by opening the domestic market to imports, he co-opted Sri Lanka’s highly consumerist middle bourgeoisie. Today, on the other hand, we are seeing a middle-class rebelling against the present regime because an iPhone costs two or three times what it did eight months ago.

Yet the similarities should be obvious to anyone. Sri Lankans, particularly the middle-classes, tend to normalise political and economic problems. They could not tolerate the queues of the United Front era because, historically, as a class, they are not capable of withstanding the drop in status that accompanies such deprivations. And yet, even when the United Front government extended the life of the legislature by two years – a move opposed by a few SLFP parliamentarians – people chose to go along with it, preferring to throw out the regime through the ballot box rather than through mass agitation.

If the goal of the Gotagogama agitators is to overthrow the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government through a campaign involving mass agitation, they should take stock of what happened in and after 1977. The people responded to an unpopular government by voting it out, then normalised a deteriorating economic situation five years later by retaining the new regime. Even at the height of the 1987-1989 insurgency, the middle-classes that threw out the SLFP and voted in the UNP sided with the latter. They only articulated their opposition to the UNP at the 1994 election, returning the SLFP to power after a space of 17 years.

If the aragalaya has sagged at all today, it is because a section within it has, for the lack of a better way of putting it, given up on it. One particularly eager young follower of the Galle Face aragalaya I personally know, who participated at the protests not once, but thrice, tells me now that the aragalaya has been a failure. Another young man tells me that Rajapaksa’s appointment of Ranil Wickremesinghe was “the best thing Gotabaya could have done”, in effect faulting the #GotaGoHome protesters of disrupting his programme.

What are we to make of such developments? First and foremost, that they are natural and inevitable, especially in Sri Lanka. The LSSP and the Communist Party were the first to recognise this: that is why, having attempted to foment revolution outside the legislature, powerful factions in both parties entered into electoral alliances with the SLFP, preferring to side with a petty bourgeois dispensation in the hopes of radicalising the latter. The JVP also realised this: hence its entry to the democratic mainstream after 1994.

Sri Lanka’s middle-classes have historically been incapable of seeing through a revolution, even less a regime change. Only by recognising this point will the #GotaGoHome protesters be able to carry forward their campaigns. They can choose to ignore it, but at the cost of their very future: a fact we learnt last Monday, when, as several protesters were speedily being arrested, even former supporters denounced, not the government, but the Galle Face agitators, for disrupting discussions and negotiations with the IMF.

Uditha Devapriya is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com