A WIN discussion September 2024. Listen to the recording HERE. Two years after Sri Lanka’s historic aragalaya – the nationwide popular uprising which overthrew the hated corrupt Rajapaksa dynasty – the country’s presidential election has swept aside the island’s traditional ruling families and brought to power Anura Kumara Dissanayake. He is the leader of the JVP, which had waged two bloody youth insurrections in the early 1970s and late 1980s, mobilising a generation of unemployed Sinhala youth insurrections in the early 1970s and late 1980s, mobilising a generation of unemployed Sinhala youth around a platform combining anti-capitalist guerrilla activism with blatant Sinhala chauvinism. In recent years the JVP has rebranded itself as a mainstream moderate reformist party operating under the umbrella name of the National People’s Power coalition.
Following the overthrow of the Rajapaksas, the IMF imposed upon Sri Lanka a draconic austerity programme which has cut living standards to catastrophic levels of poverty. Dissanayake is promising to renegotiate some of the terms of the IMF deal, and to curb the country’s massive corruption… but in the context now of creating conditions more favourable to “business”.
How much success can be expected from the new president, and from the new government soon to be elected, in easing the harsh conditions of the IMF programme? Will they be able to begin raising living standards back to former levels? And, given the JVP’s shameful record of anti-Tamil communal chauvinism, can they offer any respite to the repressed Tamil minority?
This week we heard on-the-spot reports from two leading Sri Lankan worker activists: trade union leader Swasthika Arulingam, and Marxist economist Dhanusha Gihan Pathirana.