Ahilan Kadirgamar, who teaches sociology at the University of Jaffna and has been a long-time human rights activist, has a keen eye on developments in Sri Lanka. Less than two months since the new president, Anura Kumar Dissanayake was elected, Sri Lanka is preparing for parliamentary elections on November 14. In this episode of Frontline Conversations with Amit Baruha, Ahilan Kadirgamar talks about the elections, Sri Lanka’s future and more. This podcast is being recorded on November 11 in Jaffna. Excerpts:
Do you think Sri Lanka is at a pivotal moment in its history?
In terms of where Sri Lanka stands now, I would say it’s at a historic conjuncture. Sri Lanka is going through its worst economic crisis since probably the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the huge social and political changes we are seeing are related to this crisis. So it’s definitely at a pivotal moment.
It’s also significant here in Jaffna because it’s been 15 years since the end of the war. Just as there have been major changes in politics in Sri Lanka’s south—who would have imagined that a coalition led by the JVP would come to the helm of state power? They tried twice through armed struggle and insurrections to capture state power, and now they’ve achieved it through democratic means. What they will do and can do is, of course, the big question.
Similarly, Tamil politics is finally going through tremendous changes. Tamil nationalism started to gain ground in the 1950s, particularly in reaction to discrimination by the Sinhala elite who held power and played divisive politics. The Federal Party first took forward the demand for federalism, and eventually they backed various militant groups. As we know, the LTTE then wiped out all other militant groups, claimed they were the sole representative, and in my view, took the Tamil community on a disastrous, suicidal path which ended in that cataclysmic end to the war in 2009.
The year 2009 should have been a moment of reckoning for the country. After a 26-year civil war, what do you do? In the south, the Rajapaksas decided to use it for their own consolidation. They strengthened Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and further militarised the country, particularly the north, in a very humiliating way towards minorities. But there wasn’t also the kind of self-criticism that was necessary within the Tamil community. The political elite here—whether parliamentary parties or militants and eventually the LTTE—owe some responsibility for where they have brought the Tamil community. There should have been self-criticism about the strategies needed to move forward. That didn’t happen.
And why do you think it didn’t happen?
One thing the LTTE systematically did was wipe out the entire second-rung leadership. They not only wiped out all other militant groups, but as we all know, they murdered Amirthalingam, Sivasithamparam, Yogeswaran—all of them were gunned down. Even the second-rung leadership and the left here were completely decimated. So there weren’t enough people left.
A number of them were put forward as LTTE proxies. When the LTTE disappeared from the scene, these proxies decided to hold on to the parliamentary mantle and politics without really mobilising or engaging the people. Their claim was that with support from the international community, using the diaspora and with support from New Delhi/India, they would be able to deliver some kind of solution. But it was clear to many of us that when you have a political leadership that cannot mobilise the people, no solution is going to be real if they are negotiating that way.
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So are you trying to say that there’s been a delayed churn in Tamil politics in the North?
Yes, this should have happened, in my view, 10-14 years ago. Then we could have moved on. This has kept things on hold, and in a way, the kind of unravelling we are seeing might immediately mean there is no clear Tamil political voice. But it’s a necessary change we are confronted with, just as there is this long-overdue change in the south as well. Whether these changes will lead to something lasting, something progressive, something that the people are looking for is yet to be seen.
On the other hand, we are facing the biggest crisis in our independent history. Poverty has more than doubled. Sri Lanka, as you would know, along with Kerala and Cuba, was considered a development model in the 1970s. Our human development indicators were extremely high, even though our per capita income was very low, because of our policies—free education, free healthcare, food subsidies. Now all of that is at risk because of the economic crisis. For the first time in our history, we defaulted on our debt two years ago in 2022. The IMF and creditors have us by the throat, saying we should repay. All these crippling austerity measures are being pushed down on us so we can repay the creditors.
How much can a new government do to address this suffering? Will it lead to other uprisings because of this economic situation? There’s a lot at stake now because when a new government like this comes, and if they fail, there’s also the chance of a much more polarising chauvinist regime coming to power. So there’s a lot at stake in terms of the need for this new government to succeed in meeting the aspirations of not just the singular people, but the minorities as well.
What we’ve seen over and over again in Sri Lanka is that when things go wrong, the ethnic card is used. First, the discrimination against Tamils which ended up in that horrible civil war. But what happened in the last 15 years? When the Rajapaksas started to realise they couldn’t manage the economy or meet the aspirations of the Sinhala people, the next round was against the Muslims. In 2012-2013, riots against Muslims started, constructing them as the new enemy with all kinds of fabricated stories. You see similar things even in India—it’s a regional and global phenomenon.
Protesters shout slogans during an ongoing anti-government demonstration near the president’s office in Colombo on April 18, 2022, demanding President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation over the country’s crippling economic crisis. | Photo Credit: AFP
Enemies are important.
Yes, enemies are important—
And building up those enemies is important.
And trying to gain power on the basis of constructing these new enemies. So there are some dangers. But at the moment, there is also a hopeful moment in Sri Lanka.
So basically what you’re saying is there’s hope, but also the fear of a mischance again. From the little that I see in the campaign for your parliamentary elections, at least that rhetoric of Sinhala nationalism or even Tamil nationalism is not dominating the discourse. So do you think that’s a good thing, a welcome thing?
That’s definitely welcome. I think it’s important that we build on that because in the history of nationalisms here, I always say they are objective allies—the two extremes are good friends, they need each other. When one starts to sink, the other becomes even louder trying to wake them up. Right now they have both been disrupted, and this is an opportunity for the north to work with the south.
Which is quite rare in Sri Lanka, isn’t it?
A rare one. But there have been opportunities in the past. I should mention here one of my mentors whom you might have known, Kethesh Loganathan. I worked very closely with him.
A real towering intellectual.
Yes. Sadly, he was assassinated in 2006. If people like him were around today, Neelan Tiruchelvam and so on, the Tamil community would be much stronger for having these kinds of intellectuals. One of Kethesh’s books is titled Lost Opportunities because Sri Lanka has also been a history of lost opportunities. Hopefully, we would use this opportunity to its fullest and try to take it forward. There’s huge enthusiasm, particularly among the younger generations—both in the south and north—they want to see change in politics.
But at the same time, because of the grave economic crisis, there’s this push to migrate, to run away hoping to find better pastures. I don’t think that’s the case. Even the West is in turmoil with anti-immigrant mobilisations, whether in Europe or North America. Nevertheless, a section of the youth feel their future is outside.
About 2,00,000 people are migrating or immigrating out per year. Is that the figure?
Yes, possibly more than that. Historically, people have gone to the Middle East to work and some come back, but now professionals are trying to permanently migrate. While a large section might be migrant labour, a sizable portion are professionals who want to permanently migrate because they’ve lost hope. More importantly, the food crisis we’re seeing here, malnutrition—these are things we didn’t worry about in Sri Lanka in the past.
We need to really rethink the structure of our economy. We’ve come full circle. In 1977, Sri Lanka was the first country in South Asia to liberalise its economy—India came a decade or more later. We liberalised the economy, weakened the public sector, and I feel now we are paying for it. This idea that free trade, free flow of capital, and privatisation was the way forward has proven to be a disaster. Sri Lanka is now the first country in South Asia to default on its external debt. Hopefully, this is a wake-up call for us to rebuild our economy in a different direction. From time to time we have done that. It’s that kind of historic moment. It is to be seen whether the new NPP government will be up to that task.
I know it’s still early days as far as the government is concerned. It was only in September that Anura Kumara Dissanayake, or AKD as he’s known here, was elected. It’s barely been a month and a half. But how would you assess some of the decisions he’s taken, especially appointing a Citibank appointee to head the Bank of Ceylon? Is he trying to signal to the business community and the rest of the world that he’s not going to rock the boat? Is that the signal he wants to send out?
We have to keep in mind that he was elected president when they only had three parliamentarians out of 225. So after dissolving parliament soon after, saying they need a majority to be able to govern, the entire focus has been on winning the parliamentary elections, which take place in a couple of days.
Having said that, they were worried about what forces would disrupt their possibilities. Certainly, the Colombo elite are very wary of what they see as an outsider having taken power. I think to some extent the international actors, the global actors, the West and so on, are also wary about the election of Anura Kumara Dissanayake. What we saw even in the days before the presidential election, as the wave became clear that they might win, was rhetoric saying “here’s a Marxist who’s going to head this country.” That they won’t be able to manage the economy, that they would disrupt any attempts to rebuild it. So this kind of messaging in the Western press in particular was almost like blackmail—saying okay, if you’re not a Marxist, then you should stick to the IMF program.
Like there’s nothing in between.
Nothing in between. Even though they had come a long way to the political mainstream—I characterise them as a left-of-centre party. So that kind of pressure... And keep in mind, the election was on September 21st. We go into what we call a blackout in terms of campaigning on the 18th. On the 19th, the former president Ranil Wickremesinghe announces he has sealed a deal with Sri Lanka’s creditors, the bondholders. Then immediately the Western press goes into this hyper discourse saying, “Will this president continue with this?”
So he was presented with a kind of fait accompli.
Yes. Within a week of being inaugurated, the IMF arrives in Sri Lanka, and within 10 days the Finance Ministry announces they will accept this bond deal. You can imagine how he was muscled into accepting, which of course for people like me, we see this as an unsustainable deal.
In 2027, when the IMF program ends—and the IMF has been the arbiter of this deal—when we start repaying our creditors, we are going to be paying 4.5 per cent of our GDP in external debt servicing. That’s about 30 per cent of our revenues. But not only is it 30 per cent of our revenues, it’s about 30 per cent of our exports. So we have to collect that 30 per cent as revenues, convert it into dollars using our exports.
This whole push to increase taxes and claiming that we need to increase our exports—all of it is so we can repay the creditors and the IMF. People talk about this as an IMF bailout, and I’ve written about it as the myth of the IMF bailout. The IMF is only giving us $3 billion over four years. There’s no bailout because $3 billion over four years amounts to $60 million a month. Sri Lanka’s foreign earnings from the garment sector, tea exports, rubber, coconut, migrant remittances—every month is 30 times that amount: $1,800 million. So there’s no bailout. But because we defaulted and the IMF is the arbiter, they are able to impose these huge austerity measures. The IMF is giving us $3 billion, but over the next 10 years, we will be paying them $2 billion in interest alone.
A vendor holds Sri Lankan bank notes while working at a market in Colombo on December 13, 2023. The International Monetary Fund revived its $2.9 billion bailout for Sri Lanka on December 12 after the South Asian nation clinched a debt restructuring deal with China, its biggest official lender. | Photo Credit: AFP
So it is a trap.
It’s a trap. I think we are learning it the hard way. At some point this government will have to find a way out of this IMF program if they are to implement the kind of people-friendly policies they have promised.
Coming back to the issue of ethnic politics in Sri Lanka and the delayed churn we were talking about earlier—you rightly pointed out that an entire generation of Tamil leadership was wiped out by the LTTE, which already weakened the leadership. But what is your sense now? When the LTTE was around, the 13th Amendment wasn’t even considered a basis for discussion. When President Chandrika Kumaratunga presented her proposals to Parliament, it was a tragedy it was never put to vote. Even if it were defeated—that was my view when I was a correspondent here—she should have put it to vote. Even if it fell through because of the UNP and Ranil Wickremesinghe, at least she would have proved a point that she was a president who moved in that direction.
We saw this bloody civil war, the insurrection, human tragedy at an unimaginable scale. Now, would it be that the hope Anura Kumara Dissanayake has generated, which was visible to some extent even in his political rally in Jaffna, might attract more people? His party got 27,000 votes, I think, during the presidential election. Is it your sense that many more people will come out in his support now?
I think so. There is a wave towards the NPP. It’s partly his charisma, but more than that, people want change. People want change in the south, people want change in the north. They are ready to give the NPP a chance. So in that sense, I think more people in the north and east will also vote for them. But going back to this question of...
A political settlement or agreement...
Yes, our demands have changed with time. In 1956, it was mainly a language issue. Then it eventually became a question of territorial devolution. Now there are minorities living all over the country, so I’m not sure how much we can rely on territorial basis alone. We probably also need power-sharing at the centre, like what you have in India—a Senate or a second chamber to be able to check all of that.
But I think at a very basic level, having gone through this tremendous destruction, when people talk about a solution, first they are looking for an acknowledgement from the south that something horrible has happened here. Let’s all come together as a country and say these people have suffered so much—there needs to be a solution.
Now, what that solution means... Sometimes lawyers think they have all the solutions. It’s not about this clause or that clause. I think people are open to see and they’re practical about it. The economy has changed—what we thought in 1987 is not what the Sri Lankan economy is today in terms of what we want to do with devolution. Even though we sometimes stick to the same slogans, there are certain realities.
For example, I am the chair of a provincial-level federation of cooperatives called the Northern Cooperative Development Bank. It’s a very positive thing that cooperatives are a devolved subject under the 13th Amendment. So if we want to sort out a problem, we can go to the commissioner here; we don’t have to go to Colombo. And cooperatives are very local institutions, so there it makes sense. We have to think where it makes sense, what is possible, and work that out. So we can use the experience of the 13th Amendment.
“There’s a lot at stake now because when a new government like this comes, and if they fail, there’s also the chance of a much more polarising chauvinist regime coming to power. ”
So what you’re saying is that if there’s goodwill, more than clause A or clause B, it’s how you go about the process. And what kind of political leadership emerges in the north would also be important.
Because we don’t want one arrogant elite in Colombo to control politics and then just transfer power to another arrogant elite in the north, if you’re serious about democracy. There is also the problem of caste here, the problem of other minorities. The northern Muslim community, who in 1990 were evicted from the North within 24 hours, are now trying to return. There are people from the plantations who, during the riots in the south, were displaced to the north—many of them are still landless or feel discriminated against. So there are many things we need to sort out in the North as well. But nationally, there has to be a recognition. We need to come to terms with this long conflict and the war and give people confidence.
When you say there are some voices from within the Tamil community, including in the University of Jaffna, which came out in open support of the NPP—would you say that this is perhaps for the first time in many decades? I’m not so familiar with your history. Is it the first time that even a section of enlightened Tamil leaders are wanting to work with a political party which is based in the South?
It is a new opening. There have been openings from time to time. In a way, I would say in 1994, when Chandrika came to power on a peace platform after the UNP ruled for 17 years, that was also a fresh moment and she was broadly welcomed.
And till the LTTE literally torpedoed the whole process in March of 1995, I think.
So there have been moments like this, and with the LTTE, people did not have the space to express that. That to some extent continued. There are virulent sections of the diaspora who would use their financial and political clout even today to try to label anybody who says we need to work with other communities in the south, because they’re very wedded to this notion. But I think the last month or two has been a major change. This opening has made even shutting down people, shutting down voices difficult because I think just like the mainstream Sinhala leadership has been exposed, the Tamil political leadership has also been exposed.
Auto-rickshaw drives past the election campaign billboard of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, presidential candidate of National People’s Power (NPP) party on September 15, 2024 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Recently the government announced that the Jaffna-Achuveli Road will be opened. And at his public meeting in Jaffna the other day, the president spoke of returning lands and a number of other issues. Can you explain what would be the outstanding issues as far as day-to-day living of people here in Jaffna, in the peninsula, is concerned?
The Jaffna and Northern Province is still very rural. People’s mainstays are agriculture, fisheries, livestock and so on. So the land question is central. There was no reason why the previous governments after the war could not release all these lands—there’s absolutely no excuse for it in my view. In fact, they used the Forest Department, the Archaeological Department, various ploys to even take over more land. When Sirisena became president, a substantial amount was released, but still so much more should have been done. So in that sense, the land issue is crucial.
If they can release these lands and then get the existing government machinery working—Sri Lanka has a very extensive state structure in every village. In India what you call a Gram Sevak, here we have a Samurdhi officer, an economic development officer. The state reaches deep down, so you can do a lot with that or you can also curtail the people by using the state structure.
Take fisheries—there is the Fisheries Department which is controlled by the central government and the Fisheries Ministry. A fifth of our population depends directly or indirectly on fisheries. They could be an enabling actor or a stifling actor. Unfortunately, I must say they’ve been a stifling actor. Whether this government can have that vision and work with actors in the north to address that remains to be seen.
These are the ways in which they can address the day-to-day concerns of the people. Some issues are also due to external conditions—the economic crisis has meant that fuel costs have gone up, which has had a huge impact. So I think not only in the north but in the entire country, how they deal with the rural sectors and the food system is going to be crucial for this government’s survival. In terms of the North, I think it’s high time demilitarisation takes place.
Are there a lot of camps here?
Yes, if you go to Mullaitivu, Kilinochchi and so on, large swaths of land are still controlled by the military. There’s absolutely no need for that, and it continues to be a humiliating presence for the local people. What happened was after the war we had a bloated military, and no government had the guts to start a national discussion about the need to slowly demilitarise after the war.
Actually, the Rajapaksas really thrived on militarisation.
They further militarised even Colombo, for example. It’s the way in which they embraced neoliberal policies, urbanisation, financialisation and so on. We know that neoliberalism works well with a certain kind of securitisation and an authoritarian state. That was their model.
Now the NPP and the JVP, coming from a very strong Sinhala base in my view, are the kinds of actors who can also bring about these changes because they can’t be labelled as traitors to the Sinhala cause, so to speak. If they can have that forthright vision and try to work out these issues about militarisation, the release of land, about ensuring that the state structures work in each region for the benefit of those communities, that would go a long way.
But there is also the political question of how, after these long decades of polarisation, you bring the country together politically. You have to show some goodwill by bringing about changes in the way things are run in the north as well.
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And the structures as well?
Right. And that will also depend now on if they are to bring about a new constitution. That would of course depend on the kind of strength they have in parliament to be able to do that, but either through that or through passing different kinds of laws to show their goodwill.
But it’s pretty tough to amend your constitution. I mean, your new president has even promised, or his party had promised, the removal of the executive presidency. That’s a pretty long shot.
That’s a long shot because you need a two-thirds majority in Parliament and also a referendum. So those challenges remain, but whether they can step by step build the confidence in that direction... I think people have been waiting to see what they will do after the parliament election because their whole thrust was to try to be able to govern by getting a majority in Parliament. And if they do get it, what they will then do after that is what people are waiting to see.
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