By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

The Economist has given something to the NPP to brag about in Colombo’s social circles. The journal’s latest number (September 6^th) has a piece on Sri Lanka entitled, “Grace Period”. It is a characteristically objective piece but one that includes the acknowledgement that the first of Sri Lanka’s three cravings – “political stability, economic growth and national reconciliation” – is in place “at least for now.” The acknowledgement is significant when seen in light of the island’s years of turmoil and the current turmoil that is encircling practically every country in the world that The Economist picks for its weekly and always well informed comment.

The US leads everyone else in the chaos meter, perhaps only as a superpower could or rather should not. Many others are not too far behind. The Gaullist system in France, which Sri Lanka mistakenly chose to emulate, is yet again in trouble for want of a Prime Minister who can be acceptable to a deeply unpopular President and a hopelessly divided parliament. Across the channel, the British parliamentary system cannot quite help out the bumbling Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who has somehow managed to burn up the massive electoral goodwill that he won before a year is even over. You can go from country to country, and you will see Nepal in your own front yard literally in flames.

Turning Point

The American turmoil has got another steroid boost after the public shooting and death last Wednesday of Charlie Kirk, 31 year old charismatic leader of a conservative youth movement called Turning Point USA. He was shot by a single bullet while answering questions at an open rally at Utah Valley University. Kirk founded Turning Point as a 19 year old school dropout – that may indicate the maturity of contemporary American conservatism, if not American politics itself.

Kirk tugged at the heartstrings of America’s youth, more males than females, by publicly challenging liberal elitism and asserting extreme conservative positions on every contentious question in America’s culture wars – from women’s role at home and in society to gun rights, to diversity, sexual orientations, conspiracy addictions and the 2020 election denial. He and his organization have been strong supporters of Donald Trump and stalwarts of the Maga movement.

Kirk campaigned for Trump in all three of his presidential elections and was influential in mobilizing the winning youth vote for Trump in the 2024 election. The President was the first to formally announce in his official social media post, Kirk’s death after the young activist succumbed to injuries in hospital. He followed it up with a video podcast and has ordered the American flag to be lowered in all government buildings in the country and embassies abroad. You might see that on Galle Road in Colombo, but many may not know why.   

A young life has been shot down again in America, and a young widow and her two young children are left to grieve. But the gun-crazy American society is not at all likely to look at the root causes of political violence or question the laissez-faire rights for carrying guns courtesy of the Second Amendment. True to form, Trump has railed against the ‘radical left’ for Kirk’s death and vowed to crack down on them, even though the alleged 22 year old killer, Tyler Robinson, is from a Republican voting, conservative Mormon family in Uta, and he was turned over to Uta police by his father and family pastor.

Ironically, Kirk himself may have unwittingly uttered his own epitaph in a widely publicized earlier quote: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” That is gun theology, American style.

In other news, NATO has seized on the Russian drone forays into Poland’s airspace and got its big fighter jets to shoot down Russia’s reportedly Styrofoam drones. NATO seems ready to go on edge on the Russia front but is happy to be diplomatic in dealing with the virtually unstoppable Netanyahu in the Middle East. The Israeli Prime Minister is pounding Gaza nonstop, and has carried out an execution style attack on Hamas officials living in Qatar. Even Trump is not pleased with Netanyahu and is bemused by Russia’s drone flights into Poland.

War and Market

Underlying the many surface skirmishes are some big power pivots in world politics. Trump has renamed his Department of Defence as the Department of War (DOW), as it was known before World War II. But DOW’s current deployments are all in American cities run by Democrats. The western powers reduced to being reactive responders to Trump are touting defence investments as the new route to economic growth. “Defence is the engine for growth,” declared Luke Pollard the British Labour Minister for the Armed Forces, recently while awarding a contract to a European firm to build a new missile launcher plant in Bolton. The new British Labour view is resoundingly echoed across Europe, Australia and Canada.

At the other end, hosting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conference of the counter-powers in Tianjin, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping called on his guests to “leverage their mega-scale market” and to “uphold the international system with the United Nations at its core and support the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization at its core.” Tongue in cheek or not, China is reversing the West’s rhetoric as it tries to forge a counter alliance to the western bloc taking advantage of Trump’s humiliation of America’s western allies and his flouting of its own world order norms.

Remarkably, the Tianjin gathering included both India and Pakistan. No NATO or western leader could have got India’s Modi and Pakistan’s Sharif in the same room, let alone at the same table. Modi’s reason for attending the conference in China is Donald Trump and the 50% tariff he singled out India for imposing because India has been purchasing Russian crude oil at half the global prices disregarding US sanctions.

India felt betrayed and humiliated after already being made to feel insulted by Trump’s White House lunch with Pakistan’s military chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and his false boast that he forced peace between India and Pakistan. In one reckless move Trump has upended over two decades of American presidential efforts to cultivate India as an Asian counterweight to China.

Complicating the tariff chaos is the question of legality of Trump’s tariffs that is now headed to the American Supreme Court for resolution. It is not that tariffs cannot be legal, but whether it is legal for a president to executively and arbitrarily impose tariffs without involving the legislature. The constitution explicitly vests powers of tariffs and taxation on the Congress.

Legal opinion is divided as to which way the Court, rather its six pro-Trump conservative judges, will sway. Even if two of them are convinced that Trump has overreached too far, that would be enough to forge a majority with the three liberal judges to uphold the lower court rulings that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are illegal. On the other hand, the six judges could collectively persuade themselves that it is important, even if they have to hold their legal noses, to rule in Trumps’ favour if only to avoid the even greater chaos of undoing the mess that their president has already created.

In Brazil, a panel of Supreme Court judges found their former president Jair Bolsonaro guilty of conspiracy to remain in power after losing the 2022 presidential election, and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison. Perhaps the US Supreme Court judges should take a leaf from their Brazilian brothers. Twenty years ago, the expectations would have been the other way around.

After escaping judicial strictures in his country, Trump is now berating the Brazilian government and its Supreme Court for conducting a witch hunt against his soulmate Bolsonaro. For that he punished Brazil with a 50% tariff (same as on India) and sanctioned Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the lead Judge on the panel. The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American, has vowed to “respond accordingly to this witch hunt.” What is also common to the two countries is that the two polities are deeply divided – US over Trump, and Brazil over Bolsonaro.    

Small and Stable

Amidst the encircling chaos, it is remarkable that Sri Lanka is showing political stability and it is in order that the NPP government gets some credit for it. Political stability is a necessary and useful backdrop to realizing Sri Lanka’s other two cravings: economic stability and national reconciliation. At the same time, political stability cannot be sustained if economic stability is not systematically achieved. Without progress on the economic front, even the government’s own electoral stability will be put at risk. Increments in national reconciliation may not bring matching electoral rewards, but without them the NPP will lose its pretext for claiming moral superiority over the political rumps from yesteryear.   

Within three years from now Sri Lanka’s debt payments will start and the current complacency over foreign reserves will be seriously challenged. The government’s challenge is to make serious advances, before 2028, in fighting poverty (now close 25% are below the poverty line of Rs. 1,096 per day) and malnutrition among children (currently afflicting 17% of children under five). Maintaining essential food supplies will be critical to eliminating malnutrition and reducing poverty.

The government should pre-emptively avoid inter-seasonal rice shortages simply by allowing imports to offset short supplies. Trying to solve shortages through mastering data and imposing regulations will not work. When it comes to rice, good politics would be to provide for flexible imports, and not insist on regulations and restrictions. Ensuring a steady supply of rice could even force hoarders to enter the market and not manipulate it.

The more difficult challenge would be to find new avenues for growth in addition to the established exports, tourism and remittances. The current exports will have to be protected from Trump’s tariffs even as the government looks for new exports. They cannot be identified and established in a jiffy. Tourism in Sri Lanka began after 1965 and it has taken 60 years to see three million visits as an achievable target. Garments have been around for half the time, still the industry has not been to able to reduce its factor imports.             

On national reconciliation, the government will have to make up its mind where to begin. The resurrection of mass graves presents both problems and opportunities. The government should not end up losing opportunities by trying to avoid problems. The government has been allocating funds and ensuring independent judicial oversight for mass grave investigations. It should start thinking of and planning the next steps that should invariably involve identifying and engaging with those responsible for the mass graves.

If the government was thinking of an exclusively development road map for national reconciliation, it has got a new reminder from India about the 13^th Amendment. But the two are not mutually exclusive, and it would make sense to marry development and devolution. That brings up the politically hot question of provincial council elections and their timing. The government should not wait for the auspicious time when it can win election to all the provincial councils at the same time. Rather it should have the confidence to work with a provincial council, or councils, where another party has got the majority.