By Vishwamithra –

“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.”  ~Herman E. Daly

There is a question worth asking in Sri Lanka today, even if there can never be a definitive answer to it: What would Rohana Wijeweera have done about the cost of living if, by some impossible turn of history, he occupied the seat now held by Anura Kumara Dissanayake?

The question is not whether Wijeweera was a better leader than AKD. Nor is it an invitation to romanticize a revolutionary whose politics belonged to another age. It is a thought experiment intended to illuminate something rather more immediate: how dramatically the JVP’s conception of economic power has changed between the Wijeweera generation and the government of today.

The cost-of-living problem is real. In August 2026, Colombo’s headline inflation reached 8.0 per cent, while food inflation climbed to 8.5 per cent. The nationwide measure of inflation stood at 8.1 per cent. These figures do not mean that every price rose by that amount during a single month, nor can every increase be laid at the government’s door. External energy prices, international instability, exchange-rate pressures, supply conditions and statistical base effects all matter.

But families do not eat statistical explanations.

They buy rice, vegetables, fish, milk powder and medicine. They pay electricity bills, bus fares and school expenses. To the economist, inflation is an index. To the housewife standing before a vegetable stall, the pensioner counting the notes remaining in his wallet and the wage-earner wondering whether his salary will survive until the end of the month, inflation is an intensely personal experience.

And that is precisely where Wijeweera would have been politically different.

The Rohana Wijeweera of history did not regard the market as an independent mechanism that government should delicately encourage, regulate and occasionally correct. His politics began from a much more radical proposition: economic power itself was political power.

The JVP program associated with his era envisaged a planned socialist economy, nationalization of banks and major industries, state control of foreign trade and radical restructuring of agriculture. Whether such policies would have worked is an entirely different question. History provides enough examples of centrally planned economies producing shortages, inefficiency and black markets to make romanticism dangerous.

But one thing seems difficult to imagine: Wijeweera standing before the country and explaining that the government must simply wait for market mechanisms eventually to bring relief.

He would almost certainly have looked for the culprit.

Was it the importer? The wholesaler? The middleman? The supermarket? The trader? The bureaucracy? The banking system? Foreign capital? Or what he regarded as the economic structure itself?

That instinct is fundamental to understanding Wijeweera.

His political vocabulary was constructed around exploitation, class, ownership and control. The young men and women attracted to the early JVP were not being invited merely to administer the existing economic order more efficiently. They were being told that the order itself was the problem.

That is a very different proposition from governing Sri Lanka in 2026.

Were one to extrapolate cautiously from his documented economic philosophy, a Wijeweera government confronting rapidly rising food prices would probably have been tempted towards aggressive state intervention: expanded state purchasing, direct distribution of essentials, stronger controls over imports and wholesale trade, restrictions on margins, state competition with private traders, and perhaps compulsory measures against hoarding.

He might also have demanded a much more intrusive examination of the journey of food from farm gate to dinner table.

Take a vegetable sold in Colombo.

How much did the farmer receive?

How much did transport add?

How many intermediaries handled it?

What margins were collected between Dambulla and Colombo?

Who possesses bargaining power in that chain?

These are not unreasonable questions merely because they come naturally to socialist politics. Indeed, greater transparency in supply chains can be useful under almost any economic philosophy.

Where Wijeweera would probably have departed sharply from modern economic orthodoxy is in what came next. His historical ideology gave the state a commanding role. If he concluded that private distribution was exploiting consumers, his instinct would likely have been not merely to regulate the system but to replace significant parts of it.

That might have produced immediate political theatre.

Whether it would have produced cheaper food sustainably is far less certain.

Price controls, for example, can make an item cheaper on paper while making it disappear from the shelf. A government can order a trader to sell below a certain price; it cannot order him indefinitely to sell at a loss. State distribution can protect consumers during emergencies, but badly managed public monopolies can also accumulate losses that eventually return to the citizen through taxation, inflation or debt.

There lies the great irony of comparing Wijeweera with AKD.

Wijeweera wanted to overthrow an economic system. AKD has inherited one he must operate.

AKD’s government cannot behave as though Sri Lanka exists in an economic vacuum. It governs a country emerging from sovereign default and economic collapse, dependent on international trade, imported fuel, external financing, tourism, remittances and investor confidence. Every populist intervention carries a bill, and somebody eventually has to pay it.

The revolutionary can promise to tear up the ledger.

The President must balance it.

That does not, however, absolve the present government from asking whether economic stability is reaching the kitchen table.

A government can produce improving macroeconomic indicators while households continue to experience severe pressure. Both propositions can be true simultaneously. Indeed, one of the oldest mistakes in politics is assuming that recovery in national accounts automatically becomes recovery in people’s lives.

It does not.

GDP does not cook dinner.

Foreign reserves cannot themselves pay a family’s electricity bill.

A healthier fiscal balance means little politically to someone whose real purchasing power is shrinking.

The Central Bank itself says inflation is currently above its 5 per cent target and expects it to moderate over the medium term. That may prove correct. But “over the medium term” is a phrase belonging to economists and central bankers. Hunger, rent and household bills operate according to a considerably shorter calendar.

This is where AKD confronts perhaps the most fascinating contradiction in the history of the JVP.

The movement founded by Wijeweera spent decades arguing that Sri Lanka’s economic structure required fundamental transformation. Today, a political movement descended from that tradition carries responsibility for administering an economy constrained by fiscal discipline, international markets and the realities of global capitalism.

That transformation may represent political maturity. It may represent economic necessity. It certainly represents history.

But it also creates a legitimate question.

How much of Wijeweera’s impatience with economic injustice can survive inside the discipline of modern government?

The answer should not be a return to the economics of the 1970s. Sri Lanka has already paid dearly for experiments involving excessive controls, closed economic thinking and bureaucratic allocation. Nor should anyone pretend that nationalizing another institution automatically makes rice cheaper or vegetables plentiful.

There is, however, something the modern JVP might still learn from the political instinct of its founder: never allow economic statistics to become a substitute for the lived experience of ordinary people.

Investigate the supply chains.

Expose artificial shortages where they exist.

Publish margins where concentration permits excessive profits.

Improve storage and transport.

Reduce agricultural waste.

Strengthen competition.

Use state purchasing intelligently where markets demonstrably fail.

Attack corruption in import licensing and procurement.

And above all, make increasing agricultural productivity—not merely controlling retail prices—the center of any serious food-price strategy.

Wijeweera would probably have reached instinctively for the commanding hand of the state.

AKD has chosen a considerably more cautious road.

Neither fact, by itself, tells us which policies will succeed.

But the contrast tells us something extraordinary about Sri Lankan politics. The organization that once dreamed of dismantling the economic establishment is now responsible for keeping the economy stable while persuading citizens that stability will eventually improve their lives.

That may be the most profound journey the JVP has ever undertaken.

And the real test will not be whether AKD can reproduce Rohana Wijeweera’s economics. He neither can nor should be expected simply to resurrect an economic program written for another century.

The test is whether a government descended from a movement created in the name of the economically dispossessed can ensure that macroeconomic recovery becomes something an ordinary Sri Lankan can actually feel.

For ultimately the cost of living is not an ideological argument.

It is the price of breakfast tomorrow morning.

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com