By Uditha Devapriya –

Uditha Devapriya

According to a Facebook report compiled by two Sri Lankans, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa have spent extensively on ads on Meta. Each has disbursed around Rs 32 million so far. Anura Kumara Dissanayake comes third at Rs 7.1 million, after Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe at Rs 8.6 million. Namal Rajapaksa comes seventh at Rs 665,000, after Dilith Jayaweera, who has spent Rs 1.6 million.

These numbers are revealing, but hardly surprising. The main battlelines are between the incumbent and the SJB. On the other hand, according to the latest IHP trackers, Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake are fighting neck to neck. Their approval ratings have risen while the President’s has improved only marginally. There is of course no real relationship between election ad spends and polling numbers: we have learnt that much in the US and India over the last few years, if not decades. An NPP official reflected on this somewhat snidely when he remarked that the President “has won in X with bots and on FB spending, [but] the citizens will win on 21st.”

It must be admitted that situation today is not what it was five months ago. The hype that the NPP enjoyed has not come down, but it has plateaued. The SJB, on the other hand, has enjoyed a resurgence. Part of the reason for this has been its extensive campaign, not just against Ranil Wickremesinghe – which it has identified as Enemy Number One – but more strongly the NPP – which it views in much the same way an elephant would view an irritating fly. To this end, NPP representatives, including the kin of some officials, have resorted to straw-manning and redbaiting the party, accusing the NPP of, for instance, being opposed to private education and having slipshod positions on minority rights.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe was only half-correct. Money, not power, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. When you have financing, you can engage in almost anything. What we are seeing now, therefore, is parties with money engaged in the most intriguing redbaiting, anti-communist campaign in recent years in Sri Lanka. One would be tempted to say that Ranil Wickremesinghe is leading the battalion here. But Wickremesinghe, who has the dubious distinction of overseeing the most divisive IMF agreement this country has entered into, is only targeting one theme: economic recovery. His campaign against the NPP pivots on two main issues: the future of the island’s ongoing restructuring programme, and the future and political wellbeing of the SLPP MPs who helped him become President.

The SJB, which has MPs that are more ideologically committed to neoliberal orthodoxy – regardless of the party leader’s position on issues like social welfare and spending – have been far less nuanced about their attacks on the NPP. It is amusing when those involved in civil society, who are connected to the SJB, resort to accusing the NPP of all kinds of things the NPP has neither stated nor supported. But that is what they are doing. Whether it’s posting fake posts about officials whom the NPP intends on appointing as Ministers or calling them anti-private sector and anti-private education, the SJB has left no stone unturned in rubbishing the NPP. Among the more outrageous of these claims is that the NPP is somehow in cahoots with Ranil Wickremesinghe to defeat the SJB. There is not a shred of proof for this, but such claims continue to be posted and recycled everywhere.

The NPP has also attracted criticisms from supposedly nonpartisan civil society organisations which find fault with its lack of transparency. Some of these outfits claim that while Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa responded positively to requests for interviews, the NPP and Anura Kumara Dissanayake have either declined or failed to respond. These outfits take such responses as signs of what may happen if the NPP wins on September 21. They also – somewhat justifiably, one can say – draw parallels between the NPP’s reluctance to come into the public and Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s reluctance to engage in a presidential debate back in 2019. Perhaps because these groups and collectives are based in Colombo and are dominated by middle-class groups – which in Sri Lanka have swerved against the Left – they insinuate that the NPP embraces a left-authoritarian political model.

Two reasons explain this. The first is historical. Attitudes to leftwing groups in Sri Lanka have always been different to those in neighbouring countries in South Asia. Largely because it got universal suffrage before other British – and colonial – societies, the Left was compelled to adjust itself when entering parliamentary politics. As Dayan Jayatilleka has pointed out in Long War, Cold Peace, the political Right responded to this in two ways. First, it mobilised the bourgeoisie against the Left – essentially, the LSSP and Communist Party – on economic issues such as nationalisation, the schools takeover, and even foreign policy. Second, it used cultural issues to galvanise support from the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie.

After the SLFP emerged in 1951, the latter crowd – the Sinhala (and predominantly Buddhist) petty bourgeoisie – moved away from the party of the bourgeoisie, the UNP, and became a more tenable, pragmatic option for the Left. When the Old Left – the LSSP and CPSL – lost chunks of this petty bourgeoisie after 1977, the JVP came up and filled the space. While the SLFP continued to dominate this class, the JVP and other anti-UNP parties, including Sinhala Buddhist nationalist parties such as the JHU, began marketing themselves to the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie. What we are witnessing now is the JVP mobilising this class, particularly in rural areas that previously had voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

This convergence, or confluence – which should not come as a surprise to anyone – has now led to fears that the NPP will “redo” Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The logic is simple: many Gotabaya Rajapaksa supporters have joined the “system change” bandwagon, so most of them will support Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Some even argue that should the NPP come into power, it will enact the same policies, including tax cuts. Dayan Jayatilleka put it aptly the other day when he dismissed such claims and argued that “no one”, least of all Dissanayake, “is that much of a crackpot.” Yet the political right, including the liberal centrist crowd, represented politically by the SJB and some civil society outfits, recycle these claims.

The second reason has to do with voter patterns in Sri Lanka. Because Sri Lanka received the franchise before other colonial societies, it conditioned itself early on to the kind of electoral shifts and somersaults which have only now become mainstream in the West. Sri Lankan voters, whatever the hype over fringe parties and movements, have always tilted to the so-called “mainstream” candidate. We saw this in 2019, when anti-corruption activists such as Nagananda Kodithuwakku got plaudits from people, but barely scraped through at the polls. Public interest activists have only recently emerged as presidential candidates, the most recent being the former Chairman of the CEB. Yet as in the US, they have never become a serious threat to the mainstream candidates.

What is unique about this election is that what was once considered fringe and third party – the NPP – is moving to the centre. As a political analyst, I find claims of the NPP or JVP being communist somewhat ludicrous. I have mentioned earlier that the NPP or JVP is undergoing its second major shift – the first being its entry to parliamentary politics in 2001 – and that this has forced it to do a volte-face on some issues and protect its integrity on others. Its attitude to India is a classic example of this: while it went to New Delhi on an official visit in February, it has come out against Adani Group’s investments in Sri Lanka.

As Ramindu Perera has observed in a recent nuanced piece, the JVP’s response to India has always been historically conditioned, in much the same way that the UNP’s or the SLPP’s has been. Nevertheless, it is clear that the NPP is undergoing a major transformation from within and particularly with respect to issues like India and the IMF.

It remains to be seen how Sri Lankan voters will respond to these developments. When a third party moves into the centre, the establishment naturally gets splintered. The UNP and SJB are thus concurrently opposed to each other and united in their opposition to the NPP. They are using the same arguments and recycling the same claims. The only difference is that, regardless of its leader’s commitment to social welfare and the economic policies of his father, the SJB exudes a more polished, one could say refined, commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy than the UNP. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s motives for continuity are, in that sense, primeval: it is power, pure and simple. The SJB’s attacks on the NPP are driven by ideology and need to be taken more seriously. As voters witness SJB officials, their children, and civil society groups targeting the NPP, they may wonder whether the NPP has become a lightning rod for unfair criticisms. This may well have a bearing on next week’s elections.

*Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com. Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.