Sri Lanka’s Historic Election

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has been ousted. Just a few months ago such a prospect seemed inconceivable, given Rajapaksa’s popularity among the Sinhalese majority and the enormous control he exercised over state power. But on January 8, the Sri Lankan electorate achieved the impossible by voting Rajapaksa out of office. Unlike other countries that have had to oust dictators through bloody violence or street protests, Sri Lankan voters ended Rajapaksa’s decade-long, increasingly authoritarian rule via the ballot box.

In a bid to preempt waning support, Rajapaksa called elections two years ahead of schedule. The gambit backfired. The joint opposition candidate, Maithripala Sirisena, until recently health minister in the Rajapaksa government, won the presidential election by a margin of 449,072 votes. In an election that produced a record 81.5 percent voter turnout, Sirisena secured 51.28 percent of the votes compared to Rajapaksa’s 47.58 percent.

By any measure, this was a historic election. “This is the first time since the introduction of an all-powerful executive presidency in Sri Lanka that an incumbent lost the election,” observed a Jaffna University professor, who spoke to The Diplomat on condition of anonymity. What is more, Sri Lanka’s “beleaguered minorities,” who account for 30% of the island’s population “can take credit for the electoral defeat of its most powerful president ever.”

Rajapaksa became Sri Lanka’s president first in 2005. In May 2009, his government inflicted a crushing military defeat on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), ending the 25-year-long civil war. As a wave of Sinhala-Buddhist triumphalism swept the island in the wake of the war victory, Rajapaksa assumed demi-god status among the Sinhalese-Buddhists. His popularity swept him into a second term in 2010 and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)-led United People’s Freedom Alliance’s (UPFA) won a string of elections to parliament, provincial councils and local bodies.

But nepotism and corruption assumed shocking proportions during Rajapaksa’s second term. Close kin and cronies were appointed to key ministerial and diplomatic posts, or were made heads of government corporations and banks. The Rajapaksa family was said to be controlling 56 percent of Sri Lanka’s budget allocation. This together with economic mismanagement, deteriorating law and order, and creeping authoritarianism triggered a groundswell of dissatisfaction with Rajapaksa’s rule even among his Sinhalese-Buddhist support base.

With the opposition New Democratic Alliance coming up with Sirisena as their candidate to take on Rajapaksa, the latter’s re-election bid was dealt a severe blow. Sirisena appeals to the same demographic that Rajapaksa did and ate into his once impenetrable Sinhalese-Buddhist vote base.

However, it was Tamil and Muslim voters who gave Sirisena his victory.

Rajapaksa’s brutal conduct of the war, especially in its final stages when tens of thousands of Tamils were killed in the aerial bombing of so-called “Safe Zones,” the continuing militarization of the predominantly Tamil Northern Province, the foot-dragging on investigations into allegations of war crimes by his government, and his reluctance to reach out to Tamils in a meaningful attempt at post-war reconciliation made him immensely unpopular among Tamils. Rajapaksa “trampled on Tamil sentiments and sensitivities,” the Jaffna University professor told The Diplomat, drawing attention to the government’s “bulldozing of LTTE graveyards to make way for military camps” in the war-ravaged Tamil areas.

On voting day, Tamils struck back. “We voted to oust Rajapaksa; we voted for Sirisena,” the professor said.

It was the robust support Sirisena received from the Tamils that enabled him to pull ahead of Rajapaksa in what was a close contest. He won 74.42 percent and 78.47 percent of the votes in the Northern Province’s Jaffna and Vanni districts, respectively and 81.62 percent of the votes in Batticaloa district in the Eastern Province.

Had the roughly 600,000 Tamils of the North and East who voted for Sirisena not done so, the challenger would not have won by the 450,000 vote margin that he did, observes Kandiah Sarveswaran, a member of the Northern Provincial Council representing the Tamil National Alliance (TNA). That would have left Sirisena short of the 50 percent of votes needed to avoid a run-off.

Like Tamils, Muslims too suffered during Rajapaksa’s presidency. The Rajapaksa government did little to rein in thuggish Buddhist outfits like the Bodu Bala Sena that periodically attacked Muslims, their businesses and their places of worship over the last couple of years. Muslims too voted against Rajapaksa in large numbers. Interestingly, neither Tamil nor Muslim parties struck deals with Sirisena on a devolution of power when they extended support to him. “Our support was unconditional,” Sarveswaran says.

Sirisena’s victory was not so much a mandate for him as it was a vote against Rajapaksa. It was a mandate for change. Regime change has been achieved but will President Sirisena bring real change to Sri Lanka?

Until he defected to the opposition to be named its presidential candidate Sirisena was part of Rajapaksa’s inner circle, a close confidante. On the Tamil question, he has long been on the same page as Rajapaksa. Indeed, as Sirisena proudly reminded Sri Lankans in a recent interview, he “was the Minister-in-Charge of Defence during the last two weeks of the war” and had “acted as the Minister of Defence five times during the height of the war,” which means he was very much a part of the controversial decisions made in that period. In a press conference ahead of voting, Sirisena ruled out scaling down the military presence in the North.

In the circumstances, “Tamils do not place much hope on Sirisena,” Sarveswaran said. The Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), a party of Buddhist monks that is virulently opposed to any form of power-sharing with Tamils, is part of the NDF government and Sirisena will use the JHU as “an excuse” to avoid responding to Tamil demands. At best, “we can hope for Sirisena to remove some hurdles” in the way of the Northern Provincial Council’s functioning and to resettle some of the 200,000 displaced Tamils, he observed.

Sirisena is unlikely to allow an international probe into war crimes allegations leveled against the Rajapaksa regime. His election manifesto “is very specific and clear on this subject,” says Dr. John Gooneratne, a retired Sri Lankan diplomat who was deputy director-general of the government’s Peace Secretariat in the peace talks with the LTTE in the 2002-06 period. It rules out allowing any “international power to ill-treat or touch a single citizen of this country on account of the campaign to defeat terrorism.” In the course of his election campaign, Sirisena did announce “a domestic inquiry into this area of international concern,” Gooneratne noted, adding that the terms and scope of such an inquiry are, however, unclear at present.

A key plank of Sirisena’s election campaign was a pledge to abolish the executive presidency within 100 days of his assuming the presidency. Sri Lanka’s executive presidency was introduced in 1978 and is among the most powerful in the world. It is widely seen as the main reason for the country’s slide to authoritarianism and in every presidential election over the past two decades every candidate has pledged to abolish the executive presidency. Once in power, however, every president has conveniently forgotten their promise. Will Sirisena do so too?

Sirisena will need a two-thirds majority in parliament to ensure passage of constitutional amendments. This will require him to work with Rajapaksa’s UPFA, which holds over 135 seats in the 225-member parliament. Sirisena is more likely to dissolve parliament and go in for fresh elections in a bid to improve the NDF’s parliamentary strength.

Sri Lanka’s decaying political and legal institutions has evoked enormous concern, prompting intellectuals like Radhika Coomaraswamy, a former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict, to call on the new president to initiate a process for “reforming politics, political institutions and rule of law institutions ... along with a change in the political culture.” She has suggested the setting up of a Constitutional Commission to recommend reforms, with a person of unquestionable integrity like Christy Weeramantry, a noted Sri Lankan jurist and former judge of the International Court of Justice, heading it. The process must be consultative so that the Commission produces a “consensus document” that prompts a sense of “ownership” in every Sri Lankan, she says.

With regard to economic policies, the NDF government is expected to press on with the agenda of the previous regime “with some modifications.” It can be expected to review unpopular projects such as a contract worth $400 million with an Australian company for a casino project and another with the Chinese worth $1.5 billion to build a city on reclaimed land off Colombo.

Changes can be expected on the foreign policy front. Especially after his military victory in 2009, Rajapaksa’s rather abrasive approach resulted in Sri Lanka’s growing distance not only from Western countries but from India. New Delhi was appreciative of “Rajapaksa’s role in defeating the LTTE and [eliminating its leader] Velupillai Prabhakaran,” Ashok Malik, a New Delhi-based political commentator told The Diplomat. However, his government’s growing closeness with China, which saw Sri Lanka allowing Chinese submarines to dock in Lankan ports contributed to a perception in Delhi that Rajapaksa “was not playing with a straight bat.” It “broadened the trust gulf” between the two neighbors.

The Sirisena government can be expected to return Sri Lanka to a more balanced foreign policy; he has promised to establish “equal relations” between China, India, Pakistan and Japan. This is likely to see a correction in Sri Lanka’s tilt towards China during Rajapaksa rule. While some have interpreted this as “good news” for India, it may be too early to predict a Chinese exit or even a reduction in its presence on the island.

Sirisena’s victory gives “India an opening [to play a larger role in the Sri Lankan economy], but a lot depends on how quickly and robustly the Indian economy grows,” Malik says. Besides, “China’s economic clout in Sri Lanka, or indeed in the rest of South Asia, runs much deeper than its influence on individual political leaders.”

The road ahead for Sirisena is not easy. He faces formidable challenges. One is that the alliance he heads is a disparate one that includes feuding leaders and parties subscribing to conflicting political and economic ideologies and policies. A shared goal of ousting Rajapaksa brought them together. With that goal achieved, can this alliance survive? Sirisena will need to summon enormous skills to hold this motley grouping together.

Importantly, Sirisena will have to bear in mind that Rajapaksa is down but not out. The former president is reported to have sought the army’s help to hang on to power when his electoral defeat became evident. This is a clear sign that he and his family will not give up easily. Too much is at stake for the Rajapaksas. In the run-up to the election, Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Colombo-based Centre for Policy Alternatives told The Diplomat that with loss of power Rajapaksa would lose impunity and that “irrespective of their fate on the human rights and war crimes front, the Rajapaksas will undoubtedly be hauled up before the courts on corruption charges by a successor regime.”

Should they face such a predicament, the Rajapaksas can be expected to make another attempt at a power grab, or at least pressure the Sirisena government. The former president retains a significant hold over the masses. In electorates that are predominantly Sinhalese, it was Rajapaksa who “emerged the clear winner indicating that his rural Sinhalese vote base has not seriously eroded, although it has diminished.” The ousted president’s capacity to bring his supporters to the streets to stir trouble for the new government must not be underestimated.

Sirisena is likely to find that ending a decade of Rajapaksa rule was the easy part. Far more formidable challenges lie ahead.