Will change come through red gates?

My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.  

The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but successive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent elements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview, the violence of the JVP (and also the LTTE)  was a reaction to the repression of the government, and the continued

marginalisation of certain social groups by a political elite. I did not know till Bopage mentioned it, that Rohana Wijeweera’s father was left paralysed for life after being attacked by political thugs. Interestingly Bopage also observes that in the 70s and 80s, across the world, armed struggles were seen as an acceptable means for initiating change. In a very different context today, the likelihood of such violence being repeated is unlikely.  

Another factor that seems to be provoking anxiety is that NPP economic policies will likely take us back to a protectionist, soviet-style economy, and that they will reject the IMF package and put us into a worse economic crisis than the one that our incumbent President is said to have brought us out of.   Several orthodox economists who have had conversations with members of the NPP suggest that this is not the case. The NPP does have reservations about an unbridled market economy, and they expect to negotiate a package with the IMF that puts the greater burden of structural reforms on the wealthier citizens rather than the middle classes and the poor. Something that should be difficult to argue against, though I can see why it perturbs some among us.

Yet another criticism is that the NPP has no experience of governance, and that the JVP's brief participation in government in 2004 was disastrous.  Given that the track record of all parties show that they have been culpable for the multiple crises that Sri Lanka is facing today, this hardly gives the NPP the prerogative of being bad in governance and implementation.  NPP's commitment to eradicating the scourge of corruption is definitely a plus, acknowledged by minority parties with different allegiances and also by many young voters who are understandably fed up.  So long as the party in office can mobilise a group of thoughtful and capable advisors and administrators, a different, yet untried approach to running this country is probably a risk worth taking. 

Whether the gates that will open on September 21st are red or not, the important thing for the citizens of this country is to ensure that we maintain a scorecard of the performance of whoever is our new head of state and their government. We work tirelessly, formally and informally, to ensure our preferred candidates are elected into office. And then, in a rather naive and trusting way, we leave them to get on with it. This has not worked. A system change requires us, the people, to monitor the performance of our elected representatives.  My aunt, Ambassador Manel Abeysekera, a veteran foreign service officer and diplomat, never failed to correct me if I talked about a government in power.  She would point out that it is a government in office.  In a democracy the power resides with the people, and we should exercise it, not just with the ballot but post-elections through systems of holding our representatives accountable.