Sri Lanka Presidential polls: Marxist revolutionary Dissanayake emerges front-runner

By most people’s reckoning, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, 55, is the clear frontrunner in the September 21 election, whose two other main contestants are incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe, 75, and main Opposition leader Sajith Pramadasa, 57.

All three belong to Sri Lanka’s overwhelmingly majority community – Sinhalese Buddhists. The two largest minority communities in the country being Tamils and Muslims.

There are some 35 other candidates including Namal Rajapaksa, son of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, and Sarath Fonseca, who headed the Sri Lanka Army when it crushed the Tamil Tigers in 2009, ending a quarter century of Tamil separatism. However, none of them will make a significant mark in the contest.

An influential Marxist outfit gains prominence

Dissanayake heads the National People’s Power (NPP), an alliance of like-minded groups. But he is primarily the leader since 2014 of the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP, or People’s Liberation Front), Sri Lanka’s most influential Marxist outfit, which carried out two bloody insurrections to seize state power in 1971 and 1988-89.

North Korea actively backed the 1971 insurrection, which was crushed by Sri Lankan security forces, with the help of several countries including India, leaving thousands dead on both sides.

The second and more blood-soaked insurrection followed the 1987 India-Sri Lanka pact aimed at ending Tamil separatism but which the JVP, along with others, found offensive due to the deployment of Indian troops in the island’s war theatre – north and the east.

Although the JVP gave up violence as a creed and embraced democratic politics in the 1990s, it could not have gained the present day’s prominence in national politics but for the economic and political upheaval Sri Lanka saw in 2022, leading to the flight of then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa out of the country.

The unprecedented economic crisis that enveloped Sri Lanka at the time, leading to widespread shortages of even essential goods and serpentine queues for almost everything, triggered a massive general revolt whose most important driver was the well-organised and disciplined JVP.

Using its time-tested tactics, JVP cadres came to lead not only protests of mass disgust across most of the country but played a key role in the main rallies in Colombo, injecting popular slogans like economic equality and an end to endemic and widespread corruption in the country of 21 million.

Not out of the woods

Once Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country, his discredited ruling party SLPP picked Wickremesinghe, one of the most veteran Sri Lankan politicians but outside its ranks, to govern the country for the remainder of Rajapaksa’s term. (Premadasa was offered the job first but he declined) It was Wickremesinghe who signed the Norway-brokered truce with the LTTE in 2002 but which eventually collapsed.

Although the visible worst of the 2022 economic calamity is now over, Sri Lanka is still not out of the woods. Under an IMF bailout, taxes have been hiked across the board, leading to widespread discontent which analysts say could cost Wickremesinghe the presidential contest though he is confident of retaining power.

The other strong contender

The other man seen as a strong contender in this Presidential race is Sajith Premadasa, son of former president Ranasinghe Premadasa, who was blown up by a LTTE suicide bomber in 1993. A graduate of the London School of Economics and a former party colleague of Wickremesinghe, he heads the main Opposition SJB party.

His supporters point out that even in the 2019 presidential election, which Gotabaya Rajapaksa won with 52 per cent votes on an emotive nationalist-Sinhalese Buddhist agenda, Premadasa still gathered a whopping 41 per cent of the votes, mainly on the strength of Tamil and Muslim votes. (Dissanayake then polled a mere 3 per cent of votes)

Most minorities are still expected to vote for Premadasa, and so all the three main candidates will be fighting intensely to secure the support of the Sinhalese, whose votes are widely expected to get split.

Unprecedented election

This is why the coming presidential election will be unprecedented.

Sri Lanka’s presidential battles have normally been a two-horse race (irrespective of the number of contestants) and so it has been easy for the eventual winner to grab 50 per cent of all votes plus one to be declared the winner.

But unless one candidate somehow pulls of a clear victory, it is feared that no contestant will get 50 per cent of the votes, leading to the counting of the second and third preference votes, in the millions of ballots to pick a new president.

After balloting ends on Sunday, September 21, the results are expected the next day. But if the counting goes beyond the first round, it is not clear when the final result will be out. This has never happened in Sri Lanka before.

Although Wickremesinghe is the first choice of the business community, Premadasa too enjoys support among business and industrial bodies. But since a presidential election is about direct voting by all adult Sri Lankans, it is an obvious advantage for Dissanayake.

Champion of the underdog

Amid a plethora of election pledges and promises to deliver the moon to the voters, Dissanayake – whose father was a labourer –is viewed as the most committed to fighting corruption as he belongs to a party that has traditionally championed the cause of the underdog. Most other politicians are seen belonging to the tried and stale political class.

At the same time, the terrible violence the JVP unleashed on its enemies, killing thousands both in 1971 and 1988-89, before the security forces too resorted to terrible torture and extra-judicial killings, have not been forgotten by most Sri Lankans, particularly those in the 50s and the elderly.

The JVP is trying its level best to convince the people that it has given up violence for good. Business groups and the elites, however, worry over a Dissanayake victory.

India invites JVP

That Dissanayake was on the ascendancy became clear earlier this year when the Indian government surprisingly invited JVP leaders, Dissanayake included, to meet its top officials including National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. New Delhi did this although it counts both Wickremesinghe and Premadasa as long-time friends.

This was obviously done to curb the JVP’s traditional anti-India postures and a strong pro-China tilt.

All three main contenders have enjoyed varying degrees of participation in Sri Lankan governments. Until the results are out, hopefully, on September 22, most Sri Lanka watchers will have to keep their fingers crossed.