I have written before about recent positive developments in Sri Lanka where the corrupt nepotistic looters who ran the country into the ground for decades and treated it and its coffers as their own playground to do with as they liked, were thrown out of power, first in a presidential election in September where the leftist candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake (known as AKD) defeated two members of the old guard. He then immediately dissolved parliament and called for new elections and in November his party won 159 of the 225 seats, with 62% of the vote.
He appointed a woman Harini Amrasuriya, a sociologist, as prime minister. Amrasuriya is the first woman who is not the wife or daughter of a top politician to hold this position in South Asia. The two of them are making big changes.
Two years after Sri Lankans rose up and cast out a political dynasty whose profligacy had brought economic ruin, the country is in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention.
Anger has steadied into a quieter resolve for wholesale change. Through a pair of national elections last year, for president and for Parliament, the old elite that had governed for decades was decimated. A leftist movement has risen in its place, promising a more equal society.
…Some of the earliest actions have included ending the V.I.P. culture around politics. Gone are the long motorcades, large security details and lavish mansions for ministers. The president has slashed his traveling entourage. The prime minister’s compound, which under its previous occupant buzzed with the activity of over 100 staff members, now has a library-like quiet, as Dr. Amarasuriya works with a staff of just a dozen.