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.
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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.

(It used to be the case that in any trip abroad for an official meeting, the person who was designated to attend the meeting would be accompanied by a large contingent of family and friends and assorted hangers-on who would use it as a free holiday.)

While it is the case that the top executive position of president is still held by a man, both of them seem determined to expand the role of women in the country, deservedly so since women played a huge role in bringing about this positive turn of events. Amrasuriya describes herself self-mockingly as a ‘childless cat lady’ but she is deadly serious about what the country needs to do.

As the country’s democracy rebounds, opportunities are opening for women.

Women were a driving force behind the protest movement that forced Sri Lanka’s president to flee in July 2022. When the country all but ran out of cash and fuel, the burden fell disproportionately on women, who shoulder the domestic load. Their rage sent them into the streets.

Now, women are at the center of efforts to give the country lasting protections against the whims of strongmen. Women are also doing the slow and steady work of shaping a political culture that allows them equal space.

Women, who make up 56 percent of registered voters, were crucial to the electoral victories late last year by National People’s Power, a small leftist outfit.
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Dr. Amarasuriya has long preached that a more equal society cannot be achieved without making governance more friendly to women, injecting what she calls “feminist sensitivity” into policymaking.

The new government is taking up policy debates on improving pay parity and making work environments better for women. It hopes to raise the rate of female participation in the formal work force to about 50 percent, up from 33 percent. The governing party is doubling down on its efforts to mobilize women politically to ensure that this moment is not fleeting.

Before the presidential election last year, National People’s Power, the leftist party, spent about two years trying to mobilize women like Ms. Maduwanthi. Women, Dr. Amarasuriya and other party leaders argued at the time, were looking for someone to champion the issues they felt strongly about.

After female voters helped lift Mr. Dissanayake to victory in the presidential vote, the party won an absolute majority in Parliament weeks later. In many districts, women won handily.

Dr. Amarasuriya, running in Colombo, broke a record for votes that had been held by Mahinda Rajapaksa, a former prime minister, president and war hero and the older brother of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president who was ousted in 2022.

The ample victories by Dr. Amarasuriya and other women shattered a myth that female politicians could not win, she said. Her party raised money centrally and distributed it evenly to female and male candidates to overcome disadvantages that women face.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the events of the last three years and how Sri Lanka got to this point. ((My earlier discussion of those events can be see here.)

Back in April 2022, the decades of looting of the country by its politicians had left it so bankrupt that it could not import the basic necessities of fuel and food and medicines. This led to widespread discontent with hundreds of thousands of people holding mass extended protests in the capital Colombo and around the country and in May even occupying the presidential palace and prime minister’s office and residence and forcing the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother the prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa out of office and their official homes. (The nepotism did not end there. Another brother was the finance minister, a fourth brother the minister of agriculture, a nephew a cabinet minister, and a cousin a deputy minister.)

When I watched the mass protests, I was encouraged by the diversity of the people leading them. Sri Lanka is a country that has long been bedeviled by sectarian schisms based on religion and ethnicity that frequently spilled into violence and even pogroms. Many of these conflicts were fomented by the main political parties in order to gain power, a tactic that is sadly all too familiar globally. But the people speaking at the protests spanned the gamut of religions, ethnicities, gender, age, and class, giving me hope that we were witnessing the dawn of a new era.

But the old guard was not yet done and they staged a backdoor counter-revolution, using the fact that they still had a parliamentary majority of 150 in the 225-member body, a holdover from the elections held back in 2020. Under the constitution, parliament gets to decide who fills a presidential vacancy. The Rajapaksas appointed Ranil Wickremasinghe (himself a nepo baby and the poster child for how an utterly incompetent and unprincipled person can rise to positions of influence provided they have the right family and connections and are willing to do whatever their masters tell them) as acting president, and parliament elected him president in July with 134 votes. AKD got just three votes out of the 225 since that was the size of his party then. Wickremasinghe clamped down on the protests and the crowds dissipated. (It is actually incredible that the mass protests lasted as long as they did, since it is difficult to have people willing and able to engage in them for months on end.) It appeared that the popular revolution had been defeated.

But it was just dormant. The seething anger was still there. It was just seeking an outlet for expression and elections provided it. While the old guard held off elections as long as they could, and even tried to find ways to extend their term, they finally had to hold presidential elections in September which AKD won and this led to the current situation.

So things are definitely looking hopeful, after looking extremely bleak for two years. It should give all of us hope that things can change for the better, however desperate they may seem now. However, while I am cautiously optimistic about the turn of events in Sri Lanka, I am also old enough to know that hopes can be dashed. The government faces enormous challenges due to the decades-long decline in its economy and democratic institutions. The US has never looked kindly on leftist governments that show signs of successful governance because that would show that there is an alternative path to the neoliberal capitalist paradigm that it seeks to impose on the world. So I would expect it to try and undermine the current Sri Lankan government and that will require deft maneuvering by them to thwart those efforts.