Aragalaya: Did the elite triumph over the hoi polloi?

Sri Lanka, like any other nation, has its share of conspiracy theorists, who see a crocodile in every glass of water, as a popular local saying goes. Some of them have even claimed that the LTTE bomb attack which nearly killed the then President Chandrika Kumaratunga, seeking re-election, on the eve of the 1999 presidential election, was stage-managed to engineer a wave of sympathy votes for her! Various such theories have also been expounded about the suicide bomb attack that killed President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.

The latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds is that the Sri Lankan political elite conspired against the ordinary people and deprived the latter of an opportunity to govern the country by infiltrating the Galle Face protest or the Aragalaya, taking it over, and using it to capture power. Among the proponents of this theory is dissident SLPP MP and former Minister Dilan Perera. Addressing the media recently, he shed copious tears for the hoi polloi, who, he said, had staged a very successful national protest campaign only to have it hijacked by the elite.

Has Perera as well as the political camp he represents read the Argalaya accurately and dispassionately, in the current social, political and economic context, or is he trying to rouse anti-elitist feelings among the public to endear his faction of the SLPP to them so as to gain some traction for the political party he, Dullas Alahapperuma and others are planning to form to contest future elections? It is always appealing to the ordinary masses to bash the elite, and that was the approach Ranasinghe Premadasa adopted to win public sympathy, which translated into votes for him; he used to attack the Sri Lankan aristocracy while identifying himself with the masses. His strategy paid off; he won elections.

Anti-elitism as a political weapon

Elitism and Sri Lankan politics are inseparable. The same is true of politics in most other countries as well. Several traditional elitist families have dominated Sri Lanka’s political landscape since pre-Independence days. The Senanayakes, the Bandaranaikes, the Ratwattes, the Jayewardenes, the Kotelawalas and the Wickremesinghes are prominent among them. It took decades for regional elites such as the Rajapaksas to make their presence felt in national politics and rise to the top; the delay in their transition was due to the dominance of the Bandaranaikes.

Anti-elitism played a significant role in engineering the emergence of an alternative to the UNP, which was the party with an elitist leadership and a mostly non-elite support base. The SLFP emerged as a party of the non-elites, but ironically it was led by one aristocratic family—the Bandaranaikes—for more than half a century.

Interestingly, the leaders of Sri Lanka’s socialist movement and Marxist parties were also members of the Colombo-based elite although the non-elite were free to rise through the ranks. The UNP and the SLFP used to have glass ceilings for the non-elite, and those who dared break them faced resistance from the elitist factions that thought they were born to rule. This may explain why a section of the UNP rose against President Ranasinghe Premadasa, who had a visceral antipathy towards the elite, and clashed with them openly. He fought epic battles with Anura Bandaranaike, who used to deride the former’s humble origins, and then with Gamini Dissanayake. The abortive attempt to impeach President Premadasa has also been seen as an instance of the elites in his own party, the UNP, striking back, as they felt slighted and did not want to be under him. But Premadasa managed to overcome their resistance until his untimely demise regardless of the methods he used for that purpose.

The circulation of elites

Attempts to reinforce binary opposites such as the elites and non-elites for political purposes are common, but this classification lacks universal acceptance and makes it difficult to understand, much less explain, certain situations in politics, characterized by what has come to be dubbed the circulation of elites.

It is popularly thought that one becomes an elite by birth, but thinkers such as Vilfredo Pareto have argued that the distinction of the elite and the non-elite is neither fixed nor permanent; there are up and down movements of the elite and the non-elite. Pareto has said there are situations where the elite may degenerate into the non-elite and the latter may become the elite. We have seen this happen in this country, where elitist families lose wealth and power, and the non-elite acquire wealth and power and establish themselves as the elite; in most cases it is their progeny who become members of the elite after attending elitist schools, acquiring proficiency in English, receiving foreign education and marrying members of the upper class. President Premadasa and former Minister Dissanayake, who came from an elitist background, would clash at the drop of a hat, but the former’s son, Sajith, is considered part of the political elite today just like the latter’s sons—Navin and Mayantha.

Maithripala Sirisena, who served as the President from 2015 to 2019, may lack some elitist attributes, as such, and calls himself a member of the ordinary public, but he cannot be considered a non-elite. The accumulation of wealth and power in his family over the decades and the high posts he has been holding position him among those who are transitioning from non-elites to elites. After the 2015 regime change, he famously said in public that he had played elle at Royal College, Polonnaruwa, and gone on to become the President, and Ranil Wickremesinghe, who played cricket at Royal College, Colombo 07, had become the Prime Minister. But his son, Daham, attended Royal College, Colombo, and cannot be considered a member of the none-elite by any stretch of the imagination. Daham has taken to active politics as an SLFP youth organizer.

Leaderless protests and unintended outcomes

Ordinary people may be able to topple governments by taking to the streets and/or participating in strikes, but they cannot collectively run a country without any organized leadership. Leaders emerge from ‘leaderless’ protests with the passage of time, or some outsiders step in to fill the leadership vacuum, as was the case in respect of the Galle Face Aragalaya. There have to be leaders conversant with statecraft if protests movements are not to lead to anarchy. Libya is in utter chaos today because there was no proper leadership to the uprising, which ousted President Muhammar Gadhafi. The so-called rebel forces that rose against the Gaddafi regime and dismantled it consisted of various groups including Jihadists. A unified leadership is essential to prevent a country’s slide into anarchy in case of mass uprisings.

The Galle Face protest was organized via social media platforms mostly by the resentful youth, who detest the political leadership and the political system as a whole, and was initially leaderless and apolitical with tens of thousands of people, sinking their political, religious and even social differences to help the protesters who banded together as a pressure group to bring down the government, which was not solving their problems. Among the protesters and their well-wishers were even members of the Colombo elite, who even parted with their own money to keep the protest going.

Was Aragalaya scripted?

It is being argued in some quarters that Aragalaya was scripted and had the elevation of UNP Leader Wickremesinghe to the highest post in the land as its goal. The fact that the Aragalaya withered away after the election by the parliament of Wickremesinghe as President is adduced in support of the above-mentioned argument. But the proponents of this view have chosen to ignore the fact that following the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, on 09 May, the then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa offered the premiership to Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa, who turned it down contemptuously, declaring that he would not form a government without first obtaining a popular mandate. He changed his mind when the premiership was offered to Wickremesinghe, but it was too late by that time. If Premadasa had grabbed the opportunity and formed an all-party government, perhaps, there would not have arisen any need for President Rajapaksa to resign because a change of government would have had a calming effect on the agitated polity. Former Army Commander Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka has also said President Rajapaksa requested him to take over as the Prime Minister, but he spurned the offer.

The non-elitist JVP, which was not initially well-disposed towards Aragalaya, later admitted that it had been present at the Galle Face Green since the inception of the protest. It was also the JVP which was blamed for retaliatory violence that broke out following the May 09 goon attacks on the anti-government protesters.

Thus, the question is whether the argument that the political elite hijacked the Aragalaya and used it to further their interests by having Wickremesinghe appointed the President, at the expense of the ordinary public, holds water. There is hardly anything that is free from manipulation in politics, and various forces manipulated the Aragalaya, which stood Wickremesinghe in good stead. He succeeded in realizing his presidential dream because he, unlike Opposition Leader Premadasa, followed what Brutus says in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads to fortune’. However, it remains to be seen whether he will be able to carry out what he has undertaken, live up to the expectations of the public and avert the fate that befell his immediate predecessor, who had to leave the country.