Brothers in Arms

August 5: Sri Lanka Parliamentary Elections

Sri Lankans followed social distancing guidelines while voting yesterday in a twice-postponed election to choose the country’s members of parliament. Voters were asked to bring their own pens to the polls to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

Votes are still being counted. But the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party — which is headed by current prime minister and former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, as well as his brother, the country's current president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa — is widely expected to secure enough votes to govern.

The Rajapaksas have been accused of extensive human rights abuses, including war crimes and crackdowns on journalists and activists. They have also made clear that they would like to get rid of a constitutional amendment limiting the powers of the presidency. This amendment was put in place after Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency ended in 2015.

Just before the elections, we talked with the Sri Lanka-based journalist Kalani Kumarasinghe about the rise of Buddhist nationalism in the country and what’s at stake. This interview has been condensed and edited.

What issues were people voting on in this election?

While Covid-19 is one really important factor, we also have an unprecedented number of main parties running in this election.

The current president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, is a political novice. He was elected last year. I believe he has renewed faith from the public, especially after the way he steered the coronavirus crisis. This would be greatly influential in securing more votes for his party, Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna.

He has an important ally in the form of his brother: Mahinda Rajapaska who was president from 2005 to 2015. Mahinda Rajapaska is now prime minister and leads the SLPP.

Both Rajapaskas have been accused of corruption. 

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government (2005-2015) caused a huge amount of foreign debt for Sri Lanka, because it undertook a lot of development projects. The economy is still struggling, even after successive governments because we are unable to repay those loans, especially to China. 

Both brothers also have important links to the civil war. Mahinda Rajapaska was president during the end of the civil war in 2009; Gotabaya was defense secretary. In the final months of the conflict, the Sri Lankan army is thought to have killed some 40,000 civilians. This February, however, Mahinda Rajapaska announced that Sri Lanka would be withdrawing from a 2015 United Nations resolution investigating these alleged war crimes.

There is a certain elderly segment of Sri Lanka who genuinely believe that president Gotabaya Rajapaksa saved them from the coronavirus. I can see them voting in favor of the SLPP. 

There’s a lot of historical memory that shapes people’s perception of politics in Sri Lanka.

The civil war ended only a few years ago, and the memory of its violence remains fresh. That violence was largely based on warring ethnicities. The majority of  Sri Lanka’s population [about 70%] are Sinhalese Buddhists. They have been in conflict with Tamils, [who are for the most part Hindu or Muslim and make up about 11% of the population], since the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, which devalued the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka and made Sinhala the official language. 

Tensions began to emerge especially during the independence movement in the 1940s, even though both groups fought together for a united cause of independence from Britain. 

Sinhalese extremists were responsible for the growing disenfranchisement of the Tamil people, which eventually led to the thirty-year-long civil war. The secular group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam launched deadly attacks. In response, the Sri Lankan government carried out a long and brutal campaign which was largely focused on eliminating the rebel groups from the country’s north. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled their homes and lost their lives. 

Young people have inherited these conflicts from their parents. Traditional Sinhalese Buddhist culture also plays an important factor [in ongoing ethnic tensions,] because certain populist-leaning religious leaders are of the view that the country’s Buddhist majority is under attack. This is exploited by the country’s major political parties, especially by the Rajapaksa faction and the current government. Gotabaya Rajapaksa has, for example, suggested that Tamils are behind “secret deals” to help their rivals and suggested executing disobedient generals on live TV. 

What kinds of discrimination continue against Tamil people and other minorities today? 

Tamils struggle with obtaining state services due to the language divide. Tamil workers from the country’s north belong to the poorest socio-economic classes in Sri Lanka and have been offered little relief from the state. Since the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks [in which three churches were bombed by Muslim extremists, killing 267] Muslim-owned businesses have been boycotted publicly. With every election cycle, these divisions only grow deeper. 

You have covered Black Lives Matters protests in Sri Lanka, and have described people supporting Black Lives Matter in the abstract but not supporting minority rights at home. Why does that happen?

You have to understand the deeper context for this. In the US, you would have the same event covered by CNN and Fox. They have really different narratives of an event. 

Sri Lankan broadcast media isn’t as evolved. A few media companies in a position to command the attention of the public are either owned or influenced by someone belonging to a major political family. There are also state television channels — two of them — which usually become the government mouthpiece for whichever government is in power. So the ability for people to receive actual information is very limited.

Most of the young people today would have probably been coming into political awareness when Mahinda Rajapaksa was president. He had a really great propaganda machine going on for him. So what a lot of the younger people would have grown up seeing was a very strong nationalist sentiment because the civil war was raging. 

How so?

There was a very powerful advertising campaign titled ‘Api wenuwen api’ (We for us) which sought the voluntary enlistment of youth to the Sri Lankan forces during the last stages of the war. Even if you couldn’t enlist, I remember my peers in school expressing how proud they felt of our military forces. The jubilation and celebration after the war was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. 

A lot of the younger people embrace this national sentiment and conflate it with the Sinhalese Buddhist sentiment. This does not give them the ability to see what their own counterparts in the north of the country would have experienced as a result of the war, be it shelling or something else. 

Have social media and the internet helped this issue or is that type of thinking hard to dismantle since these young people have grown up in this system of propaganda?

Social media was really influential in bringing the Rajapaksa regime to an end in 2015. But that is because people were frustrated by the economic woes of the time and the youth felt they didn’t have the necessary opportunities or technological advancements that they wanted to see. That is why a lot of the youth, especially first-time voters and those who were looking for jobs, were of the view that the opposition would do a better job and they voted against the Rajapaksa regime in 2015. 

But after the terrorist attacks killed hundreds last Easter, the same youth are now thinking that national security is of utmost importance and nobody wants to see what happened last year in April happen ever again. They have adopted the belief that only the Rajapaksas, these mighty military men, are capable of doing any kind of security job right. 

This interview was conducted by Neha Middela.