How To Stop Ranil’s Constitutional Coup & Counter-Revolution

By Dayan Jayatilleka –

It was Engels who coined the phrase “the ironies of history”, taken up and made popular in the 20^th century by Isaac Deutscher.

On another occasion, Engels also said something to the effect that revolutionaries wake up to find that the revolution they had made is not the one they had sought to make or thought they were making, and then they have to start all over again to fight for their original cause but under a different banner.

Is that to be the fate or destiny of the Aragalaya? The result will be known in the coming several days.

It is a rich irony that the Aragalaya unwittingly opened the path for the Prime Ministership of Ranil Wickremesinghe, thereby positioning him to assume the Presidency once Gotabaya Rajapaksa was thrown out.

The problem is that the Aragalaya did not think things through politically, did not figure out what Marx called “the line of march”. To be more precise, the Aragalaya’s notion of politics was to do exactly what Marx refused to when he said he would not provide “recipes for the cookshops of the future”.

The Aragalaya projected proposals for the way politics should be after Gota. It overthrew Gota the autocrat but failed to intervene in the politics of the transition or even understand that it was relevant. Now it is faced with the assumption of power by a man who, after the briefest intermission, has returned to his traditional role as the most rightwing, reactionary political figure in the history of post-independence Ceylon/Sri Lanka—arguably outside of Sir John Kotelawala, who was advised by Ranil’s father Esmond Wickremesinghe.

What the Aragalaya produced as politics were utopian proposals for new institutions and Constitutions. These proposals treated Parliament and the political parties with contempt, and presented proposals for solutions outside Parliament. The Aragalaya disdained intervening on the terrain of politics in the concrete; in the balance of forces in the political arena including in parliament.

Now the only way in which the Aragalaya can prevent a counter-revolution or what we may call an Egyptian outcome, is through an intervention in parliamentary politics; the politics of the present parliament—which as it turns out, is hardly ‘outdated’ and surpassed, but is the crossroads of direction, decision and destiny for the country.

On a technicality, Ranil Wickremesinghe can assume office for the rest of Gotabaya’s term. This would go against the entire spirit of the basic law, the Constitution. The spirit of the constitution is democratic republicanism. The sovereignty of the people is the cornerstone.

The assumption is that the executive president is elected by the majority of the people taken as a whole. In case he is removed, then the PM takes over, but here the assumption was that the PM would also be an elected MP who came from the party that had the most seats in Parliament.

The framers of the constitution made a deliberate choice, that unlike in the US system, the cabinet would not consist of those outside the legislature. It is inconceivable that the framers of the Constitution would have endorsed a person whose party did not have a single elected representative in the House and was not even in a coalition with a party that held the majority, as holder of the executive Presidency even in special circumstances.

It is still more inconceivable that they would envisage an unelected person would ascend to the post which is designed to be held by a person who had won over 50% of the vote of the country taken as a whole!

If on a technicality, Ranil is entrenched as the leader of a democratic republic with a directly, nationally elected presidency, it would not only be a travesty of Constitutionalism, it would, more dangerously, give the entire younger generation of Sri Lanka, the message that Constitutions and Constitutionality are a scam; a mode which has enough loopholes to turn upside down the very tenets on which the basic law is founded and make a travesty of democracy itself.

This would leave Revolution the only solution. Given his track record, Ranil would not hesitate to unleash the military lethally against such an uprising. As Myanmar shows, the military cannot prevail over a movement of educated youth if they take to arms, but in Sri Lanka with its collapsed economy, such a cycle of violence will push us over the precipice into state fragmentation and barbarism.

There are two ways to stop it but those have to operate as a pincer. One is a renewed surge of the Aragalaya. Introducing an anthology of Lenin’s writings, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek wrote that “The Revolution Always Rings Twice”. He was referring to the Russian Revolution of 1917 which first overthrew the Tsar (in February) and then Kerensky (in October).

In between February and October 1917, the Revolution had to thwart a military counter-revolution headed by General Kornilov.

Ranil is a combination of Kerensky and Kornilov or a Kerensky masking Kornilov—or more simply, a fusion of the two.

With Gota gone, the Aragalaya will have to fight Ranil, the least representative and most rightwing President we would have.

The Aragalaya will overcome the effects of the terrible clash around the Parliament – the Lankan equivalent of Russia’s premature uprising of July 1917, the ‘July Days’ condemned by Lenin–and the resultant recoil of the Armed Forces away from the people. It will have to win back the armed forces either through a self-criticism or a thorough outing of those responsible of or the violence against the soldiers.

The Aragalaya is indeed a powerful material force but contrary to the Jacobin Left’s supposition, it is not the only “material force” out there; the military is too, and in the sense of “hard power”, even more so.

Secondly and more importantly, the only way to prevent Parliament from rubber-stamping Ranil as President, is to:

(1) De-link the Pohottuwa bloc-vote from Ranil.

(2) Split the Pohottuwa, isolating the Rajapaksa Clan and the pro-Rajapaksa rump-faction which is supporting Ranil.

(3) Support a dissenting Pohottuwa personality such as Dullas Alhapperuma.

(4) Unite all democratic forces in Parliament around a single anti-Ranil candidacy.

(5) That candidacy has necessarily to be from the Pohottuwa, so as not to unite the SLPP bloc in support of Ranil– which means the Opposition has to grasp the principle of ‘tactical voting’ even if they have to hold their nose to do so.

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