Asian Elections and Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s India visit

by Rajan Philips

2024 is election year practically everywhere. In South Asia, it is two down and two to go. Bangladesh went first in January, and the governing Awami League won the election as predicted, with the main opposition Bangladesh National Party boycotting the election and the government fielding independent candidates to avoid the embarrassment of winning uncontested seats. Pakistan had its election on February 8, and the people literally gave the finger to rebuke the military’s machinations of the election.

Unlike in Bangladesh, where the government nominated independent candidates, in Pakistan the imprisoned Imran Khan and his proscribed PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) were forced to field their candidates as independents and were barred from using the Party’s Cricket Bat symbol. Yet they won the most seats, and they would apparently have won a clear majority but for the widely alleged manipulations in vote counting. There are continuing allegations by independent commentators that a clear victory for the PTI was stolen in the wee hours of the election night. In the aftermath of uncertainty, the former alliance of the Pakistan Muslim League of the Sharif brothers and the Bhutto-Zardari led Pakistan’s People’s Party, who ousted Imran Khan from office, is back – cobbling together yet another new government ignoring the people’s verdict.

Next up is India with the mother of all elections which will be held over two months in April and May. As things are, Prime Minister Modi is all set for a threepeat win and form a third Modi-BJP government in succession. The opposition parties are still haggling over how much of a united front opposition they can rationally build upon before it is too late. It seems already too late unless something spectacular were to happen to jolt the opposition fragments to come together to survive, let alone turn back the Modi juggernaut, or simply be run over by it as separate entities. What is more significant than the Modi threepeat is the way in which he is overhauling the character of the Indian state.

What Narendra Modi is doing now to India is what the leaders of Pakistan did to their country at the very moment of its cesarean birth – the creation of a theocratic religious state, spurning the example of India that opted for a modern secular state to overarch a deeply asecular traditional society, where religious differences were/are combustibly vulnerable to political demagoguery. We can keep writing about this till holy cows keep coming home, but the point here is that the recent and ongoing developments in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India provide an insightful South Asian backdrop to the anticipated elections in Sri Lanka, and perhaps more contextually to Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s seemingly geo-locally significant visit to New Delhi.

Sri Lanka is the fourth to go for elections in South Asia. But there was another Asian election this week, in Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country, the third largest democracy, with the world’s largest Muslim population, and a growing economic powerhouse that is quite ahead of India in almost all economic growth measures. As in many other prospering countries, while there is impressive economic growth there is also a worrying democratic recession. In the presidential election on Wednesday (February 14), Prabowo Subianto, a former army lieutenant general of considerable notoriety under Suharto, and the current Minister of Defense under President Joko Widodo, is reported to be comfortably ahead to win in the first round without a runoff. His Vice Presidential running mate is 36 year old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the eldest son of President Joko Widodo.

There has not been any reporting of serious voting malpractices, but pre-election shenanigans have raised concerns that the country is on the slippery slope of democratic recession. Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto are former rivals who faced off each other in the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections, which Joko won and Prabowo lost. They have since become allies and the highly popular Joko has gone to the extent of supporting Prabowo’s candidacy in 2024 against the nominee of his own Party (the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle), Ganjar Pranowo, thereby ensuring Pranowo’s defeat. The alleged reasons for the switch are Joko’s political desire to continue to have a say in the government, and the even stronger paternal desire to give his son a stepping stone as the new Vice President. At 36, Gibran is underage to be Vice President, but the hurdle was removed by the country’s top court with Chief Justice Anwar Usman, Joko’s brother-in-law, casting the deciding vote for his nephew. What is new, and where?

Unlike other Asian countries, including Pakistan where the army calls all the shots, Sri Lanka is the only country where election timing is virtually at the discretion of its CEO, aka the Executive President. At the same time, an incumbent government’s interference in the conduct of elections would seem to have been minimized after 2015, and the first defeat of the Rajapaksas. One would hope that Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe will not monkey with election timing anymore, and will not try to redeploy the old election dirty tricks of the UNP that go back all the way to Dedigama, long before independence, in the 1936 election to the second State Council election. The UNP was not a Party at that time, but its eventual fathers were in control of the levers of state power even under colonial rule.

AKD’s Visit

The only formal political party in Sri Lanka in 1936 was the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. By 1939, the Party was proscribed, and its leaders were jailed. They broke jail and went to India, not to escape incarceration, but to continue their revolutionary activity and join the struggle in India for freedom from colonial rule. The Indian expedition of the Old Left would be a more appropriate backdrop for commentary on the political implications of Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s visit to India than that cheap gossip in a Sunday Paper, about Lenin allegedly asking Trotsky to go even in a petticoat to procure peace at Brest Litovsk.

Many of the commentaries on the visit were also putt shots aimed at the pre-history of the NPP, or the old history of the JVP, and all of them predicated on the musings of Rohana Wijeweera about Indian Expansionism. Lionel Bopage, one of the repositories of the positive aspects of the JVP experience, has provided a useful overview of the evolution of the JVP’s position on India, but it is unlikely that the JVP’s and NPP’s media detractors would read Bopage or do their own research to provide an objective assessment of AKD’s visit to India.

One striking omission in almost all of the negative commentaries is that their negativity is singularly aimed at AKD and the JVP/NPP, and nothing much negative, if at all, has been said about the Modi government’s imperial invitation to a rising political star in India’s utmost isle. Yet I came across one amusingly innocent piece that politely accused India for its meddlesome manners especially in the matter of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. There is nothing new in this, but what I found to be new is the nugget that Rohana Wijeweera apparently never stopped warning about India’s designs for Sri Lanka and that he based his premonitions on a detailed study of the Indian National Flag that includes The Ashoka Chakra or Dharma Chakra, and the Indian National Emblem that includes an adaptation of the four lions of Ashoka’s Lion Capital.

I don’t know whether Rohana Wijeweera actually said anything or believed that the use of the Chakra and the Lion in India’s national symbols is something that Sri Lankans should remain wary of. But this is the kind of nationalistic adolescence that Anura Kumara Dissanayake would hopefully help not only the JVP but also most Sri Lankans to grow out of, through the vehicle of the NPP. Thankfully, no one in the NPP is in the blabbering habit of Wimal Weerawansa, who once exhibited his high school general knowledge when he insisted in parliament that the Indian National Anthem, Tagore’s immortal rendition in Bengali, is only sung in Hindi! Those days are behind the Sri Lankan electorate, and there is much to look ahead.

Just on the question of the Chakra on the Indian Flag, there have been a few interpretations of it. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, the vocational Philosopher, India’s first Vice President and later President, has interpreted the Chakra as being representative of dharma and law. Prime Minister Nehru was more practical – the Chakra is symmetrical on the flag and easily reproduceable than Mahatma Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel that had been on the flag of the Congress during the independence struggle.

Sri Lankan Historian S. Arasaratnam, one of the more objective scholars of nationalism among Sri Lankan academics, has interpreted the Chakra as symptomatic of the efforts of India’s founding fathers (in the Constituent Assembly) to lift the emerging nation above the fray of its religious differences. Then comes along Modi after 75 years and plunges the country into a new temple triumphalism.

Those who ask the JVP to explain its rapprochement with India in light of its virulent opposition to the Indo Lanka accord 37 years ago, have not been consistent in asking others who too had been opposed to India in more ways than one and even long before the signing of the Indo Lanka accord.

NM Perera pithily characterized the foreign policy of DS Senanayake and the first UNP government as “Anglo mania and India phobia.” That mindset has been quite the norm in many political circles. It continued 30 years later with President Jayewardene at least until 1983. Even the SLFP has not been averse it to it despite later claims of a special relationship with the Nehru family in India.

As nuggets go, James Manor in his biography of SWRD Bandaranaike, The Expedient Utopian, recounts an anecdote from the 1930s, when Lord Mountbatten was stationed in Kandy and Nehru was visiting the island. Mountbatten suggested to one of SWRD Bandaranaike’s sisters that they should invite the visiting Indian leader for tea at Horagolla. Pat came the rebuff, “we do not sup with coolies.” That was more ignorance than snobbery, but the nugget would go down well in Modi circles in today’s India.

As well, as political analysis goes, one of the academic theses on the Indo Lanka Accord has been that the accord severed the linkages between the Sri Lankan state establishment and the social base of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. The argument continued that what was ruptured in 1987 was restored only after 2005 when Mahinda Rajapaksa became President, thanks to the not so hidden hand support of the LTTE. Yet it has been a truism among Sinhala ultranationalists that Mahinda Rajapaksa is the only authentic Sinhala nationalist leader because everyone else was compromised by English.

Now that the Rajapaksas are gone, and the Supreme Court has ruled why, there might be revisitations of the old thesis. One hypothesis could be that the tragedy of the Rajapaksas is that they were used as dummies by others, who were otherwise political nobodies, for ventriloquistic claims on everything from nationalism to the economy, and from central banking to organic fertilizer.

As I wrote recently, the peacefully involuntary departure of the Rajapaksas has created the biggest vacuum to be filled in this election year. Anura Kumara Dissanayake has emerged as the most likely contender to fill that void, but in altogether different, and hopefully positive, ways. His trip to Delhi enhances that assessment, and even expectations, except for those who hold against Mr. Dissanayake the sins of his predecessors but will not subject any other political leader to such a demanding postmortem.