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President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka’s ringing claim during the National People’s Power (NPP) May Day rally at the Galle Face Green this Thursday that his Government had ‘established the Rule of Law in Sri Lanka’ would be exceedingly funny if it was not so bizarre.

Positively primitive scenes

That claim is refuted particularly by the uncouth sight of NPP party cadre, ferried in by buses to Colombo for the May Day rally, parking on the Southern Expressway and having their lunches with gusto while camping on the side of the expressway lane. These surreal visual images with law enforcement officers standing idly by, could not have contrasted more strongly with the President’s lofty sentiments. Basic law and order seems to be disregarded in the NPP’s brave new world of a ‘thriving nation and a beautiful life,’ forget about the Rule of Law.

Where did the party cadre summon up the chutzpah to do this if not from the protective cover that the President, the Prime Minister and all their merry ministers afford them? Up to now, it is not reported that NPP party men and women who violated highway laws with impunity, have been disciplined. If the Rajapaksas had allowed the Medamulana rabble to run riot in this same way, the same voices who shrug their shoulders at ‘minor infractions’ would have said, ‘well, the Rajapaksas built the Expressway, what is the harm in letting them do what they like?’

This slavish mentality, this forsaking of critical judgment, this typically easy excusing of inexcusable political behavior, characterises our polity. Perhaps this is due to the boasted (why this boast, pray?) origins of the Sinhalese from some stray troublesome Aryan prince banished from India with his ruffian followers. Or perhaps it emanates from decades of kingly and then colonial rule where serfdom was baked into the genes of the subjects. Whatever the reasons, national slavishness combined with racism and communalism has marked most of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history.

Bitter lessons of history

In fact, that sinister undertone ran through our so-called ‘liberation movements’ in the North and in the South, broadly speaking. The ‘Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’ (JVP, the main constituent party of the NPP) which led two failed insurrections against the Sri Lankan State, even now fails to acknowledge the many brutalities it perpetuated. Neither does the NPP, (carefully manufactured as an electoral ploy) compel the JVP towards a fair reckoning of its blood splattered history except in the most perfunctory way.

That was well seen in the farcical debate on the ‘Batalanda Commission Report’ recently with tears shed by Government parliamentarians on the slaying of comrades during the Southern insurrection of the nineteen eighties but with nary a word on the multiple killings of thousands of civilians by the party. And except a few courageous voices from the North who paid the ultimate price with their lives, the Tamils exhibit similar blind antipathy in regard to critiques of the Wanni’s ‘Sun God’ who led his people into a miserable fate on the banks of the Nandikadal lagoon in 2009.

In the South, this abject slavishness came to a zenith during the Rajapaksa era with the Sinhalese tolerating no criticism of ‘war-winning leaders.’ There was no distinction between the urban and the rural, the educated or the uneducated either. In Colombo, the United National Party (UNP) party faithful defended in one fervent breath, all the misdeeds of their ‘technocrat’ party leader. That extended even to excusing the egregiously unforgivable ‘bond scams’ by the grossly misnamed ‘yahapalanaya’ coalition of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe period (2015-2019), by asking ‘what bond scams? We know only James Bond.’

Politicians and the people, two sides of the same coin

The calamitous Presidency of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was enabled by that same sycophancy, with fiscal and monetary safeguards trodden underfoot to the studied silence of financial and legal professionals as Sri Lanka topped into bankruptcy. Thereafter, no lessons were learnt as the city’s elite rested in the comfort of its chosen saviour, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, callously dismissing ‘the hungry and the poor who crowd Colombo’s slums, eke out miserable existences in sardine packed lodgings…’ (Focus on Rights, ‘This is just not Cricket, Mr President,’ Sunday, March 19th, 2023).

In other words, the tragedy of Sri Lanka, a bankrupt nation with dangerously undermined governance and civic institutions, is reflected in two similarly problematic sides of the same coin. On the one side of this coin are the politicians, uniformly greedy for power and eager to use any weapon towards that end including the betrayal of the national interest and the subjugation of society. On the other side are the people, beaten down, demoralized and apt to hail any false messiah with uncritical hurrahs of praise.

To be quite clear, the NPP’s ‘stunning’ election victories, (Parliamentary, Presidential) in 2024 have not changed one jot of this slavishness. That has just been transferred to a different mood and mentality. There is monotonous political buzzing in our ears as NPP front-rankers claim the moral high ground of ‘good rule’ but a gap yawns between rhetoric and reality. President Dissanayaka asserted on Thursday that ‘corrupt party political conduct has been dealt with under our Government.’ True but this is not to concede that all NPP parliamentarians are squeaky clean.

The weakness of the Opposition

Meanwhile, for a political party whose trade unions constituted its backbone, it is somewhat amusing that on the very day that celebrates such activism, he called upon union activists to stop ‘protesting over petty demands.’ The President did not list what these demands were but asked for more time to fulfill NPP promises, saying that parliamentarians have given up their ‘privileges.’ He also remarked that the Government faced no threat from the Opposition but that the only threat came from ‘within ourselves.’

On the Opposition, this point cannot be disputed. This Government survives and is sustained only by the weakness of the collective Opposition. This is lamentably what Sri Lanka has in common with India (witness the waxing and waning of the Congress party) and the United States (given the dismal performance of the Democratic Party which cannot effectively harness public uproar over the dangerously erratic ramblings of US President Donald Trump.

That said, President Dissanayaka himself is far from blame when marked on the NPP’s report card regarding the Rule of Law. Election monitors recently formally filed complaints to the Election Commission that the President had infringed election laws ahead of Sri Lanka’s local government elections. He had warned that local government councils potentially headed by the NPP will have easy access to state funds which will not be the case for ‘opposition councils’?  Does this warning not breach the ‘Rule of Law’?

Where does this political slavishness end?

Then again, we have the extraordinary complaint of a photojournalist removing under pressure from his social media account, an evocative May Day shot of President Dissanayaka with his hands outstretched upwards and his mouth open as if in desperate plea, under the hammer and sickle background of the JVP political banner. This raises fears of political censorship of the worst kind.

The photo itself was remarkably newsworthy, much like the iconic ‘Tank Man’ image of a lone protester standing in front of a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square. So why this agitation over a May Day rally camera shot? Leaving aside fanatics who would admit to no wrong, why is the NPP party faithful not called by the public to account for such extraordinary behaviour?

What other reason can be for this if not political slavishness, the very opposite to the ‘Rule of Law’ that the President referred to as his passionate objective to uphold?