Sri Lanka: A Democratic Revolution in the Making?
by Rohini Hensman and Faizun Zackaria
A time for gratitude
Two disasters were recently averted in Sri Lanka. The first would have been the re-election of the corrupt and brutal Rajapaksa regime in the presidential election of 8 January 2015. For this we must be grateful, first and foremost, to democracy acitivists across the spectrum – Sobitha Thera, trade unionists, students, teachers, women’s groups, political parties, social activists, artists, lawyers, civil society organisations (CSOs) and people’s movements (especially the Movement for Social Justice), social media activists, and so on – who organised the campaign for a common opposition candidate with such skill and courage that it succeeded despite the huge amount of money and muscle-power employed on the other side, and also to the Election Commissioner, who managed to carry out a tolerably free and fair election against heavy odds. Secondly, to Tamil voters, who overwhelmingly rejected the Tamil nationalist plea to boycott the election on the grounds that restoring democracy in Sri Lanka would offer nothing to Tamils (1). The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) in particular has played a commendable role in recent years, affirming their faith in democracy by opposing the continuous slide into dictatorship under the Rajapaksa regime. For Muslims to support the opposition should have been a no-brainer after the state-sponsored pogroms against them by Buddhist thugs of the Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS); that it took so long for their leaders to disentangle themselves from the old regime is a sad comment on the corrupt politics of patronage that prevailed. Hill-country Tamils, most of whom had hitherto been in the clutches of plantation politicians like Thondaman of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress which supported the Rajapaksa regime, gave an overwhelming message that they can make intelligent decisions on their own.
