Whither Yahapālanaya?
By Harini Amarasuriya –June 21, 2016
Dr. Harini Amarasuriya
Recently there has been a spurt of interest in defining what January 8 2015 truly meant for Sri Lanka. This discussion has emerged in a context where the government is being accused of betraying the mandate on which they were elected. This is supposed to be the ‘yahapalana’ government (a loose translation of the term ‘good governance’) but the question today for many people is ‘whither yahapalana?’
What exactly is the mandate of ‘yahapalana’? What brought that citizens’ movement together to deliver the election result of January 8th? The messiness of the broad alliance that forms this government as well as of its supporters makes this a difficult question to answer.
When considering the issues that the campaign mobilised around, it is hard to find a clear connection between them. Various groups mobilised around different issues: corruption, deterioration of democracy, abuse of power, the emergence of a particularly virulent form of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, economic woes etc. The term ‘yahapalana’ was vague enough to accommodate all of these concerns. The issues were serious enough for individuals and groups to unite briefly, putting aside their differences. Despite the incoherencies of the yahapalana campaign and the might of the Rajapaksa regime that it was up against, yahapalana triumphed.
To understand the triumph of yahapalana, it might be useful to also consider it in the broader context of what is going on in the rest of the world. Who would have imagine Donald Trump as the Republican Presidential nominee? Not even the most optimistic of us could have predicted how close Bernie Sanders came to clinching the Democratic nomination. A few years, ago, none of us had heard of Jeremy Corbyn. In Spain, the radical left party Podemos is tipped to emerge second in the upcoming elections in Spain and to be a major player in forming a coalition partner in forming a new government. In Greece, Syriza came into power defeating established parties from both the left and the right. All this reflects a sense of frustration with the existing system, with establishment politics, with political parties and governments who are out of touch with people. This is the mood around the world – the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the excluded are speaking out and are searching for alternatives.
The mandate of January 8th has to be understood in this context – it was an expression of frustration with the system; a desire for change of the established way of doing things. It is for this reason that the energy for the January 8th campaign came not from established political parties or politicians but by a motley crew of civil society activists: artists, intellectuals, religious leaders; social activists. The inspirational figure was Reverend Maduluwawe Sobitha – a figure who had made it clear that he had no interest in any position in the government. It is good for both the President and the Prime Minister to remember this: January 8th did not happen because of them: it happened despite them. It is especially important for the Prime Minister to remember this: people did not think he could even be a figure head leader for the campaign – he was never seriously considered as the Common Candidate. Political leaders were simply the vehicles through which people worked out a change that they wanted. People were not inspired by their political leaders – they were simply a necessary evil to be used to bring about change.
