NPP - from oppositional passion to more administrative credibility?

MY column last week was about what the Aragalaya might mean to the NPP Govt. today.

- By Wijith DeChickera

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake with members of his administration in the early days of the NPP Government

MY column last week was about what the Aragalaya might mean to the NPP Govt. today. In it I wrote that some of the issues which animated the unprecedented people’s movement of 2022 remain unresolved and are perhaps as urgent as ever even four years later. Hints of corruption, incompetence and blunders in policymaking, now the deep state still at work...

And looking back to 9 May 2022, the question was posed again whether people’s sovereignty in Sri Lanka on that halcyon day mistook the catharsis of a moral victory with the ambiguous certainty of a transformation that never came into full effect. After all, why hasn’t the revolution moved ahead into the promised land?

What Sri Lanka has since then discovered is a harder and less romantic ethos than speaking truth to power by taking to the streets. That dismantling the apparatus of corruption, incompetence and the deep state is arguably easier than designing competence.

Last week’s contention was at heart a warning to the National People’s Power: that the moral legitimacy inherited from the Aragalaya is neither permanent nor purposefully self-renewing.

That uprising represented not merely rage against a ruling family or economic collapse, but a collective demand for ethical governance, transparency and accountability, competence at administration and overarching systemic reform.

Yet revolutionary movements that succeed and subsequently assume the mantle of governance often discover to their dismay (and the detriment of the nation at large) that the state is not a protest site.

Rather, it is a labyrinthine, procedural, resistant, compromised, slow. The very machinery that the incensed rebels once denounced becomes the apparatus that they must now operate. And they discovered sooner than later that there are gremlins in the engine.