Three years after Aragalaya: bring on the next revolution

I wouldn't punch 119 quite yet. Or seek to frogmarch me to the local constabulary’s complaints desk. This piece is not about armed revolt or aggressive rebellion. The thought I'd leave with you today is rather one of peaceful easy feelings prompted by some quiet introspection.

- Wijith DeChickera

Of course, the early springs of the erstwhile Aragalaya were peaceful and easy also, rising as they did — at least in its suburban incarnation — as a domesticated people’s movement. Tame but not lame. Passionate yet law-abiding.

But to focus on bustling women and their kitchen-utensil-aided “spontaneous overflow of strong emotion” is to forget the fountainhead of farmers’ and (to a lesser degree perhaps) fishers’ woes that set the spark to the faggots of government's effigies being burnt.

I wouldn’t forget the anguish of families whose loved ones died lamentably in those labyrinthine fuel queues. Or discount the dilettantes who swanned around iconic Colombo landmarks of an afternoon out. Mouthing rehearsed slogans and brandishing placards whose demands would have been alien to them only a few months before the vote-with-your-feet street movement captivated the imaginations of sundry generations across Sri Lanka.

That it was the boys of the red brigade and men to whom Marx was on nodding terms who actually stormed the barricades, which converted the push to secure justice into a putsch, shouldn’t detract from the roots and original intentions of the unprecedented people’s movement.

Nor devalue the holistic assertions and demands of popular sovereignty. Which sprang to the fore in the face of that strange mix of governmental arrogance, incompetence and lack of empathy for the long-suffering masses: battling Easter wounds, economic downturns and pandemic depredations without so-called saviours but self. Who only three short years before the populist ouster had given a certain gubernatorial ethic their resounding mandate!