Electoral reactivation of provincial councils is an urgent systemic imperative

MY late friend and comrade Kethesh Loganathan, son of a famous banker, a Georgetown alumnus, theoretician of the Marxist-led EPRLF and finally, Deputy Head of the Peace Secretariat (SCOPP) who was assassinated by the LTTE when answering his doorbell, named his book ‘Lost Opportunities’, because that’s what he saw as the key motif of the Sri Lankan tragedy.

- By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

I think of it as ‘Wrong Choices’ (or ‘turnings’) but there isn’t much difference—wrong choices/turnings result in lost opportunities.

Sri Lanka is undergoing precisely such a moment. It is the third in the tenure of the AKD-led JVP-NPP administration. The first lost opportunity is in economics. The second, in diplomacy. The third, not quite lost yet, is in politics.

The lost economic opportunity was the chance to leverage the global coverage of the Aragalaya, international intellectual sympathy regarding Sri Lanka’s debt trap, the first ever Left government, and the counterbalance of multipolarity in world affairs (BRICS, SCO), to negotiate a better debt repayment deal. The criminal folly was not that of embarking on an IMF program as such but of continuing with this present IMF program without any effort at renegotiation, and worse still, completely surrendering to the foreign private creditors.

I cannot help but smile wryly when I read ‘radical’ critiques of the IMF’s Sri Lanka policy which (rightly) condemn ‘Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa’ but are so intellectually pusillanimous as to refrain from a single mention of AKD or the JVP-NPP, leaving an uninformed outsider to guess who wielded state power from Sept 2024. President Dissanayake chose to pass up the opportunity of engaging in tough yet skilful ‘trade union type’ negotiation with the IMF and private foreign creditors, thereby caging Sri Lanka, its people and his own administration within very narrow parameters.

The lost diplomatic opportunity was opting not to attend the BRICS and SCO summits.

The almost-lost political opportunity is that President AKD has chosen so far, not to use his two-thirds majority in Parliament to drill-through the obstacle blocking Provincial Council elections.

Litany of lost opportunities