Politics between polls Today World News

Vijitha Herath receives a document from Sri Lanka’s President Anura Kumara Dissanayake after being sworn-in as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Employment, and Tourism during the swearing-in ceremony of the new Cabinet in Colombo on November 18, 2024. Photo: Sri Lanka President’s Media Division via AFP

On the morning of November 16, 2024, I was following the final tally of preferential votes secured by candidates in Sri Lanka’s recent general elections. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s National People’s Power (NPP) alliance won a historic mandate of more than a two-thirds majority. Vijitha Herath, the NPP candidate in Colombo’s neighbouring Gampaha district, broke records by winning more than 7 lakh votes. He has been named Foreign Minister in the new government.

At the same time, a memory popped up on my social media. It was a short video clip of my interview with Mr. Herath six years ago. On November 16, 2018, Mr. Herath was among those injured when some people in the Rajapaksa camp violently attacked Members of Parliament who were challenging the sudden appointment of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister in place of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had been abruptly sacked by President Maithripala Sirisena. Sri Lanka was in the grip of a political impasse for some seven weeks until the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Sirisena’s move was illegal, and Mr. Wickremesinghe was reinstated.

In a fascinating coincidence, Mr. Herath, who in 2018 was a legislator with the opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), made headlines the same day six years later as part of a new political force that has decimated the island’s old political class, including the Rajapaksas, Mr. Sirisena, and Mr. Wickremesinghe.

It is as if decades happened in these six years in Sri Lanka. During this time, the island witnessed the deadly Easter Sunday serial blasts in April 2019, the election victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in November 2019, the pandemic from 2020, Mr. Gotabaya’s mighty fall in July 2022 in the wake of a crippling economic crisis and a citizens’ uprising, and now, the meteoric rise of Mr. Dissanayake and his political alliance. The near-erasure from Sri Lanka’s electoral map of the country’s traditional, once-powerful political parties and the political elite that controlled them signals a tectonic shift.

While polls are exciting news events for the media, reporters learn a lot more while covering what happens between elections. What seems a “tectonic” electoral shift is often the cumulative effect of many complex political changes on the ground, invariably tethered to how most people in a country are doing. As reporters, we have a distinct advantage. We don’t have to predict precise poll outcomes; all we need to do is listen to diverse voices to try and capture voter sentiment in our coverage.

Invariably, this sort of ground reporting allows us to glean some clear pointers to a likely poll outcome, even if not the extent of someone’s win. Both the defeat of Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2015 and the victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2019 were not entirely surprising for many of us who report from Sri Lanka. That said, there are specific results that surprise us at times, either because our reading was biased or simply wrong. Either way, there is incentive to return to good, old-fashioned reporting.

In the case of the NPP’s victory in Sri Lanka’s recent election, the story, in a sense, began in 2018. With just six MPs in the 225-member House then, the JVP made compelling interventions in Parliament, besides moving the Supreme Court with others against Mr. Sirisena’s anti-democratic, unconstitutional move. The NPP was set up the following year as a counter to the political establishment, which was tainted by allegations of serious corruption and nepotism. Not long after, the country witnessed an unprecedented mass struggle in 2022, staggering in its magnitude and intensity. The headless citizens’ movement did what the political opposition couldn’t: eject the powerful Rajapaksas from office. Two years later, the NPP is in power now, with 159 out of the 225 members in the new Parliament convened on November 21.

meera.srinivasan@thehindu.co.in