Sri Lankan PM Harini Amarasuriya interview: ‘India and China have goodwill towards us’ Today World News

In September this year, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake completed one year in office. This month, the parliament completes a year, with your party holding a majority. What has been the biggest success and challenge for your government?

Our success, I think, has been stability. Winning over the sceptics — who had the biggest fear that we would not be able to handle this, that we were inexperienced, that we did not know what we were talking about, did not have a plan, or that we are a bunch of communists. There was this huge fear that this was going to be unsuccessful, and that we would not be able to govern. I think we have proved everyone wrong.

We have shown ourselves to be stable, not just stable, but effective. We have brought about many changes in our political culture that now seem very normal. It has almost come to a stage where you do not have to talk about those things anymore. It has been normalised that you do not waste, there is no corruption, politicians will not protect criminals, there are no personal agendas at work, and that there is a plan, a collective vision. We are not being extravagant or flashing our power all around. People say, ‘you have a two-thirds [majority], you can do anything you want’. But we have not done anything we want, right? We have been very responsive to governance, we have allowed people to process what we are trying to do, and if there is resistance, we have adjusted. Some see that as a sign of weakness, but we don’t. Strength comes from not abusing power, when you have a lot of it.

We have demonstrated a real difference in governing style. At one level, it is great that it is so normal and people are not even talking about it, they are taking it for granted. At some points, though, I feel like ‘come on, give us a bit of credit for this.’ But the biggest thing about all this being normalised is that you cannot reverse it. People are not going to allow this to slide back. They will not expect anything less from any other political configuration, and I think that is a real achievement.

In terms of challenge, it is not only about the politicians changing, right? You must take this big state machinery along with you. A state machinery that has largely been dysfunctional for a long time but has still trundled on and delivered in some senses, but in a very haphazard way. It is not used to working to a plan, not used to being responsive, not used to thinking independently. So, changing all of this has been, and still is, the challenge. Because, though those at the top and middle level, are coming on board with this idea and rhythm of how we are working, but for the ordinary citizen to actually feel the change, that machinery must really change. That has been the frustration at some level — that things have not moved faster at the grassroots level, because of these kinds of blocks we encounter along the way.

When you say state machinery, do you mean bureaucracy?

The bureaucracy, the institutions, the classic problems we have talked about for years that come from duplication of institutions, decision making being so complicated and cumbersome, the lack of this orientation that the citizen comes first. You know these from even the simplest things — like how you talk to a person. All that needs to change as well.

And then the fact that things like digitisation have not happened. It is not an individual’s fault, it is just systemic failure.

So, we have inherited this systemic, institutional failure, and the challenge has been to identify the people who can change it and put them in the right places. And that takes time, because we need to identify those people, identify where the weaknesses are, we must try and make sense of this chaos and reorganise it, while we are also running a country and dealing with the day-to-day stuff. That has been the biggest challenge.

Your government is taking forward an IMF programme. Three years since the economic crash and sovereign default, there is relative fiscal stability, but high living costs persist, there is a constant refrain about low wages and stagnant incomes. Your coalition has acknowledged that the IMF deal is hard on ordinary people and had promised to renegotiate it. Why hasn’t that been possible?

We had said we cannot renegotiate the whole terms of reference, or all the parameters which were earlier agreed upon with the IMF, since that would have led to further chaos, further destabilisation. I don’t think we could have dealt with that, especially with the expectation that we would fail. To consolidate ourselves, we had to make sure we did not fail in the first instance. With that limitation, we have negotiated many things within those parameters, which are not entirely obvious, like [public] spending. We gave a significant public sector pay rise, incrementally brought in welfare benefits, raised capital expenditure on health and education. Even to attract FDIs, we have negotiated more flexibility for us to make those decisions with an eye to the future, and for the benefit of our people. Those negotiations were not easily made, they were tough, but they are less dramatic. So, perhaps the feeling is that we have not negotiated, but I don’t think that is a correct assessment.

At times, we are criticised by both sides, the left and the right. They say, ‘you are a left-wing party, what are you doing with the IMF?’. We are a very pragmatic group of people, and we really understand the state in which the country is. We need to make decisions based on these conditions, and not some utopian idea of where we would like to be maybe in 20 years. But we are heading in a particular direction. We said this openly to the IMF that, with all due respect and appreciation of our good working relationship, our goal is that we never to have to do this again.

The recent Budget president by President Dissanayake — also the Finance Minister — is the first full-year Budget of your government. What are its highlights?

The meticulous attention it pays to fiscal planning targets, and given all the limitations, the effort to address all key sectors. Whether it is the pensioners, estate workers, people with disability, or community dogs, the Budget pays attention to people’s everyday struggles, balancing this very complicated macroeconomic situation which requires daily monitoring. I think it sets the tone for the big transformations we want, whether in education, health or infrastructure.

As Education Minister, you are leading reforms in the sector that has historically been seen as a big strength for Sri Lanka. A recent Human Rights Watch report linked inadequate state revenue to insufficient resources for education. You know the public education system well — you have taught in it and even been part of trade union action demanding an allocation of 6% of GDP in education. What is the root cause for the crisis in education?

The lack of direction and prioritising, the lack of a plan like in every other sector. I would say, deliberate neglect so you create a crisis that then forces very unjust interventions. There is this film called ‘Our Brand is Crisis’, I think that is what they did with education – create a crisis, make people lose trust in public education, then force them to opt for private tuitions, which are also not managed well.

So, you let go of that responsibility and officially say: ‘public education is still there’. But in reality, people are having to make do, or figure things out for themselves. This has led to huge institutional problems of deterioration, including in teacher training, a lack of coherence in policy, and huge infrastructure issues. They have just cast aside the fundamentals. So, it is not just about funding. Even if you had had, and put more money into this system, you would not have got what you wanted, because no one invested in building institutions. The National Institute of Education, which is responsible for curriculum, faces many challenges like vacancies, apathy or the lack of leadership.

But the amazing thing for me has been that despite everything, this machinery continued functioning to the level it has. It has somehow survived because of that really amazing investment made earlier. People who clung to it and did whatever they could, either as parents or teachers or administrators, who just kind of kept it going. It still produced quality graduates and students.

When we started this ambitious reform process, some wondered if we could really do this, especially people from private sector, who we brought in for inputs on certain things like IT. There is a system to this chaos, but it will deliver. Around 200,000 teachers are going to be trained by the end of the year; 70,000 new books are being prepared to be printed and delivered to the children from January 1, 2026. So things are moving.

In a recent Parliamentary intervention, you emphasised a “home-grown process” to deal with allegations of past human rights violations. Building trust among survivors, especially Tamils of the north and east who are still grappling with the impact of the civil war that ended 16 years ago is not easy, since they have been repeatedly let down by successive governments. How will your government earn their trust?

That is an area where we really need to do more work. We are not talking about a “home-grown solution” just because it is popular — we genuinely believe that is what will work in the long run and help prevent polarisation. Local systems must be designed to handle these issues; we cannot simply hand over responsibility to others. We must take ownership. The key, as you said, is trust, and that will take a lot of effort.

This is also where we would welcome more dialogue with civil society — discussions that recognise we are a new government, the need to build a new narrative. What was said or done in 1994, 2007, 2010, or 2015 should, for the moment, be set aside. Let us begin with an acknowledgement of our intentions and work together to move forward. We need help, ideas, and open discussions that do not hold us accountable for past baggage, or measure us by old standards. What we really need now is to generate new thinking, a fresh approach to these difficult questions, that is less antagonistic, less polarised — and to build a more constructive way of engaging. There’s a lot of work ahead for all of us.

What do you mean by new narrative?

I am not saying we have all the answers — and that’s exactly why we need new, fresh thinking on this. For years, we have had a particular way of understanding ethnic relations: what happened, who is to blame, and what needs to happen. I am not saying we should throw all of that out, but have we brought that up to speed with current realities and challenges? How might a generation born after the war be thinking and feeling about these issues?

We are now in a place where young people’s aspirations are changing. They are very different, and yet we are being asked to place our trust in a global system that is falling apart before our eyes. So, we need to think anew — not only about how to respond to victims, but also about how to reorganise society to approach these questions differently. To me, this is the moment to do that, because we are open to that conversation. We are not saying this or that, or drawing hard lines; we are open. And society too has that space now for dialogue. But it is sad to see that the conversation is not happening yet.

Why is that?

I think we are all struggling with a deficit of new ideas, of fresh thinking. That’s one part of it.

The other is exhaustion and a kind of pessimism about the possibility of anything new. I really feel that gap, this lack of imagination. And maybe it is tied to the cost we have paid as a country for losing so much human potential. We killed our best thinkers. We drove them out. The most visionary and radical minds, from all parts of the country, were labelled terrorists and eliminated simply for thinking differently. As a nation, we are now paying the price for that loss. You can see it everywhere — in politics, the arts, academia — this absence of people who can challenge us to think differently. It is almost a generational void.

The new generation, meanwhile, is very differently positioned. You have my generation, then a kind of lost generation, and then young people who are saying, ‘We want to figure out AI’. So, what do you expect us to do with that when you are still talking about smart classrooms? And there is something else I have always felt, even before I entered politics or joined the NPP. Many of our analyses rarely bring in the class factor. Our narratives about the war, ethnicity, and violence have missed that entire dimension. But we are now at a moment when class is critical — especially in understanding the transformations and political changes we have seen. If we leave class out of our analysis or our understanding of the state, we are leaving out an important chunk.

In 2016, before your entry into Parliament, you served as a member of the Public Representations Committee on Constitutional Reforms, which was a Cabinet appointed mechanism tasked with the first country-wide public consultations on constitutional reform. The NPP has promised a new constitution. Where does that promise stand?

We have always said that we need a consultative process. We have not fixed dates for it, but that has to happen. We have also said we are willing to start from where we left off in that earlier consultative process — and not reinvent the whole wheel. Of course, things have shifted since then, so there is a lot to consider, and a lot to do.

The Provincial Council elections need to take place, and that is targeted for next year. Funds have been allocated, and the Election Commission will have to work out the details — after looking into whether a new law is needed, or the Parliament agrees to proceed with the old system. So, there’s a process there.

In our first two years, our priority will be on the economic side of things, because we cannot afford to let that ball drop. Everything else has taken something of a back seat — whether that is good or bad — but keeping the economy steady is a lot of work. Delivering on education, health, and other areas is huge too.

Something else we need to think through is that, at least at the leadership level, we are not overtly racist. We may be unintentionally so — because that is how we have been socialised to think about different people — but never intentionally. The impact of that shift, I think, should not be underestimated. Even institutionally, leadership is now far more sensitive to overt racism and has intervened many times to say, “you cannot do that.” That needs time to take root — to bring about an institutional shift towards a more open, inclusive society and structures, including an inclusive constitution. Otherwise, we risk falling back into the “them versus us” mentality. This is something I have been reflecting on more, especially when you look at what’s happening globally — the rise of the alt-right, the backlash against feminism, and the reversal of rights we took for granted.

I recently heard of a movement in the US advocating to take away women’s right to vote. It shows how quickly things can slide back. Look at New Zealand — I just finished reading Jacinda Ardern’s autobiography. She led all those progressive initiatives and yet she was pushed out, resigned because her presence was seen as damaging to her party, and much of what she championed has since been reversed. There was backlash.

So, if you don’t bring people along with you, reversals can take us even further back. It is the classic Marxist idea — structural conditions have to be created for real change. I feel our responsibility is to create those structural conditions that make progressive transformations possible and sustainable. It is not just about changing laws or adopting new terminology or even a new constitution — it is about building the conditions for a genuine, substantive shift.

You make an important point. The fact that your party’s poll campaign was not racist, reflected in the general election results. At the same time, the unprecedented goodwill your government enjoys across the country will not last forever; expectations, disappointments, and the pressures of incumbency inevitably set in. So, while there is a small window of political goodwill and opportunity to act now, there is also the risk of moving too fast and provoking a backlash. How do you see that balance playing out?

See, I don’t think we have reached that window of opportunity yet. Our government’s trajectory is not the traditional one where the peak comes at the beginning. People did not elect us because they were convinced we were the right choice; they did so because they were utterly disgusted with everyone else. They decided they would never give them a chance again. They decided to place their faith in us, give us a chance. They are watching us closely, they are being very vigilant.

I think our real window will come a few years later, when we have earned people’s trust and they feel their faith was not misplaced. That is when meaningful change can truly happen. We understand this, which is why we are not flashing our 159-seat majority. We know people took a huge leap of faith in us, and we cannot let them down by making rookie mistakes or rushing decisions. Our responsibility is far greater than a routine change in government. So yes, I think our window of opportunity lies a little further down the line.

You recently visited both China and India. What were your key takeaways from these back-to-back visits?

The enormous goodwill was evident — genuinely so. The opportunities I was given to meet with leaders were remarkable. I am not the President of the country; I am the second citizen. Yet I was afforded the chance to meet them, and they were extremely accommodating of our needs. Leaders and other officials from both countries showed great interest in Sri Lanka and expressed strong goodwill — wanting to engage, to help, and recognising Sri Lanka’s importance to them. These are two major powers — one a close neighbour and the other a regional one — both acknowledging Sri Lanka’s significance. I think that is extremely important. It shows there is real goodwill towards us, and that goodwill can be harnessed for the benefit of our country and the region.

Is there pressure on Sri Lanka while dealing with two major partners with competing interests?

I think we will always have to be careful about how we balance the different regional leaders and their ambitions. But in some ways, global changes are making this easier for us. Traditional lines of friendship and enmity no longer work the same way — the axis has clearly shifted towards this region. Most countries in Asia now recognise the need to look to one another, as we have become the centre of global growth. The old Western model that long dictated international relations has shifted. In that sense, it would be a mistake to see India and China as antagonistic; recent events show that they continue to engage with each other constructively. So, as long as we manage our relations wisely, I do not think we will face any undue pressure.

As you mentioned, the liberal world order is unravelling amid this global turmoil, wars raging in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan; countries grappling with Donald Trump’s trade policies; and far-right, neo-fascist parties gaining ground. Your government has pledged a neutral foreign policy — can Sri Lanka reconcile these competing global forces, while pursuing a principled foreign policy?

It is not easy. Principled positions are extremely important — for us as a government and for us as the NPP, a movement that came together around shared values. We are a value-based, principle-driven, ideologically aligned group, and that is central to who we are. But we also need to be conscious of our place in the world. How we express those principles, whether by shouting from our rooftop or in other ways, must consider our tiny position and vulnerabilities in global affairs. The stronger we become as a country, the more we can resist external pressures and stand firmly by our principles. Without that understanding, simply making noise is not necessarily useful.

We are meeting just after Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City, which has drawn global attention. Did you follow the story?

Yes, it was really lovely and exciting to see. In many ways, it felt very reminiscent of how we did things — that grassroots, people-driven campaign, standing up to the powers that be, the status quo, and still winning. It was a true triumph, the result of years of work and mobilisation by those who kept the progressive flag flying under very difficult conditions — people like Bernie Sanders and others. So yes, it was really heartening and [made me feel] hopeful.

You referred to the rise of anti-women, anti-feminist forces elsewhere. What has your experience been as a woman in power within a largely male political landscape?

You know, if I ever write about this journey, I think I will write about the gender aspect — because it has been amazing. At one level, it is striking how, when I meet women leaders anywhere in the world, regardless of political persuasion, we immediately connect. We have all experienced similar things, whatever our contexts. I always knew it would be a journey to bring a feminist perspective into a largely male political space, so I had no illusions about that.

What has surprised me, though, is not my political colleagues within my party, but the reactions of male colleagues from other spaces — their struggle to deal with this change. It is as if they do not quite know how to process it. Even men I would have thought of as deeply feminist have reacted in unexpected ways. Oddly enough, none of my women friends have had this problem — they have been completely supportive and protective.

On the political front — from being a national list MP to mobilising people and securing one of the highest vote counts in your party and being appointed Prime Minister — what has that experience taught you about political activism?

Grassroots work – that’s what politics is really about. There are no shortcuts. Organising people, building trust, that is democracy. Everything else is about being at the right place, at the right time, and huge amounts of luck, but the conditions must fall into place. And nothing replaces the hard work at the ground level.

The political goodwill we have seen over the last few years could never have translated into real momentum and votes without connecting with people directly. Thousands of women were part of this — that is what makes it truly remarkable. We have long discussed women’s political participation in terms of quotas and numbers, but what is happening now is far deeper. Housewives in small villages feel they have a voice, a say, and the power to mobilise. Young women look at the 22 women in Parliament and think, ‘I can do that too’. That is the real change. Of course, there is pushback — intense, often hateful — but that only shows something fundamental is shifting. The challenge now is to make sure this change moves in the right direction, in the right way, and remains sustainable, especially in a traditionally very male party, and male-dominated political space.

Since you mention your party, there is considerable intrigue about the dynamic between the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which has a left-insurgent history, and its broader National People’s Power coalition. What is this dynamic like, especially while in government, because there is often speculation over differences or a rift.

All this talk about a “rift” between the two is really political. The NPP was never separate in that sense. The JVP took the lead in forming it — they recognised that if they wanted to come to power, they needed to build a broader coalition. Those who joined the NPP knew this from the start — that we were bringing in a certain kind of expertise or experience, but the political path was led by the JVP. We were comfortable with that. Most of us came from academia, civil society, or NGOs, and we had reached the limits of what we could do within those spaces. Initially, we tried to push the JVP from the outside, and later, we became part of the NPP movement ourselves. So, for me, it was never a question of “JVP versus NPP.” The NPP exists because of a conscious decision by the JVP to create it. If that decision had not been made, there would be no NPP — we would not have just come together on our own.