The Current Economic Crisis and the People's Movement in Sri Lanka: Prospects and Challenges

On July 14, 2022, Sri Lanka’s parliamentary speaker announced that he had accepted the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sent by email from Singapore where he had fled via The Maldives.[1] That this former military commander – known as ‘the terminator’ due to his propensity to get critics assassinated[2] – was forced to resign by an overwhelmingly non-violent mass movement marks this as a major episode in Sri Lanka’s protracted democratic revolution.[3]

Sri Lanka's Democratic Revolution: The Latest Episode in a Decades-Long Drama

On July 14, 2022, Sri Lanka’s parliamentary speaker announced that he had accepted the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sent by email from Singapore where he had fled via The Maldives.[1] That this former military commander – known as ‘the terminator’ due to his propensity to get critics assassinated[2] – was forced to resign by an overwhelmingly non-violent mass movement marks this as a major episode in Sri Lanka’s protracted democratic revolution.[3]

Christianity and Capitalism in India and Sri Lanka

Introduction

Christianity came to India and Sri Lanka from other countries at various periods ranging from ancient times to the present. Therefore a general view of the link between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) is necessary in order to understand how the specific relationship between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) developed in these two countries. The first section of this paper will present a general view of Christian attitudes to poverty, wealth and capitalism in early Christianity, during the Reformation, and in the modern period; the second and third sections will look at the shapes and forms these attitudes took in India and Sri Lanka respectively; and the conclusion will sum up the findings of the paper.  

'The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary' Intertwines the Personal with the Political

Review of Land Guns Caste Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary by Gita Ramaswamy, New Delhi: Navayana, 2022, pp. 431.

The personal and the political are intertwined so tightly in Gita Ramaswamy’s Land Guns Caste Woman: Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary that it would be impossible to separate them. Another running thread is intersectionality: the way in which different axes of privilege and oppression interact, sometimes reinforcing each other but also sometimes working in opposite ways.

Nightmare's End?

I am not in Sri Lanka, and I feel torn about what is happening there. Acute anxiety about how millions of people will survive the dearth of food, fuel and medicines nestles alongside a glimmer of hope that this crisis could be the beginning of the end of a decades-long nightmare. Since the country gained its Independence in 1948, various sections of the population have been targeted by its ruling bloc: threatened with losing their homes, livelihoods and often their lives. They have fought back, but each section has been isolated and crushed by an increasingly centralized and ruthless state. Now, for the first time, the vast majority of the population has risen in revolt. Criticism of the dictatorship is widespread, and divisions between working people may finally be healed.

Socialist Internationalism and the Ukraine War

How do the working people of the world transform themselves from a plethora of groups waging a multitude of scattered struggles for survival and dignity to a revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism, governing the earth, and taking over production? They have innumerable tasks before them, but one of the most important is to overcome divisions among themselves resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism. Marxists have been debating this issue from the beginning, but it still plagues us today. The war in Ukraine offers a good opportunity to examine it more closely.

Political Dimensions of the Crisis in Sri Lanka

Let me start with a childhood memory. My father was Tamil, my mother was Burgher – that’s what they call people with European ancestry in Sri Lanka – and we were living in a predominantly Sinhalese neighbourhood just outside Colombo. One day in May 1958 our Sinhalese neighbour Menike, who was like a member of our family, came over in great distress, insisting that we leave our home at once and go somewhere safe because a bloodthirsty mob was heading our way. At around the same time my mother’s former student Yasmine, who had become a family friend, also Sinhalese, came over in a car, offering to shelter us at her parents’ place. My mother had been for a walk so my parents knew that Tamils were being attacked, but at that point they refused to leave. They packed off my brother and me and our Tamil grandmother in a taxi with another Sinhalese neighbour to stay with our Burgher grandmother, and started making Molotov cocktails to defend themselves and their home. By this time Menike was frantic and threatened to commit suicide unless they left. They finally agreed, and yet another Sinhalese neighbour drove them in his car to Yasmine’s parents’ place.

Thirty years later, when I was doing research on Sri Lankan refugees and internally displaced people, I came across numerous similar stories in which Tamils had been saved by Sinhalese friends, neighbours, colleagues, or even total strangers. To me these stories encapsulate the divided soul of Sri Lanka: hatred and violence on one side, love and compassion on the other, racism on one side, anti-racism on the other, brutal authoritarianism on one side, a stubborn pursuit of democracy and human rights on the other.