Commentary | Surachanee Sriyai, Rationalizing Sri Lanka: An Analysis of the 2022 Protest Movement

After four months of protests, Sri Lanka’s sitting president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled the country in mid-July, 2022. The success of the protest movement was then finalized when Rajapaksa announced his resignation on July 15. Amidst the global phenomenon of democratic retrogression, this protest movement provides a glimpse of hope to Sri Lankans. While feeling hopeful is indeed important, it is equally crucial to learn from the situation and the success of the people of Sri Lanka in ousting their president.

There are several factors that contributed to this protest movement, but mostly what angered people was apparent political misconduct that had disastrous economic consequences for everyone. The Rajapaksa family’s entrenched power over Sri Lanka politics in this decade alone is a case in point of how longstanding political clans hamper national progress. As with other countries, Sri Lanka has also also facing the detrimental fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, skyrocketing inflation, combined with the government’s mismanagement of funds, have sent the country spiralling into a crisis where people are struggling even to purchase necessities. In the eyes of the opposition, the person to blame is Basil “Mr. Ten Percent” Rajapaksa, the finance minister and the brother of the president and the prime minister. To note, he got this nickname from several allegations that he took a 10% commission fee from government contracts that went through his office. The case of Basil is just one example of what nepotism can do, but in fact, president Gotabaya Rajapaksa has appointed five family members to key cabinet positions during his administration.

For the protest movement, economic crisis served as a unifying frame, bringing together people from all walks of life. At one point, the young activists leading the protest at Galle Face even called the movement “Occupy Galle Face”, mirroring aspects of financial distress from earlier Occupy movements. The economic downturn in Sri Lanka, made worse by the pandemic, affects the rich and the poor alike. The shared suffering caused by nationwide economic recession, poverty, and overall disparities allowed the movement to mobilize a broad base of audience without much effort to convince them that the Rajapaksa administration was the culprit, and thus, must be removed. Remarkably, this frame successfully united even the Sinhalese and the Tamils, two groups with a long history of conflict, across the ethno-religion cleavage. But as many political enthusiasts know, the backdrop of economic catastrophe alone is usually not enough to topple a ruling government. In the context of Sri Lanka in 2022, I observe at least four other key points that shifted the opportunity structure in favor of the people, leading them to successfully overthrow the Rajapaksa regime.

First, although the most updated report of Freedom House has rated Sri Lanka as a “flawed democracy,” national institutions, particularly the judiciary, still do reasonably well in constraining the executive branch. For example, the Supreme Court ruled against the Diveneguma bill that was drafted to override the check and balance procedures and centralise governance at the executive branch in 2012. It also reinstated Ranil Wickremesinghe to the prime ministership in 2018 after he was wrongfully removed from the office by president Sirisena amidst a constitutional crisis. Additionally, a series of political incidents in the parliament since early April have put the Rajapaksa administration on the defensive, making it almost completely unable to rule despite having the majority in the parliament: pressure from opposition parties; allegations accusing the president and his cabinet of corruption, nepotism, and violence against protesters; the en masse resignation of MPs; and the resignation of prime minister Mahindra Rajapaksa, the president’s own brother.

Second, China's now lukewarm gesture towards the Rajapaksas may also heighten tensions in Sri Lanka; especially among the political elites and government coalition. Being the largest creditor to Sri Lanka, China holds about 10% of the country’s total foreign debts. As a result, Beijing’s “invisible hands” have grasped the Sri Lankan political and economic sphere for over a decade, with the Rajapaksa brothers as close allies. Notably, one of the allegations posed against the Rajapaksas was for allowing Chinese influence into the Sri Lankan economy to the detriment of the nation’s sovereignty. Prior to the economic crash, the Rajapaksa and allies were able to deflect such allegations, as they continued to receive support from Beijing. Yet, with its own economy taking a hit from the pandemic, causing sluggish growth, China’s patience with nonperforming loans is wearing thin. Now that Sri Lanka is going bankrupt, defaulting on debts and turning to the IMF for assistance, Beijing may find the attempt to prop up the Rajapaksas increasingly futile. The lack of support from China, even a performative gesture, puts the regime under pressure from both its coalition and the opposition. For the governing parties, the lack of support from China combined with the pressure from the people signals to them that it is time to jump the ship. For those in the opposition parties, it is a chance to prove that the efforts to cooperate with China during the Rajapaksa’s tenure have not been in the nation’s best interests.

Third, the demands of the people, while aimed at the systematic ails that have persistently put Sri Lanka in limbo, were mostly achievable. For instance, they called for more accountability and transparency as well as putting an end to corruption and nepotism in the government. These ultimatums can be, to some extent, satisfied by removing the Rajapaksa clan and its cronies from government positions. While the demands may appear to be a sweeping claim from the government’s perspective, it is comparatively much more modest than those posed by anti-government movements elsewhere, such as calls for democracy or the dismantling of status quo institutions. According to Gamson, modest-yet-powerful demands such as ones we see in Sri Lanka can, in fact, be beneficial to the success of a movement since the government would be more likely to concede to demands that do not put them in a complete existential crisis. However, one may argue that states resort to the use of force and suppress dissidents in order to maintain the opportunity structure in their favour – this is what president Rajapaksa has done several times since the beginning of the protest. So, the question is what was the tipping point that swayed the opportunity structure over to the people?

This leads to my last point of observation that the 2022 Sri Lankan protest has found a unity in numbers, which is rare but also is very crucial to the movement. Namely, larger crowds can 1) diffuse the perceived costs/risk for protestors; and 2) increase the exit cost for political leaders should they continue to resist the people’s demands. In other words, the collective action problems are easier to overcome when the risk of participation is shared across a larger number of people. Following this logic, people would then be more likely to join the movement if they see that there are already a lot of people participating in it. The sheer number of people, in turn, can pressure the government into heeding the movement’s demands; especially when the declaration of state of emergency and the internet shutdown in March proved to be ineffective tactics as the size of the protest grew. It became increasingly difficult to control the crowd through violent means when the authorities were outnumbered. It is also worth mentioning that apart from the main protest sites in Colombo, such as Galle Face Green or the Presidential Residence, satellite movements also occurred throughout the country, making it next to impossible for the government to keep things under complete control despite having deployed the military to control the crowd a couple times since March. The role of social media is also worth mentioning, though in this case, I do not think that it was critical to the success of the movement beyond the initial step of overcoming collective action problems. The nightmarish reality already had the people riled up and ready to act; they just needed to know that they were not alone. Social media, hence, served to  amplify people’s pre-existing dissatisfactions, transforming them into a collective sentiment of sort, rather than a catalyst of activism.

Now that Sri Lankans have prevailed over the status quo, the questions and concerns about the next step loom large. Specifically, who will lead the country out of the crisis? The parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe as an acting president on July 20th. He is supposed to serve until 2027, which marks the end of the now-exiled Rajapaksa’s term; however, he has been experiencing public criticisms since the first few hours after taking the office. It is possible that protests may erupt again if the tension continues to build without a solution that satisfies all parties. Until then, Sri Lanka is standing at one of the most critical junctions in its contemporary history as the world is witnessing whether it can rise from this series of challenges. 

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Dr. Surachanee Sriyai is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University. Her research interests include digital politics, social movement, political communication, comparative politics, and democratisation.

To cite this Commentary, please use the entry suggested below:

Surachanee Sriyai, “Rationalizing Sri Lanka: An Analysis of the 2022 Protest Movement,” criticalasianstudies.org August 22, 2022; https://doi.org/10.52698/THDC4019.