Snapshots from the Struggle, Sri Lanka April–May 2022

Abstract

In the opening months of 2022, sri Lanka found itself plunged into a profound economic and political crisis. spiraling inflation and drastic shortage of foreign currency made everyday life almost unendurable for all sections of sri Lankan society. three-wheeler drivers waited in line for hours for ever scarcer supplies of fuel. Households suffered long daily power cuts. the poor struggled to feed their families. as the economic situation worsened, people responded with a wave of ever more imaginative and confident protests, directed at the government but especially at the president, Gotabaya rajapaksa, and his family, which has dominated the last two decades of sri Lankan politics. the crisis can be traced to particular economic choices made by the country’s leaders as well as the unequal determinants of global trade and financialization. the immediate causes of the crisis lie in the accumulation of unsustainable levels of sovereign debt — a problem soon to be felt more widely across the global south. However, the personalistic focus of the protests fell on the rajapaksa ruling family for good reason. Mahinda rajapaksa served as president from 2005 to 2015. He combined strategic appeals to majoritarian sinhala Buddhist nationalism, with high-visibility vanity projects. He also inserted family members into positions of authority, accompanied by accusations of graft and corruption. His brother, Gotabaya rajapaksa, defense secretary when the decades-long ethnic war was “won,” was elected president in late 2019. this followed four years of internal squabbles among the opposition coalition that had replaced the rajapaksas in 2015. Gotabaya presented himself as a non-politician, a good administrator with a technocratic team who would “get things done” — in contrast to the self-serving and incompetent politicians he would replace. In practice, the opposite happened. the new president combined political incompetence with spectacular errors of judgment, like the sudden banning of imported fertilizer in 2021, which crippled much of the country’s agricultural