Sri Lanka has a new leader and a new ask of the (Western) world
Two weeks after Sri Lanka voted in a Lenin-loving leader, the country is at a historic crossroads. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, often called AKD, is asking for a better deal from the IMF, which usually insists on extreme measures from developing countries. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on why Sri Lanka’s first election since going bankrupt and unprecedented street protests may be a turning point. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
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The Big Story:
Sri Lanka had its first election since going bankrupt in 2022 and triggering street protests that forced its president and prime minister to flee the teardrop-shaped island nation. Does this presidential poll signal the rebirth of Sri Lanka, very appropriate for a majority Buddhist country?
Is Sri Lanka doomed to be a doleful template, like Kenya, Argentina, Pakistan, Tunisia and Angola, all of which are struggling with out-of-control debt and consequent domestic turmoil? …
The Backstory:
- Sri Lanka negotiated a key debt restructuring deal with the International Monetary Fund in June 2024.
- Since 2022, poverty in Sri Lanka has doubled to 25% of the population…
This Week’s Books:
- A stirring account of how the global system failed Sri Lanka.
- A Booker Prize-winning novel on life after death in the island nation.
- BONUS: Serendipity…fables from long ago, lovingly retold.
Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World
By: Asoka Bandarage
Publisher: De Gruyter
Year: 2023
One of the most startling points in academic Asoka Bandarage’s book is her assertion, early on, that Sri Lanka’s 2022 crisis wasn’t really the result of China’s “debt trap diplomacy”. She writes: “In fact much of Sri Lanka’s borrowing in recent years has not been from China, as is commonly reported, but from ISBs [International Sovereign Bonds] backed by the USA and the EU. In total, 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s current debt is held by the West and its allies”.
Bandarage, who has studied and written about Sri Lanka, South Asia and global political, economic and social developments for decades, takes a long view of Sri Lanka’s 2022 crisis. She examines it with a critical eye. Was the collapse of the island’s economy and accompanying destabilisation of the state really the result of short term problems such as the pandemic, the Ukraine war, debt to China and corruption and mismanagement by the long-ruling Rajapaksa family? Or was it because of the dissonance induced by centuries of colonialism…
Choice quotes:
“In January 2022, the international NGO, Debt Justice pointed out that 54 countries were experiencing debt crises and that debt payments were undermining governments’ ability to meet the basic economic and social needs of their citizens…”
“Although details of this are not available to the public, BlackRock is reportedly the biggest International Sovereign Bond (ISB) creditor of Sri Lanka”.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
By: Shehan Karunatilaka
Publisher: Sort of Books
Year: 2020
This novel, which won the 2022 Booker Prize, is about life after death. In so many ways, it can be read as a metaphor. For Sri Lanka in 2024, two years after the crisis. And for Sri Lanka in 2009, after the government ended the civil war. The plot, however, is set in Sri Lanka in the 1990s…
Bonus Pick: The Three Princes of Serendip: New Tellings of Old Tales for Everyone
By: Rodaan Al Galidi
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Year: 2021
There’s good reason to include Dutch Iraqi author Rodaan Al Galidi’s retelling of these folk tales in any account of Sri Lanka. The title story, The Three Princes of Serendip, is Persian in origin and inspired Horace Walpole to come up with the English word ‘serendipity’. That’s because the three princes in the story often made discoveries quite by chance. But Serendip comes from Serendib, the ancient Arabic name for Sri Lanka, which is a corruption of the Sanskrit Simhaladvipa…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
