‘We have great hopes of AKD’, said my young Sri Lankan interlocutor

The other day I ran into a young Sri Lankan who had been in London two years and was following political developments in his country with avid interest.

He said he had hopes for positive change from Sri Lanka’s new president Anura Kumara Dissanayake, often known as AKD but wasn’t sure what form that would take.

“Anything would be better than the past,” he said, wincing a little at the memory of a couple of years ago.

We stood in silence for a moment, recalling that extraordinary time when Sri Lanka reeled from its first debt default and forced its president to flee the country. Meanwhile, the whole world watched on TV as the masses surged into Sri Lanka’s presidential palace and swam in the massive pool, ate in the well-appointed kitchens and lounged on the luxurious beds. It was a ‘people power’ moment reminiscent of Manila when it rid itself of the Marcos family nearly 40 years ago.

I wondered why my Sri Lankan interlocutor placed such hope in AKD or “Comrade President” (as he used to be introduced at election rallies). After all, his Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party is considered an outlier in Sri Lanka’s political and economic system for all that AKD won the presidency and led his centre-left National People’s Power (NPP) coalition to a landslide victory in the November 14 parliamentary poll.

This success is quite extraordinary for a party with Marxist roots because Sri Lanka is considered a pioneer of free-market capitalism in South Asia.

Now, it feels as if Sri Lanka is decisively swinging leftwards. AKD has already said he will review an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bail-out package for Sri Lanka and with the stunning mandate he and his party have received, it’s clear that the people are on board.

For now. Things could get rocky.

That said, AKD has moved with careful deliberation in his talks with the IMF, thereby ensuring economic stability while also urging the IMF team that arrived in Sri Lanka on November 17 to maintain a “balanced approach that considers the hardships faced by citizens”.

This points to a protectiveness by the state – a posture that would come naturally to the JVP – but it’s not likely to find favour with the IMF.

But Sri Lanka, like so many developing countries, appears to be falling out of love with some of the institutional architecture put in place by the western-led order, often judging it (rightly) as less interested in social justice than in the benefits accruing to global markets. A few months ago, Ahilan Kadirgamar, a political economist and senior lecturer at Sri Lanka’s University of Jaffna, wrote in The Guardian: “The central challenge before Dissanayake is getting a better IMF agreement. And it is this tension between a new president who seeks social change and the old IMF, which remains committed to the interests of global finance and markets, that is likely to play out in the weeks and months ahead”.

Exactly.

Though I didn’t ask him the question explicitly, the young Sri Lankan interlocutor who expressed such hope from AKD, seemed prepared to settle for London if things go wrong back home.

A lot is riding on AKD.