‘Only the beginning’: Sri Lankans hope for deep changes under new president | Elections News

Colombo, Sri Lanka – For Dilshan Jayasanka, the victory of Anura Kumara Dissanayake as Sri Lanka’s first Marxist-leaning president is the beginning of a “radical new path” for the crisis-hit island nation.

Just more than two years ago, the 29-year-old former floor manager at a restaurant in Colombo was a regular visitor to Gota Go Gama, the tent city erected by tens of thousands of protesters in the city’s picturesque Galle Face area.

The protests in 2022 were aimed at toppling the then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government, which was blamed for Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since its independence from British rule in 1948.

After the restaurant he worked at was forced to close due to the financial meltdown, Jayasanka made the tent city his home.

“Many non-partisan people who took part in ‘Aragalaya’ [struggle in Sinhalese] are now with the National Peoples Power [NPP],” Jayasanka told Al Jazeera on Tuesday, a day after Dissanayake, who leads the NPP alliance, was sworn in as the country’s ninth president.

As Dissanayake assumed the presidential office, located right opposite Colombo’s Galle Face, Jayasanka, who had spent weeks there in 2022 fighting for change in his country, said: “I believe his victory is a positive development for my country. I hope he will make a better Sri Lanka.”

Jayasanka also hailed the 55-year-old leader for appointing Harini Amarasuriya, one of NPP’s three legislators in the 225-member parliament, as the country’s new prime minister, making her the country’s first woman to head the government in 24 years.

“As someone who actively took part in Aragalaya, I highly commend that move. In fact, many women took part not only in Aragalaya but also bringing Dissanayake to power,” he said.

Hours after appointing Amarasuriya as the prime minister, Dissanayake dissolved the parliament effective midnight on Tuesday and called for a snap parliamentary election on November 14.

‘Great opportunity for a system change’

Dissanayake and his Stalinist political party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), played an active role during the 2022 protests. The controversial party led two insurrections against the Sri Lankan state in the 1970s and 1980s, during which 80,000 people were killed. The party has since renounced violence and Dissanayake has apologised for their crimes.

First elected to parliament in 2000, Dissanayake remained a peripheral player in Sri Lankan politics until he made fighting corruption and reviving the economy the main planks of his campaign this year.

His call for unity amid ethnic divisions, clean politics and pro-people economic reforms resonated in the crisis-hit nation of 22 million. For decades, Sri Lanka was under the grip of a bloody civil war after its Tamil minority, mainly concentrated in the north, began a movement for an independent ethnic state.

Tens of thousands of people were killed during the 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009 when Sri Lankan forces destroyed the last strongholds of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the rebels fighting for a Tamil homeland. At least 40,000 civilians were killed in the final days of the war, according to estimates by the United Nations, and the military was accused of widespread human rights violations.

The scars of the civil war are still visible in Sri Lanka’s politics and the Tamil question remains unresolved. In fact, Dissanayake’s JVP itself was once accused of fomenting anti-Tamil sentiments.

But Anthony Vinoth, 34, who was an active member of the 2022 mass protests, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that Dissanayake’s victory was “a significant reward for the Aragalaya movement”.

“As a member of the Tamil community, I feel that the victory of [Dissanayake] is a great opportunity for a system change which we have been longing for a long period… Now he has an opportunity to address issues faced by different communities without bias,” he said.

However, a majority of Tamil voters in the northern, eastern and central provinces had voted for other candidates, including Dissanayake’s main rivals Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe, in Saturday’s election.

The Tamil community had been asking for a political solution to their grievances. They have also been asking for the whereabouts of their loved ones missing after the end of the civil war, the return of land captured by the military, and a proper devolution of power to the regions so that they could manage their own affairs.

“Anura Kumara’s campaign didn’t target much of the minority community’s demands. This is a point of view among the Tamil communities,” Anthony said, adding that he will “wait and see” how the plans for reconciliation promised by the new president would be implemented.

“But I am optimistic and hoping for positive political and cultural changes in the country.”

Sinhala Buddhists make up about 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s population, while the Hindu and Christian Tamil minority are at about 12 percent. Muslims, who make up about 9 percent of the population, were rarely the targets of ultra-nationalist Sinhalese groups in the country.

But that changed in the years after the end of the civil war, reaching a peak in 2019 when suicide bombers linked to ISIL (ISIS) attacked churches, hotels and other locations across the country on Easter Sunday, killing 269 people. The fallout from that attack saw Sri Lankan legislators proposing curbs on the rights of Muslim citizens. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Muslims were criticised for their practice of burying the dead.

Like many Muslims, Farhaan Nizamdeen, another member of the Aragalaya movement, supported Dissanayake in the presidential election.

To be sure, the Muslim vote also went to Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) or its breakaway group, Samaji Jana Balawegaya, led by Premadasa.

But Nizamdeen, a freelance journalist, said most Muslims in his neighbourhood in the southern Sri Lankan town of Galle backed Dissanayake. “I view this as a breakdown of the traditional politics in Sri Lanka,” he told Al Jazeera.

Following the Easter Sunday attacks and COVID-19 outbreak, the Muslim community “lost faith not only with the main parties but also with their own representatives”, said Nizamdeen.

“National leaders and our own Muslim leaders pledged many things in every election but they never delivered. And the Muslim community was very hurt when Gotabaya Rajapaksa government forcefully cremated Muslims during the COVID-19 outbreak,” he told Al Jazeera.

“So I feel this as a protest vote against those leaders, including the leaders of Muslim political parties, than a vote for Anura Kumara [Dissanayake]. But I don’t believe everything will be resolved overnight simply because he is now in power.”

‘Break from the traditional elite’

Melani Gunathilake, an environmental and human rights activist, told Al Jazeera that a president from a working-class background “who genuinely understands the people’s pain, was very much needed”.

But she added that Dissanayake’s NPP had failed to capitalise on the national unity and reconciliation displayed by the young protesters during the Aragalaya movement.

Pointing out that the Marxist leader did not secure significant Tamil votes, she said: “It shows that once again, we in southern Sri Lanka have failed to address their grievances and play our role in taking Tamil people with us on our journey.”

Senior journalist and political analyst Sunil Jayasekara told Al Jazeera that Dissanayake’s victory carried historic significance and marked a fundamental shift in Sri Lanka’s governance for a second time.

“First, it was in 1956 when SWRD Bandaranaike was elected [and] the country’s governance was taken away from the traditional elite,” said Jayasekara, the general secretary of National Movement for Social Justice, a civil society movement that has been campaigning for democracy, human rights and rule of law.

Bandaranaike himself was from a wealthy political family but formed a coalition of Buddhist monks, Ayurvedic practitioners, teachers, farmers and labourers to defeat the government run by the traditional elite in 1956. He was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959. His widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, became the world’s first female prime minister in 1960. Later, his daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, would serve as the country’s first female executive president from 1994 to 2005.

Like Bandaranaike, Jayasekara said, Dissanayake represents a break from the traditional elite. “And it is our sincere hope that the people’s expectations will be fulfilled.”

However, Jayasanka, the former restaurant floor manager, said Dissanayake’s victory is “only a beginning and there is a long way ahead”.

“I think everybody should help him deliver what he promised. But if he fails, he might even be ousted in a shorter period than Gotabaya [Rajapaksa].”