THAMBUTTEGAMA, Sri Lanka — Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake dissolved Parliament late on Tuesday, with general elections to be held on Nov. 14. Since his party currently has only three members in the legislature, he aims to strengthen his power base with the highly unusual move to call elections right after taking office.
During his campaign for the presidency, Dissanayake set himself apart from rivals by reminding Sri Lankans still suffering the lingering effects of the 2022 economic crisis that he, too, came from poverty.
Little seems to have changed in Thambuttegama, where wild elephants still come foraging at night from a nearby forest. Dissanayake was raised in this village of rice farmers where his mother still lives.
Neighbors of the small, white-walled, single-story Dissanayake home tell Nikkei Asia they are still trying to digest the rise of Anura to the seat of power, following his victory in Saturday’s election.
In the early days, his family lived in a wattle-and-daub house that lacked electricity, relying on kerosene lamps, recalled Dingiri Banda Neelawatura, a 70-year-old neighbor.
“His father earned little money as a laborer for the survey department, so Anura sold toffees and sweets as a schoolboy at the nearby train station to bring in some money,” Neelawatura said.
After Dissanayake finished high school in the late 1980s, he took on the name “Aravinda” to hide his identity as he entered the world of antiestablishment, Marxist politics. He joined the revolutionary Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna movement shortly after the party began its second violent uprising against the Sri Lankan state.
Dissanayake was sensible to hide under a new name. His closest first cousin Sunil Dissanayake, who had joined the JVP youth with him, paid the ultimate price for taking this political route: He was arrested, tortured and killed by the government. His corpse was partially torched by government death squads near a phosphate mine, according to villagers in Thambuttegama.
Dissanayake dropped out of the University of Peradeniya, hounded by threats after he raised suspicions of his involvement with JVP. He later joined the University of Kelaniya, from which he graduated with a physical science degree.
A former university roommate told Nikkei about Dissanayake’s quick grasp of texts, which he later demonstrated as a debater on the opposition benches of Parliament.
“He liked the Russian writers [Maxim] Gorky, [Alexander] Pushkin and [Anton] Chekhov, reading them in depth and grasping the meanings of their texts,” said Ajith Rupasena, Dissanayake’s roommate for two years. “Once he joked he may end up as president if the plan he had to become a farmer failed.”
Not surprisingly, Dissanayake’s subsequent rise into full-time politics became a play in two acts: moving up the leadership ranks of the JVP and then having a hand in its transformation into a mainstream political party under the banner of the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance.
Newspapers published Sept. 23 declared Dissanayake’s victory in the presidential election. © ReutersThe NPP became the new political vehicle for the JVP, which refashioned itself to expand its network. This included attracting technocrats, academics and experts to join the party, in addition to forming youth groups and other civil society organizations. These moves helped to erase some of the JVP’s hard-core Marxist past.
Following the 2004 election that the JVP contested as part of a left-of-center and nationalist alliance, it secured 39 parliamentary seats. Dissanayake was appointed minister of agriculture, livestock, land and irrigation, giving him his first taste of being in government.
Some said he has done much to diversify JVP’s interests.
“To accommodate these varied interests and the people pushing for them is not easy, but Anura Kumara Dissanayake has been able to achieve this balancing act,” said Lionel Bopage, former general-secretary of the JVP. “He has allowed the NPP to have a spectrum of people who have different views.”
But this political makeover does not mean Dissanayake has abandoned his JVP roots. Veterans of the Marxist party said that the NPP’s win was rooted in the JVP’s strategy of grassroots outreach over the past two years, later amplified by a social media information blitz.
“Anura Kumara Dissanayake was the public face of the NPP movement, but strategies to have three levels of meetings drew from the organizing strength of the JVP,” said Aldeniya Hettiarachige Dayatilleke, a 75-year-old JVP veteran who joined the party in 1971, when it launched its first insurrection. “We had to educate the public to build this political tsunami.”
Dissanayake struck a conciliatory tone after he won the presidential election. To establishment politicians who for decades regarded him as an outsider and to those who hadn’t voted for him, he promised to build “confidence in that part of the public who do not believe in us.”
Dissanayake’s comments after he was named the president drew from his memories of a life lived in part as witness to the dark underbelly of Sri Lanka’s economic, social and political life.
“Our journey here has been paved by the sacrifices of so many who gave their sweat, tears and even their lives for this cause,” he said. “Their sacrifices are not forgotten.”
source : asia.nikkei