Reserves for Emancipatory Politics in Post - war Northern Sri Lanka | Ahilan Kadirgamar and Niyanthini Kadirgamar

Introduction

In Sri Lanka, ravaged by ethnic conflict and a civil war, nationalism for decades was at the centre of political debates. In fact, political economic questions, including about neoliberalism –though Sri Lanka was the first country in South Asia to liberalise its economy in 1977 – were side-lined by even leftist intellectuals due to the urgency of addressing the civil war (A. Kadirgamar, 2017a). This intellectual anomaly of contemporary analysis of nationalism preceding critiques of neoliberalism provides an interesting vantage point to engage the recent international scholarly interest on authoritarian populism. Even as critiques of neoliberalism gained mainstream importance after the global economic crisis of 2008, contemporary forms of nationalism and populism (Rodrik, 2018), and in some intellectual debates the constitution of authoritarian populism, have emerged as a central question (Scoones et al., 2018; Bello, 2018). These concerns have gained further attention with the election of Trump in the US and Brexit in Europe; however, the resurgence of nationalism in the West has a longer trajectory with rising anti-immigrant politics over the last few decades. Interestingly, the common narrative of the emergence of neoliberalism also begins with changes in the US and UK, with the rise of Reagan and Thatcher respectively. This discussion of neoliberalism, nationalism and authoritarian populism that privilege developments in the West and particularly, the US and UK, are subject to debate. We engage questions about neoliberalism, nationalism and populism and their relationship to authoritarian power from the periphery; the war-devastated rural districts in northern Sri Lanka. The location of a rural war-torn region provides for analysis of the deeper reach of neoliberalism, nationalist politics and populist measures, as they have to percolate through disrupted economic and political structures after decades of devastation. The resistance in turn to neoliberal policies, nationalist mobilisations and populist measures, by rural struggles and movements suggest possibilities for the emergence of new forms of progressive rural politics. The character of such rural struggles and the structure of the rural movements, their relationship to caste contradictions and women’s everyday politics, as well as their engagement with the state provide insights about the constraints and potential for emancipatory rural politics. Historically, Sri Lanka is an interesting case; in terms of the history of import substitution regimes, the
early emergence of neoliberal policies, the over-determination of politics by nationalist movements and for decades when the war isolated its northern region from neoliberal globalisation. Neoliberal policies in Sri Lanka were initiated before the rise of Reagan and Thatcherin 1977 with the authoritarian regime of President Jayawardena (Herring, 1987; Lakshman, 1980). The politics in the country both before and during the neoliberal era were shaped by Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil nationalisms as well as populist measures.
Innorthern Sri Lanka, Tamil nationalism was the dominant political project after Independence in 1948, as state power remained aloof of the Tamil elite. The rise of Tamil militancy, and eventually the brutal consolidation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waging a war for a separate state, adopted an authoritarian approach to rule over the Tamil polity. The civil war starting in the 1980s, cut off the market and devastated the northern economy, delaying the reach of neoliberal policies in the country until the end of the war in May 2009. With the war victory in 2009, the Rajapaksa regime consolidated authoritarian power by promising accelerated economic development, continuing with militarisation and privileging a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist discourse. It is with regime change in January 2015, and the opening of democratic space that people’s struggles began to emerge in northern Sri Lanka. [ . . .]

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Reserves for Emancipatory Politics in Post - war Northern Sri Lanka

by Ahilan Kadirgamar and Niyanthini Kadirgamar (paper presented at ERPI 2018 International Conference - Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World)