Stabilised, Not Transformed: What Sri Lanka's Stalled "System Change" Means for Devolution and for India

A MANDATE TO REJECT IS NOT A MANDATE TO REBUILD

Sri Lanka's National People's Power has delivered what Colombo's markets and the IMF wanted. Not yet delivered is what the 2022 protesters wrote on their posters: system change. What this is really about is the type of mandate the NPP won and what that mandate allows it to do.

The interest map The NPP government wants to prove that a leftist party with a violent past can govern responsibly.

Fiscal discipline, met IMF targets and arrests of politicians and bureaucrats accused of grand corruption all serve that goal. NPP General Secretary Nihal Abeysinghe argues that surplus revenue let the government absorb Cyclone Ditwah, which killed over 600 people and the West Asian fuel shock without passing the burden to the public. What it fears is spending political capital on reforms that divide its own Sinhala-majority base:

• Repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act looks risky to security establishments and rights defenders say the draft replacement still falls short of international standards.
• Provincial Council elections are the promise made to Tamil voters and they are stuck with a parliamentary committee.
• Abolishing the executive presidency means a sitting President giving up his own powers. Tamil voters want devolution through the Provincial Councils created by the 13th Amendment, an outcome of the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. India wants a stable, solvent neighbour that does not drift towards China and it has consistently called for full implementation of the 13th Amendment.

Why the

supermajority may not be enough The 42.31% presidential vote and the November 2024 supermajority look like a sweeping endorsement. Pradeep Peiris reads them differently: as a rejection of old politics more than an endorsement of the NPP's programme.

That distinction is the heart of the problem. A negative mandate gives a government licence to stop doing harm, such as ending impunity and enforcing discipline. It does not automatically give licence to redesign the state.

Each structural reform creates identifiable losers and the voters who rejected the old order did not necessarily agree on what should replace it. So the NPP does what is safe: it governs cleanly within the existing system.

The irony India is watching The JVP, which leads the NPP, fought a violent insurrection in 1987-89 partly against the very Accord that produced the 13th Amendment.

It now heads the government expected to make that amendment work. Dissanayake chose India for his first state visit in December 2024 and India extended about $4 billion in support during the 2022 crisis.

Where the balance sits: for now, stabilisation suits India well, because a solvent Sri Lanka is less dependent on Chinese finance. But stalled devolution keeps Tamil grievances unresolved and Peiris warns that if the opening is wasted, the old political order could return. For Mains, the takeaway is to judge a neighbour's democratic change by the structures it rebuilds, not only by the crises it survives.