Dissanayake’s Party Wins Big — What Does It Mean For India-Sri Lanka Relations?

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s National People’s Power (NPP) party won a landslide victory in the snap parliamentary elections held on Friday in Sri Lanka. The election gives the 55-year-old leader a supermajority of two-thirds in the 225-member Sri Lankan Parliament which enables him to implement his left programme aimed at fighting poverty and corruption. The victory is a signal that the policies he boasts of garner increasing public support as the country struggles to recover from its worst financial crisis since gaining independence in 1948.

A Historic Landslide Victory

The victory represents a dramatic shift in the country’s political landscape for the National Peoples Party. The party held only three seats in the previous parliament, but following Friday’s results, it now commands a supermajority, and the Podujana Peramuna party of the Rajapaksa family, which once dominated, was nearly wiped out, securing just three seats. The NPP garnered nearly 62% of the vote, amounting to almost 7 million votes, a significant increase from the 42% Dissanayake achieved in the presidential election just a few months earlier.

Sri Lanka’s Political Lurch to the Left

The election result also marks a strengthening mandate for Dissanayake’s policies, which had been viewed as a shift from the style of the previous government. His left-wing alliance won almost unanimously in the wake of mass street protests that led former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation in 2022. The resulting public clamor for change saw the NPP win Tamil-majority Jaffna district overwhelmingly, indicating rising acceptance across ethnic lines.

He had dissolved parliament on September 24 to pave the way for these elections, merely a few weeks after he became the president, to drive his agenda with a new mandate.

Economic Recovery and Challenges Ahead

The newly elected president faces an enormous challenge as he needs to steer the country out of the present economic crisis. It defaults on its sovereign debt in 2022 due to a severe shortage of dollars and a contract of 7.3 percent for the economy. A tentative recovery has begun with the help of a bailout of USD 2.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund, and inflation and living costs are major concerns for people, particularly the poor. He has assured to slash taxes and enhance welfare expenditure that would help rectify these ills.

Tax Structure, Welfare Spending Reform Plans Under Controversy; Impact on Cash-Starved Economy Not Expected

It is because his reform package includes conditions imposed by the IMF on tax structures and welfare spending that has made investors worry about an over-hasty move to alter the terms under which Sri Lanka obtained the IMF bailout. Critics warn that fiddling with the IMF package may jeopardize the revival process while Sri Lanka is unlikely to meet key fiscal targets.

“The president has a huge mandate now to carry through the reforms but also huge expectations from the people. This is unprecedented, we haven’t seen this kind of victory before. People voted for a change.

This will give the president the wherewithal to introduce sweeping reforms, but that power comes with terrific expectation. In order to balance high welfare reforms by the Dissanayake administration, there will be the need for fiscal tightrope walking. Now the NPP has the supermajority, but the new government may not have enough experienced leadership to govern and make policies.

Dissanayake was, at one point, a fierce critic of the powerful executive presidency. Now, through a two-thirds majority in Parliament, he has the chance to address this issue. In fact, with his new position, he can probably start the dismantling process of the executive presidency-a promise made during his presidential campaign. However, analysts believe that in the short term, that might not top his priority list.

A New Way to Foreign Relations

The foreign policy area marks another high point of Dissanayake’s leadership. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which Dissanayake leads, has always been extremely wary of India. So, does the electoral victory of Dissanayake raise Sri Lanka’s diplomatic future? After all, Dissanayake’s party opposed the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. It was signed by Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and then Sri Lankan President JR Jayewardene at that time.

As a member of a party that had, up until then, resisted the influence of India, Dissanayake said he would keep good ties both with India and China. “As a sovereign state, we need to be in very good relations with whoever is powerful at any given time. one would not want to be caught being dragged into any form of international friction or tension,” he told an interview with The Monocle last September. “There are many power camps within a multipolar system.”. but we won’t be a part of that geopolitical battle, nor will we be aligned with any party. We also do not want to be sandwiched, especially between China and India. Both are valued friends and we expect them to become closer partners,” he said.

The new political dispensation at the onset has been marked by a very strong mandate for Dissanayake, who could now aggressively drive changes promised during the campaign. With such a challenging agenda on the back of a significant recovery mission for the economy and delicate foreign relations, what he balances out with such competing priorities will largely determine the success of his administration.

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