Sri Lanka’s dilemma: Can the system change without being overthrown?
The test now for Sri Lanka is whether political change can move beyond changing rulers. Uyangoda sees a struggle between an old ruling class and a new political force, almost “like a class war”. A system designed to protect established power may resist transformation through the very institutions that give it legitimacy
Sri Lanka’s most dangerous political question is no longer whether democracy should survive. It is whether democracy can survive being used to dismantle the political order that has lived comfortably inside it. Recently, I sat down with Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda and found myself returning to that question. He entered politics believing revolution could remake society, joined Rohana Wijeweera’s underground movement, survived 1971, spent six years in Welikada prison, and emerged not as a liberal convert but as something more troublesome: a Marxist who believes liberal democracy is indispensable, yet fundamentally insufficient.
“I was never converted to liberal democracy,” he told me. He retained his suspicion of capitalism and concentrated power while discovering, through defeat, imprisonment, reading and reflection, that freedom cannot be postponed until after revolution. “Liberal democracy is indispensable for political and social progress. But it is inadequate.” In that contradiction lies the central argument of his political life.
Uyangoda’s critique begins where conventional celebrations of democracy end. Sri Lanka has elections, universal franchise, constitutional rights and competing parties. Yet democracy has repeatedly operated alongside concentrations of wealth, political power, family influence, bureaucratic authority and ethnic privilege. His objection is therefore not to democracy but to democracy emptied of substance. “People, demos, are the true owners of democracy. And democracy had been captured by the elites.” That is a brutal formulation in a country where the establishment presents itself as democracy’s guardian. Parliament can function while citizens remain powerless; elections can occur while the same networks recycle power; constitutionalism can survive while inequality determines who can actually exercise freedom. His argument also goes beyond the familiar Marxist complaint about class. Liberal political theory, he argues, has treated society as an aggregation of autonomous individuals while neglecting communities, cultures and historically disadvantaged groups. For Sri Lanka, that omission is not theoretical. “Actually, liberal political theory doesn’t have a theory of the state. It has only theories of government and regimes.” Changing governments, in other words, is not necessarily changing the state.
His transformation began in prison. “The Welikada prison was my second university after Peradeniya.” He read Marxism, literature, philosophy, political theory, novels, the Bible and prison literature; he sat law examinations and wrote poetry. Marxism gave him a language for class, production, exploitation and material suffering.
Prison exposed him to loneliness, emotional pain, guilt, loss and the interior life of people trapped inside an institution designed to deprive them of freedom. “I saw in others and experienced myself the emotional suffering while living in a prison for long years.” A political philosophy that cannot adequately account for the inner life of human beings cannot explain human emancipation completely. That is why his later politics combines individual freedom, social equality, pluralism and collective rights.
His most provocative lesson from revolutionary experience is harder to dismiss. “I learned that violent revolution can overthrow capitalism. But it cannot replace it with a humane society.” Uyangoda’s prison education forced him to ask the more frightening question: what happens after victory? The Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Korean experiences showed that overthrowing exploitation does not automatically abolish domination.
A revolution can destroy one prison and build another. This is where his present interest in the National People’s Power becomes politically explosive. A movement once committed to overthrowing the state is now attempting to govern through elections, Parliament, courts and the constitutional framework. “They are working within the very system they want to change,” he said. “That’s why I am waiting and watching this process with great curiosity and deep concern.” He is watching whether an inherited state can be transformed from within without reproducing the habits of the old order. That is where the real political gamble now begins.
The ethnic question makes the experiment harder. Uyangoda has spent decades arguing that Sri Lanka’s crisis cannot be resolved by changing governments while leaving political power untouched. “Reforming the post-colonial ethnocratic state was the central task and challenge in all our conflict resolution efforts.” He rejects Sinhala Buddhist ownership of the state and insists that equal citizenship must mean more than formal equality. Tamils, Muslims, Malaiyaha Tamils and other communities must have genuine access to power.
Yet he is sceptical of inherited vocabularies. Federalism, self-determination and old constitutional arguments have become so politically poisoned that repeating them can reproduce the divisions they were meant to solve. His preferred language is democratic pluralism: a republic in which identities remain real without becoming permanent political enemies. “Differences should not lead us to divisions. Rather, they should bring all of us together as citizens in a Democratic Republic with diverse identities, not keeping us apart as enemies.”
His treatment of violence is equally unsentimental. Uyangoda refuses to romanticise either side of Sri Lanka’s conflict. He speaks of Tamil civilians suffering violence from the state and from Tamil militant organisations, just as he has never denied the brutality of the revolutionary movement with which he was once associated.
His proposal for reconciliation is “strategic forgetting”: not erasing history, but refusing to allow unresolved memories to dictate every political relationship in the present. Can a society permanently organised around its wounds ever become politically reconciled? He does not ask people to deny what happened. He asks whether memory itself can become a political prison.
This is why his reading of the Aragalaya and the current political moment matters, even where one may disagree with his interpretation. He sees the uprising not as a fashionable youth revolt but as a social movement exposing a rupture between citizens and the old political class. “The challenge today is to re-democratise Sri Lanka’s democracy.” Sri Lankans did not revolt because they had lost faith in democracy; they revolted because the democracy they inherited had become remote from ordinary citizens.
The test now is whether political change can move beyond changing rulers. Uyangoda sees a struggle between an old ruling class and a new political force, almost “like a class war”. But his warning is difficult to ignore: a system designed to protect established power may resist transformation through the very institutions that give it legitimacy. Asked what he would tell his younger self, the man who entered revolutionary politics believing history could be remade through struggle, he answered: “Never abandon political hope for a better society and a better political system. And always be an idealist.”
After revolution, defeat, prison, Marxism, liberalism, ethnic conflict and decades of scholarship, he has arrived not at certainty but at an insistence that political imagination must survive disappointment. For Sri Lanka, that is not a comforting message. It is a challenge to everyone who believes changing governments is the same thing as changing the country.
The ethnic question makes the experiment harder. Uyangoda has spent decades arguing that Sri Lanka’s crisis cannot be resolved by changing governments while leaving political power untouched
The writer is a columnist based in Colombo; Views presented are personal.
