The distance between the political elite and everybody remains the biggest mystery

20 February 2018 | Colombo, Sri Lanka 

By Prof. Jonathan Spencer

Prof. Jonathan Spencer

“The biggest failure of post-colonial Sri Lankan politics is the continued structural distance between the political elite and everybody else” Prof. Jonathan Spencer quoted James Manor, in his presentation at Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS), Colombo, titled ‘Sri Lanka: Forty Years of Change and Crisis’, held on 20^th February at RCSS. RCSS invited Prof. Spencer to share his insights on the political crisis of the post-colonial Sri Lanka as the second presentation of the In-house Discussion Series in 2018.

Prof. Jonathan Spencer is Regius Professor of South Asian Language, Culture and Society at School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh, the United Kingdom. Prof. Spencer has carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka since the early 1980s, concentrating at first on rural change and local politics, but writing more recently on ethnic conflict, political violence and political non-violence. He is currently working on the fraught boundary between the religious and the political in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, the history of dissent in Sri Lanka, and the consequences of forced dislocation for poor communities in cities in Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Prof. Spencer began his presentation by locating his intellectual development and his research on Sri Lanka in a broader Sri Lankan political context. For instance, he had just completed his undergraduate studies in 1978, the year a new constitution was introduced to Sri Lanka. During his first stay in Sri Lanka between 1981 and 1983, he witnessed how elements involved in the 1982 Presidential election reappeared in 1983 Black July. Then he observed the calamity between 1987 and 1989 from Europe. Since 1991, he made several visits to Sri Lanka watched the rise of Chandrika Bandaranaike in 1994. Since 2005, his multiple visits every year saw the rise and decline of President Rajapaksa.

By elaborating this interesting overlap between his intellectual development and the developments in Sri Lankan politics, he moved on to discuss few structural problems of the Sri Lankan political body, taking his cue from an early article by James Manor. Manor argued in 1979 that the biggest failure of Sri Lankan politics is the distance between the political elites and common people. All the other aspects, including the ethnic cleavages, are secondary to this structural failure. There are two particular phenomena that Manor pointed out. One is the weak local democratic institutions. The other is the weak internal party structures. 

Expanding on the latter, Manor’s observation here is that there is no a democratic path for a common person in political parties to elevate his position to the leadership level. The obvious exception in this regard is R. Premadasa who fought his way into the elite from outside. The 1980s JVP and the LTTE could both be seen as political movements which directly, but unsuccessfully challenged continuing dominance of the same political elite.

Finally, Prof. Spencer pointed out that both the JVP and LTTE in the 1980s drew on the widespread commitment, especially amongst young people, to the idea of capturing state power by violence. The almost complete disappearance of that idea is perhaps the biggest change between the 1980s and the present.





External LInks

Prof. Jonathan Spencer on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Spence

Prof. Jonathan Spencer on Global Development Academy - https://www.ed.ac.uk/global-development/about/staff/jonathan-spencer