International Day of Democracy 2023 Re-Imagining Democracy in Sri Lanka:
During the Aragalaya of 2022 the ordinary people, citizens without wealth or power rose up demanding substantive democratic reforms. The ordinary citizens in their capacity as demos began make claims to their ownership democracy. They also highlighted that democracy in general and representative democracy in particular were in a deep crisis. It was indeed an attempt by the people-demos to regenerate as well as re-invent democracy. That’s why the citizens’ protest in 2022 deserves to be acknowledged as a significant turning point in the somewhat twisted process of democratisation in Sri Lanka.
The events of 2022 provided new perspectives and critical insights immensely useful to our own work on democracy and democratisation. It showed that ordinary people play a powerful role as an agency for democratisation. Their faith in democracy is far greater than that the elites who exploit democracy for predatory ends.
What is happening to democracy at present, Sri Lankan democracy seems to have entered a new phase of forced retreat, engineered by the new ruling coalition. People who have yearned for the revival of democracy find themselves caught up in a new version of democratisation trap. Its key features has been the incorporation of ordinary citizens as disempowered voters to a deceitful social contract crafted by the political elites. As the citizens’ protest 2022 and this year have shown, that deceitful social contract is now shattered. Citizens want to replace it with a deeply democratic and authentic social contract.
Meanwhile, there seems to be two processes of polarisation of society into two hostile camps. The first is between the haves and have nots in the economic and social sense. The second is growing enmity between the majority of the citizens who crave for more democracy and minority of the elites who thrive on no democracy. The ways in which these polarities and contradictions will play themselves out are sure to shape the nature of politics in the months and years to come. Returning to open democracy, more executive, legislative and judicial accountability re-democratisation of the constitution, the state, the government and parliament guaranteeing of economic and social justice to the poor, the working people and middle classes are essential preconditions for resolving these contradictions peacefully with no resources to violence by any side.
