The Aragalaya: A sceptic's notes

• Published date: 09 August 2022
• Publication title: Daily Financial Times

There is a widespread view that the Aragalaya is utterly exceptional, not just in terms of its outcomes but also in how it was constituted. For instance, speaking at a Teach Out session - a series of independently organised short lectures that took place on the sidelines of the main protest - the historian Shamara Wettimuny framed the uniqueness of the Aragalaya in terms of the breadth of solidarities it assembled.

Before I unpack Wettimuny's specific claims, it is worth recognising, first, that one can always find a combination of axes for every event such that it is novel along those axes. For instance, the fact that the Aragalaya is the first and only protest to have established the Gota Go Gama village at the Galle Face Green, on 10 April, 2022, makes it utterly unique on that count alone. Given that every event is exceptional with respect to some combination of features, no event really is. Second, novel events are not always nice: indeed, the very novelty of many historic moments is entirely rooted in their evil.

Third, there is a tendency amongst Sri Lankans to superficially count themselves as an exceptional people and I view the exceptionalist claims about the Aragalaya as a symptom of the same malady. Allow me to digress to a relevant anecdote. I was recently at a gathering where a senior Sri Lankan career diplomat lectured for half-a-dozen minutes on the theme of Sri Lankan exceptionalism. I could not reconcile the claims of how smart, great, and wonderful we are against the distressing reality of our elderly dropping dead in fuel queues. At the end, I remarked that it is precisely such exceptional Sri Lankan thinking that left us with Dhammikka Paniya as the COVID-19 cure.

More to the point on Wettimuny's analysis. She says what sets the latest protest moment apart from the past is that all four key drivers of protests - identity, ideology, interest groups and issues - coalesced to drive change. In past protests, by contrast, only a subset of these were present. According to Wettimuny, past instances of civil resistance, particularly in the colonial period, only brought the immediately affected parties to the street. They 'remained confined to ethnic, religious, class, caste, or gender-based lines'. The Aragalaya, on the other hand, appeared to have 'overcome those divisions and have a stab at unity'.

While I do not doubt her grasp of history, the underlying cause of such exceptional solidarity appears rather trivial to me. Is it possible that...