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Before you study the economics, study the economists!”

e-Con e-News 04-10 May 2025

The French warship Beautemps-Beaupré has just barged into Colombo – so far from gay Paree and le port de Marseille. And while India (using French & US weaponry) and Pakistan (using US, Chinese & Swedish materiel) indulge in target practice on live civilians and others, Sri Lanka’s government has bravely declared it shall not allow the country to be used as a base in regional or global wars. Yet, as noble declarations go, the JVP-led NPP government’s recent dramatic pivot towards India, contradicts the JVP leader’s previous pronouncements, that such military pacts (as newly signed with India) would cripple our ‘freedom to freely move our hands & legs’!

     This is Sri Lanka’s first such agreement with a foreign power since the Anglo-Ceylonese Defence Agreement signed with England, due to post-1947 fears of Indian invasion, with the English clinging on to Trincomalee and Katunayake. The JVP has always viewed India as a ‘sub-imperialist’ power. With the threat of such a pact dragging us into the USA-led Quad’s warmongering against China, Rathindra Kuruwita suggests it would have been far wiser for Sri Lanka to push for a regional security agreement ‘instead of signing a security pact that makes the country seem like a satrapy of India‘. Also, a trilateral MoU with India, Sri Lanka & United Arab Emirates (UAE) to ‘develop’ Trincomalee into an ‘Energy Hub’, involves the English-built oil tank farm, now partially run by state-owned Indian Oil Corporation (IOC). ‘The English Raj considered a foothold in Trincomalee harbor vital for Indian defence, a doctrine that the Indian republic has inherited.’

     The JVP ‘risks becoming the very thing it once rose up against; a facilitator of foreign entrenchment on Sri Lankan soil’ (see ee Focus), Meanwhile, the recent local elections saw the People’s Struggle Alliance, which includes JVP-breakaway Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) which vehemently opposes the Indian pact, secure 16 seats for the first time: Kegalle, Baddegama, Karandeniya, Kalutara, Karuwalagaswewa, Seruwila, Uva-Paranagama, Nuwara Eliya, Hingurakgoda, Ibbagamuwa, Matugama, Walallawita, Ukuwela, Raththota, Kegalle, and Aranayaka Pradeshiya Sabhas.

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• The untimely demise of a young University professor, and an outpouring of grief in social media & news columns, provides an opening for an intriguing investigation into the birthing and nurturing of an anti-jathikathva (anti-national) gang of scholars. The US Embassy’s troll farms and message-multiplier bots had started to ‘trend’ these so-called ‘intellectuals’ during the 2^nd term of President Mahinda Rajapakse, 2010-15, soon after the terrorist war ended in 2009. Visakha Dharmahewa & Aravi Hettiarachchi (D&H) in ‘The Anti-National Deliberation Front’ (see ee Focus), call it a concerted coup by the imperialist countries ‘to co-opt emerging Sinhala thinkers against Sinhala nationalists’, to ridicule the role of Anagarika Dharmapala (exiled), Kumaratunga Munidasa (defamed), and SWRD Bandaranaike (assassinated), and also Gunadasa Amarasekara, Nalin de Silva, Susantha Goonetilleke, etc.

     D&H also name the latest batch of young recruits funded by the US State Department. D&H however fail to note the corollary funding of anti-Marxist-Leninist ideologies among certain Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist organizations that stretches back to the 1950s and even before. Though D&H perceptively link, how US Colonel Henry Olcott & his theosophist gang, sought to mystify rather than enhance the science of Sinhala Buddhism. Olcott set the foundation for Dharmapala’s eventual isolation, hounding and exile. Latter-day Olcottians have sought to deny any link between scientific socialism and Buddhism. Yet there are connexions aplenty. Nonetheless D&H’s efforts are pathbreaking for they not only name the poseurs & fake scholars, but also go on to describe the role played by foreign funders, such as Germany, of NGOs that have led to the proliferation of IMF-linked economists, and such centres for so-called poverty alleviation and not poverty elimination – alternatives that oppose any alteration by the ‘natives’, and only promote colonial has-beens and further splintering prescriptions.

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• ee recalls those who opposed the English slicing up of India and the carving out of Pakistan. & recall those prophesies that ‘Partition’ would simply continue the warmongering for the next 100 years. ee would also like to footnote that it was Canada that so helpfully provided uranium to both India and Pakistan to enable their nuclear weapons programs. And now all of them, Canada & the US included, salivate to slice & quarter & dismember, if not annihilate, Sri Lanka as well. Meanwhile, US President Trump kindly reminds us that India and Pakistan (created in 14 August 1947) have been fighting ‘for centuries’. He resounds a good old colonial scripture that our purported differences are primordial and unending, needing the great white father in London or Washington to gather us tendentious natives into his folds…

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• A deadly threat, is how Development Banks (DBs) have always been seen, by the World Bank, IMF and their imperialist sponsors. Any attempt at a real DB has always inspired equally deadly countermeasures: expulsions of cabinet ministers, assassination of a PM, coups, terrorism, etc, subverting the Development Finance Corporation of Ceylon (DFCC) & National Development Bank (NDB), that are now just money lenders to merchants. The prolix Ahilan Kadirigamar, who is now a director of the People’s Bank, suggests the NPP Government ‘is working towards setting up a development bank’, through the National Credit Guarantee Institution (NCGI).

     The International Monetary Fund (IMF)-led Structural Adjustment Program, post-1977, ‘drastically changed the structure of our economy with increasing privatisation‘. Kadirgamar grew ‘fascinated by the history of the Japan Development Bank (JDB), and its role in ‘the post-war economic development of Japan’. It inspired his leadership in developing the Northern Co-operative Development Bank (NCDB), a federation of about 1,200 co-operative societies in the Northern Province. Yet there is no mention of any investment in modern machine-making industrialization (the real definition of Karl Marx’s modern capitalism) nor of the role of Jaffna’s dollar (as opposed to the South’s rupee) diaspora, but he provides interesting insight into the history of such banks (see ee Focus).

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• No bodies embody the ‘expatriate’ joie de vivre more than the airs of white denizens at English literary festivals in Galle or Colombo, and the Sri Lankan ‘fliterati’ who seek to mimic them, led by the Borah business memsahib. Such gravitas and profundity they perform. You can see them in their shorts or see-through flimsy cottons, harem pants or salwar khameez, if they have any pale skin or parts half-decent to flaunt – tho most times not – lounging, with AC on at its most comforting adjustments, or fans lazily awhirl, white porcelain cups of steaming tea or coffee sitting untouched before them, apparently squandering money, as the Sinhala saying goes, ‘spending like a white man’. However, SBD de Silva concludes that it is actually a stereotype of the white man (who was more parsimonious than the browner leftovers who now front for them) who have actually dominated Sri Lanka’s economy, and are yet very much different from the white settler-colonials & the genocidal settlers who dominated in other parts of the world, and invested in the modern industrialization of their ‘responsible’ dominions (ee Focus).

     ee therefore continues SBD de Silva‘s brilliant exposition of the growth of Sri Lanka’s Import-Export Mafia, excerpting Chapter 4 of his classic, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. De Silva shows how England has actively prevented industrialization in our countries to this day, while promoting industrialization in other countries. What is amazing is de Silva rarely mentions Sri Lanka in this chapter but looks for antecedents in Africa (both ‘Sub-Sahara’ & ‘Mahgreb’) and the different roles played by white ‘expatriates’ & ‘settlers’ and darker ‘natives’ in the economy, especially in the mixed ‘Settler-Colonies’ of Zimbabwe, Kenya, Congo, and South Africa, as well as Algeria, etc.

     The white settlers not only tried to manage the economy ‘independently’ from London & Paris, etc, but they even militarily fought them, whereas the English preferred to hand over our countries to ‘elite’ but totally idiotic native satraps who would continue the import-export plantation fakery. Whereas our pampered economists claim that the divide is between free trade & protection, SBD details the strategic application & removal of tariffs to protect industries, depending on their maturity. Settler governments deployed customs tariffs to ‘promote domestic production rather than as a source of public revenue’.  England also chose ‘free trade’ only after it ‘ruled the waves’ and its economy had been advanced beyond agriculture, to industry.

     De Silva details how ‘settler agriculture’ which involved ‘prolonged experimentation and research… generated both a European bourgeoisie and a proletariat’, whereas in Sri Lanka the English sought to impoverish peasant production, and promote outdated social relations, which we would have moulted along the way if left to ourselves. ‘The production structures which emerged in the settler colonies had elements of a development policy‘, whereas ‘development‘ in Sri Lanka became a synonym for continued colonial depredation. Imported technologies, roads & railways, etc, then deliberately undermined peasant production. SBD’s fascinating glimpse into the sabotaging of industrialization in Sri Lanka and other nonsettler colonies, exposes a deeply damaging historical process of divide&rule – which prevails to this day, with our policy makers & policy implementers, policy executors & policy enforcers, policy operators or policy administrators, all deaf, dumb, blind & disabled to the real meaning of the need for modern machine-making industrialization.

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• With local elections finally over, after a 7-year hiatus, and the usual whining about ‘election spending’, ee continues the raucous peek into the antics of the early-1800s New York’s Tammany Society – a secret body, that operated the more open Tammany Hall political vote machine. This adaptation from Gustave Myers’ 1917 History of Tammany Hall, suggests that much of the chicanery involved in elections was not just an inheritance from England but involved ‘creative’ innovations. Decisions were made not just by verbal resolutions but by fist & boot. While setting up organizations to oppose banks, they actively promoted their own banks that defrauded people. He shows how candidates were first decided by bankers on Wall Street, with politicians bribed by shares in bank stock, just as opponents were made bankrupt and jailed, and how bankers were taxed less than workers. Any attempts by workers to organize unions were punished and jailed, while enabling ‘the countless combinations of aristocracy; boards of bank & other chartered directories; boards of brokers; boards of trade & commerce; combinations of landlords; coal & wood dealers; monopolists and all those who grasp at everything & produce nothing‘.  However, Myers makes no reference to their views on the ‘peculiar’ institution of chattel slavery, or of the genocidal wars on the original people taking place during those decades.

Welcome then to another edition of ee and a glorious Vesak to you, dear readers. May the light of the new moon and our historical & collective intelligence, resistance & resolve, shine brighter, and show us the way forward…

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Contents:

Expats Vs Settlers Vs Natives: How Imperialism Sabotages Modernization in Sri Lanka