Courtesy The Daily Mirror

Last week, Veteran journalist D.B.S. Jeyaraj, writing the first of a two-part article on Mahinda Rajapaksa turning 80, aptly surmised the protagonist as ‘demonised by the opponents and deified by supporters’. While I am not particularly interested in the birthdays of politicians, this made me ponder Mahinda Rajapaksa’s legacy in Sri Lankan politics. That was also in relation to a recent debate on social media about the most successful Sri Lankan president, for which the analyst in question had, funny enough, picked Chandrika Kumaratunga. CBK was indeed a grandiloquent and callous failure: Twenty thousand soldiers, more than two-thirds of the total military death toll of the 30 years of war, perished during the first five years of her term. The army lost all major military garrisons, including Mullaitivu and Elephant Pass, and Jaffna was saved by a miracle. 

I am not a fan of Mahinda Rajapaksa. However, political preferences or differences should not obscure objective assessment. What should be the common-sense measure to gauge the performance of a Sri Lankan leader? For the second part of independence (post-1980), it was the economy, and, probably more importantly, fighting the war. In retrospect, we know that there was no solution to what was primarily a terrorist problem other than a military solution.

For the first part of independence, it was also the economic growth and addressing the emerging ethnic problem through accommodation,  as well as through the forceful implementation of  ethnic management, similar to that in Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew  or  Malaysia under Mahathir Mohammed era.

Sri Lankan political leaders of all generations have failed in these dual tasks. The first half of independence had two types of leaders: Those who rode the gravy train when the time was good and those who rode it down the precipice. The first group primarily included UNP leaders, who did little to damage the economy. Yet, they lacked the vision and conviction to undertake far-reaching economic reforms, as did their counterparts in East Asia. The second group, the Bandaranaikes and assorted leftists, wrecked the economy every time they were in power, and some pundits are still defending those ruinous economic policies.  

The second group of post-80s is equally hopeless. J.R. Jayawardene was the first leader to have solved the puzzle of economic development and introduced an open economy. However, his mismanagement of Black July, dictatorial rule, and egoistic follies,including offending India, unleashed hell, robbing the country of its economic momentum under free market economic policies. It also trapped the country in a three-decade civil war. The leaders who succeeded him were captives of J.R. Jayawardene’s sinister making. Without Ranjan Wijeratne, Sri Lanka could have risked a Khmer Rouge-style state capture. 

However, the northern conflict would continue to plague the nation for the next 25 years. That effectively constrained the freedom of action of a succession of leaders. However, we don’t measure performance based on hypothetical scenarios of how they could have performed, had there been nosystemic constraints. Instead, we gauge their performance based on how they performed within those constraints and how they tried to overcome them. That effectively makes almost all of them unworthy of assessment – until the advent of Mahinda Rajapaksa. Excelling in one count would have made one stand out from the rest. However, MR actually succeeded in both. 

The economy grew at an annual 6.5% during his two terms ( 2005-2014), and he ended the war through classic military annihilation of the LTTE. Anyone who had watched the evolution of war in the past decade and a half and the rapid military sophistication the LTTE achieved during the second half of 90s would recoil at the thought of the fate of the nation had the war dragged on for another decade.The Rajapaksa growth model of state-led infrastructure drive funded by foreign loans is often criticised. However, such criticism often overlooks that Sri Lanka, which many tourists now laud for its quality of road infrastructure, also suffered a major infrastructure deficit not long ago — as it still does in many parts of the country.   Without the much-criticised highways, Sri Lanka’s growth story is a nonstarter. There are concerns that the Rajapaksas paid an inflated price for these roads and flyovers. However, considering the new pricing of the Central Expressway, which has almost doubled its original estimates, one should question the cost of delay. Also, local pundits may not be the best cost accountants: They held up the Japanese-funded second terminal of the Katunayake airport for the whole duration of Yahapalanaya, citing alleged price overestimates by the Japanese.

Decline of tax revenue

The other concern with the Rajapaksa economic model was the gradual decline in government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP,which fell from 14 percent in 2005 to 10 percent in 2014. Another concern was the stagnation of the export basket anda declining share of exports in GDP. The decline and stagnation, however, began with Chandrika Kumaratunga and Rajapaksa, with the ingrained cronyism of his rule, which he did not seek to fix. Others have blamed him for the sovereign default, which is far from the truth. Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange crisis was a product ofcommercial borrowing ( ISBs),  the large chunk of which was purchased by the Yahapalanya to make up for the budget deficit, having increased government sector salaries by Rs 10,000 a month, eying Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency in 2020. Blaming Chinese loans for the sovereign default is a crudely concealed geopolitical dog whistle lacking substance. There are also concerns over human rights, and his failure to utilise the political capital gained from winning the war to liberalise the economy. However, we are not talking about optimal leaders, but the only one who had achieved substantially, albeit with his other failings, amidst a cohort of men and a single woman, who were mere passengers.

Mahinda Rajapaksa is by far the most successful Sri Lankan leader. His positive contribution outweighs his failings. He is the closest Sri Lanka has to a leader of the calibre of Mahathir Mohammed, another leader who is both loved and hated – except that Mahathir ruled for 22 years, while Mahinda Rajapaksa did so for barely ten years. His political greed and tendency to manipulate the election timetable cost Rajapaksa two years of his rule. It was a shame that his successors could not follow through on the economic momentum, though some might claim it was already faltering by the end of his term.

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