4 min readApr 12, 2022 12:09 PM IST
First published on: Apr 12, 2022 at 12:09 PM IST
Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s address to the nation Monday night was his first direct outreach to the people since the economic crisis triggered crippling food and fuel shortages and engulfed the country in protests.
Prime Minister Rajapaksa also led the country as the President from 2005 to 2014. After five years out of power, he made a powerful comeback, with his brother Gotabaya elected as President in 2019 and his own overwhelming parliamentary victory in 2020.
Here are the main takeaways from Rajapaksa’s speech:
1) He made it plain that the Rajapaksa ruling family is not going to step down just because youngsters are out on the streets demanding they resign. He harked back to his leadership during the military defeat of the LTTE to make the point that he had saved the country from disaster then and was capable of doing so now.
2) By linking the anti-Rajapaksa protests, peaceful so far, to previous violent insurrections in Sri Lanka by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), and Tamil militancy, he tried to paint them as anti-democratic for dissing elected representatives. “A movement was birthed in the North of our country during the 1970s and 1980s by the youth who killed elected people’s representatives on the streets as they protested governance, by declaring their refusal for elections and a Parliament. The ensuing distress affected not only those in the North but also those in the South of Sri Lanka for over 30 years due to that political movement. Tens of thousands paid with their lives as landmines and bullets claimed Sri Lanka’s children. People lost their homes and gradually, schoolchildren began to take to the streets in protest. The next inevitable step was to forcibly conscript school children into this evil war.”
3) Prime Minister Rajapaksa also tried to paint the protests and protesters as anti-national without using the term, by telling them they were hindering the flow of foreign exchange back into the country, and secondly, by alleging that they had dishonoured the country’s war heroes.
4) Rajapaksa said his government “will never take decisions that will undermine the democracy, the country’s governance structure or its Supremacy…In politics, we are accustomed to letting go.” But by referring to the “massive efforts” to enforce the writ of the state against the JVP uprising in southern Sri Lanka and the Tamil insurgency in the North, he appeared to hint that the Government has immense powers at its disposal to take back the Sri Lankan street from the protestors.
5) The only concession in the speech was to farmers, his main political constituency, with a restoration of the fertiliser subsidy. “This government has historically imbued our farmers with the highest relief packages to aid their industry. However, today the farmers stand against us. No matter how honourable the notion of organic fertilizer is, it is not the time for it to be implemented. As such, we will be reinstating the fertilizer subsidy to once again equip our farmers to optimise their craft.”
6) Though the 2019 tax cuts by President Gotabaya shrank government revenue and were the first disastrous step in a chain of events that forced the government to dip into its reserves, Prime Minister Rajapaksa sought to deflect the blame by pointing to the coronavirus pandemic for paralysing the tourism sector and creating the dollar shortage, and the previous government for undoing some of the economic measures that his government had put in place after the war ended in 2010 in the power sector.
A man waves a Sri Lankan national flag as he stands on a barricade blocking the entrance to president's office during a protest in Colombo, Sri Lanka, April 11, 2022. (AP) 
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