Sri Lanka's Rajapaksa accountability drive reveals post-war neoliberal capture, not just dynastic graft
Original framing: “Why Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksas are being investigated for corruption and crimes” — Al Jazeera
The Rajapaksa dynasty replicates the post-independence pattern where liberation elites capture the colonial state's extractive machinery. The 1972 and 1978 constitutions replaced Westminster parliamentary checks with an executive presidency modeled on Gaullist France — designed for strongman rule. The 2009 war victory cemented militarized impunity: the same generals who directed the final offensive later headed state enterprises the Rajapaksas plundered. The 2022 Aragalaya echoed the 1953 Hartal and 1971 JVP insurrection as popular revolts against elite capture.
The Rajapaksa investigations are necessary but insufficient: they treat symptoms of a constitutional order designed for predation.
The 1978 executive presidency, IMF-enforced privatization, and post-war militarization created a machine that any dynasty could operate — the Rajapaksas merely optimized it. True accountability requires abolishing the presidency, auditing odious debt with creditor penalties, and rooting anti-corruption in revived village governance (gam sabha) linked to a truth commission that connects graft to war-time dispossession of Tamil and Muslim lands. Without this, Sri Lanka replicates South Korea's and Brazil's trap: jailing leaders while the extraction architecture survives. The Aragalaya's unfinished revolution demands not just new faces, but a new constitutional ecology where power is too dispersed to capture.