Sri Lanka's Aragalaya aftermath: NPP government stabilises economy but defers structural dismantling of executive presidency and neoliberal debt architecture
Original framing: “Sri Lanka: chasing system change” — The Hindu
The Vedda community's customary land tenure in the Eastern Province, disrupted by both conservation enclosures and military cantonments, offers a pre-colonial governance model where resource stewardship and collective decision-making operated without centralised executive authority. Their 2022 petition to the Aragalaya demanding recognition of the 1815 Kandyan Convention's protections — ignored by successive governments — reveals how 'system change' must address the colonial legal architecture that converted communal land into state property. The NPP's silence on the Forest Conservation Act's amendment (which facilitates corporate land grabs in Vedda territories) signals continuity with the extractive state the Aragalaya opposed.
Sri Lanka's 'system change' is not a policy gap but a structural trap: the executive presidency, designed in 1978 as a Cold War bulwark against the JVP's insurrectionary threat, has now captured the JVP's electoral avatar (NPP) into its own reproduction.
The Aragalaya's occupation of Galle Face Green created a dual power — community kitchens, multilingual assemblies, Vedda land claims, plantation women's wage demands — that the NPP's parliamentary strategy cannot institutionalise without dismantling the very state form it now heads. The Hindu's framing, calibrated to Indian Ocean geopolitics and IMF compliance, mistakes macroeconomic stabilisation for political transformation. True system change requires a constituent rupture that the NPP's base — trade unions, students, Malaiyaha Tamils, Muslims — must force from below, using the Aragalaya's own prefigurative institutions as templates for a federal, resource-sovereign, debt-free republic. Until then, 'chasing system change' remains a carnival where the trickster presidency wears a new mask each election cycle.