Ranil Wickremasinghe elected Sri Lanka’s new President; faces a tough challenge in restoring order

Ranil Wickremesinghe (Image: Reuters)

Bringing an end to months of political instability and street protests by citizens over severe shortages of fuel, food and medicines, the Sri Lankan parliament on Tuesday elected Ranil Wickremasinghe the country’s new President.

"I thank parliament for this honour," the 73-year-old said after his victory was announced by the secretary-general of the legislature. He secured 134 votes in the 225-member house, while his main rival, ruling party lawmaker Dullas Alahapperuma, received 82.

A seasoned politician with a reputation as an able administrator, he was appointed prime minister by former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa before the latter fled Sri Lanka and resigned from the presidency.

Wickremasinghe is a known friend of India and this led some opposition party members in the country to claim that New Delhi was behind his election—a claim denied by India.

The crisis has now brought to the fore serious questions about the massive Chinese investments under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the resultant debt that many countries like Sri Lanka are confronting due to their profligacy and fiscal mismanagement.

At the same time, the critical role played by India in Sri Lanka during the current economic crisis has once again established New Delhi as the most reliable partner in South Asia.

India has traditionally regarded South Asia as its sphere of influence and has acted as the chief security provider for countries in the region. But in recent years it has had serious concerns over China’s growing footprint in Sri Lanka and the construction of projects that hampered India’s interests and ignored its security concerns.

Chinese role, debt trap 

Sino-Sri Lanka relations had flourished since the 2009 ethnic war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) when China became a key weapons supplier for Colombo.

Ties deepened with Chinese investments in Sri Lankan infrastructure including highways, airports, naval ports and townships. This also led to criticism from different quarters that Sri Lanka was getting into a Chinese debt trap—a concern that has now become sharper in the face of the severe economic crisis in the country.

India’s relationship with Sri Lanka soured in 2015 under the Mahinda Rajapaksa presidency when a Chinese submarine and warship were allowed to dock in Colombo port.

A reset in bilateral relations with the Rajapaksas became evident after Gotabaya Rajapaksa became Sri Lanka’s President and chose India as the first country to visit in 2019, which was followed within months by his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa’s four-day visit to the country.

India also responded to the overture when Prime Minister Narendra Modi became the first foreign leader to congratulate Mahinda Rajapaksa after his parliamentary election victory.

Reassurances or rhetoric? 

Subsequently, Sri Lanka announced its “India First Policy”—a reiteration of its commitment not to allow a third country to use its land or waters for anti-Indian activities.

Observers believed that weakened global connectivity in a post-COVID-19 world may have convinced the Rajapaksa brothers of the need to keep a big country like India, which has a track record of being able to assist its neighbours rapidly during crisis times, on its side.

Even so, Colombo’s pronounced tilt towards China under the Rajapaksas led sceptics to see its reassurances more as political rhetoric than a sincere effort to address India’s concerns.

Under Wickremasinghe’s leadership in Colombo, that concern is likely to be addressed better and with more sincerity.

In recent weeks, Wickremasinghe has publicly praised India for standing with the Sri Lankan government and its people as the country dealt with its worst economic crisis since 1948, when it won independence from Britain. But he also reminded Parliament that the US$ 4 billion given by India was not a “charitable donation,” but part of the credit line.

Governance challenge  

Wickremasinghe will face a huge task in restoring order in the country that has been battered in recent weeks by street protests and violence and taking urgent and effective steps to get the economy back on track.

The street protests had begun innocuously in the wake of rising fuel prices and prolonged power cuts in Colombo and other cities. But they snowballed into a political movement within days, forcing resignations of cabinet and ruling party members in Parliament and finally the ouster of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and earlier that of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.

When Gotabaya Rajapaksa became president, he inherited an economy which was already in bad shape. Growth had been at its lowest since 2001.  But the measures he took mostly proved to be counter-productive and worsened the economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown restricting travel to and from the country also played a major part as the $ 4.4 billion tourism industry slumped by more than 70 percent since 2019.

Sri Lanka has a foreign debt of $ 51 billion, but it has defaulted repeatedly and with most of its foreign exchange drained out, it has no money to import fuel and cooking gas.

Wickremasinghe’s past critical remarks against Chinese investment has led some to see him as anti-China. But in his earlier tenure as prime minister, he handed over the Hambantota port in a debt swap to China and also cleared the $ 1.4 billion Colombo port city.

It is likely that the new President will continue to maintain a cordial, working relationship with China. But he is likely to be much more sensitive to India’s concerns and desists from doing anything that can jeopardize Indo-Sri Lanka relations.