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[Extract from a lecture delivered at a forum on Challenges to Democracy and National Sovereignty, Cinnamon Lakeside, Colombo, October 14, 2026]
The threats to democracy and national sovereignty that Sri Lanka faces today have an aspect of uniqueness. We have faced threats to democracy before from governments and from anti-government forces including the one that is now currently in government. We’ve faced threats to national sovereignty as well.
But there is something very new and very dangerous this time.
We’ve had threats to democracy coming from governments before, such as:
· The thousand-day emergency under the United National Party government of Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake.
· The government of Madame Sirima Bandaranaike, the LSSP and CPSL which extended its mandate, its term of office by two years by introducing a new constitution;
· The referendum by President Jayawardene in December 1982 having won the October ’82 presidential election.
We also faced several civil wars; two in the south one in the north. Thus, we’ve had threats from outside and from inside the system.
The threats to democracy before came from democratic parties which were transparent. Those threats were deviations from their democratic tradition. But the threat to democracy now comes from the ruling party which is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Not because it has a leftist heritage, but because it was and remains a completely opaque party.
When there’s a Congress or Central Committee Plenary of the Communist Party of China the whole world sees it on television. I have yet to see any photographs or any kind public reportage of a meeting of the Central Committee or Congress of the JVP. It is an opaque party, a cadre-based party, tight, closed, monolithic, which despite its being in office by democratic means has not undergone a transformation that brings it in line, certainly not with other democratic left parties in Latin America.
It’s to do with the type and nature of the animal . It’s a closed party. You don’t know who the members are. You don’t know who’s who in that party– and that is not true of almost any other party in the world.
This is the first time that there has been a threat to democracy in Sri Lanka, from a party that is not transparent, not internally democratic, and is not accountable to the public. You don’t know what the processes are, who made the decisions, what are the discussions, what are the decisions. It’s a very secretive party, very covert.
One of the three tiers of Sri Lanka’s democratic state, the intermediate tier, is that of the Provincial Council system. The intermediate tier came about as a result of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 but the concept goes back to the time of SWRD Bandaranaike and the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957.
Today not only are there no elections to that tier but we have not even been told of a deadline for the parliamentary committee deliberating on the provincial council system to submit its final report. The problem is a simple one. There have been many proposals as to how that could be resolved and one of those proposals is a strictly one-time only election under the old system while the search goes on in parliament for an improved or combined system.
There’s no deadline for holding the long-delayed election. It’s open-ended and the people all over the country, not only in the north and east, have been disenfranchised in that important intermediate tier. There were elections to provincial councils, and at every level despite the war. When the East was liberated President Mahinda Rajapaksa held elections to the Eastern Provincial Council expeditiously.
The disenfranchisement of the citizen-voter at a vital structural level of the Sri Lankan democratic State, is new.
Apart from the committee to design an electoral system for the provincial councils, there’s another committee chaired by the Minister of Local Government to examine the electoral system of the country as a whole. The official statement says that it is to bring the electoral system into line with ‘the new political culture’.
A whole new electoral system means long deliberation about proportional representation versus first-past-the post. If it’s a mix what is the ratio of the mix? What of re-delimitation/re-demarcation?
What if you’re told by the two/thirds majority in the House, that until this perfect electoral system is designed, we are not going to have elections? After all, that’s what they’re telling us about the provincial council elections– no elections until the electoral system is reformed.
The new PSTA legislation which is successor to the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1979 (PTA), the Organized Crime bill, the bill about NGOs, expands the remit of what is criminalized. We are seeing an attempt to shut the system up, to shut down the democratic space, the space for free expression.
This signals a conscious process of trying to transform the democracy that we have had and valued, into something else that isn’t democratic.
What is democracy? Democracy is a system in which the people –and ours is a democratic republic where the people are sovereign– decide freely at regular competitive elections on who rules them. We decide, we determine—that’s democracy.
This brings me to national sovereignty. What is national sovereignty? National sovereignty is the concept, the notion, that those of us who are citizens of a country have the ultimate power of deciding the destiny of the country.
Democracy and sovereignty are all about who decides . It’s not one party or one leader or one General-Secretary. It’s the people; the citizens.
This is nothing to do with leftism or rightism This is a system of control. You can’t expect a party which is opaque and undemocratic to sustain a democratic system. There have been public statements envisaging a long period of ruling party entrenchment, even for decades.
The problem is not that the JVP is a capitalist party. I’m glad it’s not an anti-capitalist party any more. But in terms of economic policy there’s very little space to the right of the government.
What we really talking about is referred to in the literature by various terms such as absolutism, totalitarianism, autocracy, dictatorship.
The ultra-capitalist economic model this government is creating is one of the reasons that laws are being brought which will stifle the opportunities for trade unions, and expressions of dissent more generally.
One hears it said by some people from the corporate sector: “These guys are doing well with the economy, so why do you need democracy?”
You need democracy because it’s a system of feedback loops and if you don’t have those feedback loops you will not know what is happening until it blows up in your face. And blow up it will, because the unprecedented percentage of poverty, malnutrition and ‘multidimensional vulnerability’ in Sri Lanka.
If you don’t have the provincial council system you will return to more radical extremist, ultranationalist demands in the North and East. The provincial council system was the result of that war and if that system had existed from the 1957 Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact, you wouldn’t have had a war. Without elected Provincial Councils, one doesn’t know what’s going to happen down the line.
We came out of a 30-years war because finally the people used democracy to bring a leader who won the war. Without democracy we wouldn’t have been able to do it. So, even to defend the nation , you need democracy .
Currently you have a government and a president who has signed who knows how many agreements with our giant neighbour India and refuses to disclose the contents. The same party set the country on fire because the Indo-Lanka Accord. Whatever you think of it, the contents of that Accord were known, transparent, and after the signing there was a packed press conference addressed by JR Jayewardene and Rajiv Gandhi. The party which set the country ablaze against that degree of transparency is now refusing to say what was signed on the 2025 visit of President Dissanayake to India. Never has this country’s leadership treated national sovereignty with such scant disregard.
The ruling JVP-NPP has bought insurance for its creeping dictatorship by allowing any foreign power or enterprise to grab anything they want. This is the Myanmar model. The Myanmar military junta is accommodated by India, Russia, China –and through India, the USA. The US doesn’t say anything about the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected democratic leader is in detention and that young people have been massacred. Those educated young people who have survived have gone and formed guerrilla movements.
Why are the Big Powers okay with the junta? Because the junta has given them open access to the rich natural resources and minerals of Myanmar/Burma to anybody who wants them. Each great power doesn’t want the other great power to have the sole advantage. So, India doesn’t want China being the power with the advantage in Myanmar, and therefore through the Indian connection the Americans have also been neutralized.
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The 2026 US midterm elections may have been the most globally watched American elections. The results have exceeded all expectations in America and in the world. The vote is a resounding slap to the American President, louder than the defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary or that of Aleksander Vucic in Serbia. While Orban and Vucic were able to manipulate their political systems and stay in power for well over a decade, the US system has seen to it that Trump will be kept within his term limits. Yet the same system allows Trump to continue in office for two more hectic years. In a parliamentary system, Trump would have had to leave the White House the day after the vote. In any event, he will be gone in two years. What will happen till then is predictably unpredictable like the man himself.
How it matters for the rest of the world is reflected in the comment made by Austria’s Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger: “independent of the elections outcome, our security and prosperity in Austria and Europe must not depend on how people in Kansas or Iowa vote.” More than American voters, it may be Trump and Elon Musk who determine the security limits of America’s allies in Europe, through the satellite-based Starshield weapon system that Musk’s Space X company creates and supplies to the US government.
Around mid-October, allegedly at Trump’s behest, Musk is said to have remotely restricted Ukraine’s battlefield use of Starshield that Ukraine receives from the US government. According to Ukraine, the restriction that was done without notice weakened its capacity to ward off Russian drones. The news alarmed NATO allies and created a storm in Washington. Both Republican and Democrat lawmakers have been calling for investigation and accountability. The midterm results are a big impetus to kickstarting such an investigation.
There will be other investigations into the carnival of corruption that the Trump’s presidency has become in its second term. Musk himself will likely be subjected to intense scrutiny. His brutal approach to downsizing government and slashing USAID overseas will be one area that will be investigated. Another would be to find out how Musk’s businesses have benefited from laxed regulations and easy permits at the federal and state levels of government in the last two years.
Hoping to forestall Congress investigations, Musk bankrolled nearly half a billion dollars to protect his Republican guardians in Congress and in State governments. His gamble to control the course of politics has spectacularly backfired. Now it is up to Congress with its new electees to show that they can hold to account America’s powerful and the wealthiest, without burning itself in the process.
The midterm’s implications for the Iran war and its continuing economic havocs are not clear. There have been mixed reports on Trump’s intentions. One report is that a deal with Iran was 80% ready for signing before the midterm. According to another, Trump had advised Gulf States that he will resume a new round of attacks on Iran after the midterm. The midterm results have strengthened the opposition to the war among Republicans in Washington, with Vice President JD Vance, the consummate chameleon of contemporary American politics, squarely blaming the war for the Republican defeat. Not without the quiet concurrence of his boss.
Congress Republicans are also riling up to impeach Pete Hegseth, Trump’s handpicked and self-named Secretary of War, likely for incompetence and potential war crimes. Unless Hegseth resigns soon, the present House Republicans want him impeached before the end of the year and steal a political march on the new Congress led by Democrats that will take over in January. All of this puts President Trump in a bind and will force him to take a diplomatic route to end the war. For the rest of the world and for all Americans, the end of the war and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz cannot come any sooner. To their credit, American voters have made it clear that they do not want a resumption of attacks in the Middle East.
The midterm results are revelatory at multiple levels. They show American electoral democracy at work, in a country of 350 million people, synthesizing myriads of local variations and conflicts of age, gender, race, religion, education, employment and income into representational outcomes at the State and national levels. The spread and depth of electoral losses came as a shock to Republicans who were resigned to getting the usual midterm knuckle-rap against an incumbent president. Equally shocked are Democrats, not only by their majority margins in the House and in the Senate but also by their victories in States and Districts that they have not won in 30 to 100 years. Even where they lost, Democrats were only inches away, in American Football parlance, from scoring more touchdowns.
At the aggregate level, Democrats have outperformed to historic proportions, reaching the largest popular vote, and the largest House and Senate majorities, since the first post-Watergate election in 1974. Pundits are calling Trump’s midterm punishment as another watershed moment like the Watergate. The vote total for the House elections in all the States corresponds to 400 (out of 538) Electoral College votes in a hypothetical presidential election. The scale of defeat has stopped Trump from making baseless allegations about stolen elections and fraudulent voting. The magnitude of victory presents a new challenge to Democrats as they have to demonstrate to a restive electorate how different and better they will be in comparison to Trump’s Republicans.
Democrats have 215 seats and Republicans 220 seats in the current Congress and had to capture three Republican seats for a bare minimum majority of 218 (out of 435) seats in the next Congress. The tally now is Democrats 253 and Republicans 157, with 25 seats yet to be decided. So far, Democrats have flipped 43 Republican held seats. In the current Senate, there are 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats. With Senate elections held every two years for a third of the Senators every two years, Senate elections were held in 35 States, and Democrats had to win four new Senate seats for a majority of 51. They have captured seven so far, while prevailing in all the 13 States they now hold. The Senate tally is 54 Democrats and 44 Republicans with Alaska and Mississippi yet to be called. Democrats are leading in both and will likely have a comfortable majority of 56 Senators.
In both the House and Senate victories, Democrats made extensive inroads into hitherto Republican territories. Trump had won six of the seven flipped States in his three presidential runs in 2016, 2020 and 2024: Iowa and Ohio in the Midwest; and Kansas, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina in the South. Democrats have not won statewide election since 1988 in Texas, and not since 1932 in Kansas. In addition to the House and the Senate, Democrats have also won a majority of the Governors’ elections in individual States along with elections to the State legislative bodies and local agencies.
Trump won the 2024 presidential election by attracting young male voters in very large numbers and significantly increasing the traditionally low Republican shares of white working class as well as Black and Latino voters. He won them over by vehemently promising to lower prices and make life affordable again; to take control of immigration and the borders; and to end the wars in Gaza and in Ukraine. Nothing has gone according Trump’s promises or plan, and the midterm results are comeuppance.
His Liberation Day tariffs have taken a toll on American consumers and caused trade precarities for the rest of the world. The war in Iran which he started on a whim has led to price increases in fuel and fertilizers everywhere, and they have hit rural Republican Americans harder than others in America. No one liked the violent crackdown on immigrants, especially Latin Americans who voted for him heavily in 2024. The indiscriminate apprehension of immigrants has created labour shortages in businesses, particularly in the construction industry. Americans across the board finally got disgusted with the level of corruption in the Trump Administration.
While rebuking and restraining the President, the midterm wave is also sending a new cross-section of representatives to Washington and to the State Capitals. The results show quite a number of historic firsts reflecting the diverse American society and rejecting the MAGA aversion to diversity. The most remarkable first is the election of a Muslim American as the US Senator from Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed, the American-born son of Egyptian American parents and highly accomplished Doctor of Medicine, convincingly won the Senate race in Michigan after withstanding a barrage of Islamophobic attacks from the US President at the top to every Republican hack below. According to Alvin Tillery of Northwestern University, “the simplest explanation is that the electorate finally caught up with the country.” In that sense, Trump and MAGA have been trying to fly in the face of the American reality. The midterm has stopped that in midflight.
Continue Reading Features The Sunset Years! Published
Staying away from elderly parents, being overseas or in a different city in India itself, gives rise to that familiar worrisome feeling, a constant sense of anxiety lurking at the back of the mind, along with a lingering sense of guilt for having left them behind in the first place.
Shrinking families, vanishing support systems and busy careers, often result in parents being left to fend for themselves in large houses that pose a security threat, or in apartments with temperamental neighbors and cantankerous housing societies. Thousands of young Indians, either emigrating or changing cities each year for higher education, lucrative jobs or a better lifestyle, are forced to leave behind their greatest treasure – their elderly parents with broad smiles and cheerful exteriors, who hide behind their moist eyes untold stories of loneliness, anxiety, fear and uncertainty that they would rather not share with their children.
Apart from loneliness and the anxiety of being separated, times of illness and emergencies make even simple chores like going to the bank, standing in a queue for a gas cylinder or paying a bill a big challenge, going to the doctor or a dentist becomes an ordeal. Suffering from painful separation, lacking emotional support coupled with physical insecurity, both parents and children live on the hope of reuniting in the foreseeable future, only to find it more and more difficult as the years go by.
However, some children choose to return and do come back to stay with their parents either on a different floor of the same house or in an adjoining floor of a block of flats in the same building. This not only gives elderly parents a facade of independent living yet enables keeping an eye on them to assist them as and when required .
Life rolls on, time flies and very soon, since parents normally do not outlive their children, you have the reverse of the “empty nest ” syndrome. With the passing of the parents it is the children’s turn now to be left alone and face that peculiar emptiness in their lives! They face a void, the anchors that influenced their lives are now gone, their ample presence had been felt on numerous occasions in different ways, actually their proximity had been enough for they knew parents were always there for them. With the parent’s house verily becoming a shrine, simply going back to the house gives rise to a strange indescribable yet painful vacuum, a feeling of emptiness and a realization that they now need to pick up the threads and face the world with fortitude, all by themselves.
While we often hear of elderly parents being left alone and pining for company, there are countless loving and dutiful children who change countries, even cities, sacrificing lucrative careers in the process, to support their parents in their sunset years. Now its the children who have become alone, and got left behind with the burden of memories, an empty shrine to cater to and for a comparatively longer time then the period they joyfully enjoyed with their elderly parents. These children too deserve empathy, do spare a thought for them!
(Priyan R Naik is an author, columnist and independent journalist based in Bengaluru, India and regularly writes columns for Indian, Laotian, Bangladeshi and Malaysian newspapers.)
Floral artistry will lend its beauty to a charitable cause when Ikebana International Sri Lanka Chapter No. 262 holds its annual exhibition, “Blossoms of Hope”, on November 14 and 15 at the Duke’s Rooms, Cinnamon Lakeside.
The exhibition will feature arrangements individually created by members, showcasing their talent in the ancient Japanese art of ikebana. Part of the proceeds will go towards purchasing medication for the Children’s Ward at Apeksha Cancer Hospital, Maharagama.
This year’s exhibits will be grouped by flower type, allowing visitors to discover the different ways members interpret their chosen blooms. Each arrangement will reflect its creator’s approach to composition, bringing together the character of the flowers and the expressive possibilities of ikebana.
With careful attention to line, balance and space, ikebana encourages an appreciation of each element in an arrangement. A branch’s curve, a flower’s angle or the placement of a leaf can all contribute to the overall effect. There will be demonstrations by members held on both days at 4.00 p.m.
The tradition traces its roots to floral offerings at Buddhist altars after Buddhism was introduced to Japan in the sixth century. Over time, these offerings developed into an independent art form. Today, ikebana embraces both established forms and contemporary interpretations.
“Blossoms of Hope” will offer visitors an opportunity to experience this living tradition through the work of the chapter’s members. Its charitable purpose adds a further dimension to the exhibition, connecting the pleasure of viewing flowers with support for children receiving care at Apeksha Cancer Hospital.
The exhibition will be open on November 14 from 11.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m. and on November 15 from 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., at the Duke’s Rooms, Cinnamon Lakeside
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