When Sri Lanka’s controversial Rajapaksa brothers staged a political comeback in 2019, critical voices from both the media and civil society became muted partly because of the overwhelming popularity of the powerful siblings.
Riding the crest of popular support, especially among the majority Sinhala community, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa pledged to rid the country of inefficiency and fast-track it to prosperity and security. Indeed, his government looked on its way of doing that despite the pandemic, which was seen to have been handled successfully by Rajapaksa for most of 2020. That perception in turn helped Rajapaksa’s party to take a majority of the seats in parliament that year, paving the way for the president’s older brother Mahinda to be appointed formally as prime minister.
“We were a community on anesthetic,” says Manjula Gajanayake, who till the end of 2021 was the head of the election monitoring body Centre for Monitoring Election Violence.
But the last year has not been as good for Sri Lanka. As the country’s economic fortunes spiral downward, public dissent has been rising, at least on social media.
“Interestingly, what we noticed during the second half of (2021) is that with COVID, with the cost of living, with everything else that is happening in the country, people have, at least on social media, become very vocal against the government, (and) criticizing the actions,” says Yasasmin Kaviratne, policy leader fellow at the European University Institute in Italy.
The last week of December 2021 witnessed this in full tilt. By many accounts, the government — specifically Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal — had been poised to claim credit for shoring up Pakistan’s dwindling foreign reserves. But Sri Lankans did not give him a chance to do so.
Stuck at home during the lockdowns, many Sri Lankans turned to social media to vent their frustrations with the authorities.
They made caustic remarks online on how poor the island nation’s U.S. dollar account was. One post on Facebook read: “The income of Spider-Man: No Way Home has already passed 1 billion USD, meanwhile the foreign reserves of Sri Lanka is just 1.5 billion USD.”
Determined not to be outdone, Cabraal took to Twitter to confirm that the reserves had jumped to US$3.1billion and would remain at such levels until the end of the year. But forex watchers and journalists quickly snapped back, detailing on social media that the fund infusion had been planned earlier in the year by way of a currency swap deal with the Chinese Central Bank and had been initiated before Cabraal took over the Central Bank.
These messages were soon followed by others claiming that foreign currency held in accounts of individual citizens had been converted to Sri Lankan currency without the account holders being notified. By the first week of January, Cabraal was back on Twitter, trying to allay fears that remittances of citizens were not being forcibly converted or done so at lower rates. But that garnered even more acid retorts. Said one tweet: “Liar, liar/ Your pants are on fire/ Your nose is as long/ As a telephone wire.”
Social media thrive in lockdowns
Addressing grumblings from ordinary citizens, though, is something the Rajapaksa government — or any Sri Lankan politician, for that matter — is not used to doing. With a history of repressive pushback by the state against criticism, Sri Lanka has not really developed a mass citizen-driven protest culture. Kaviratne, who has also worked as a researcher with an international human rights organization in Sri Lanka, points out: “Sri Lanka does not have a tradition of spontaneous, mass protests. Protests have generally been organized by political parties and civic groups which have the capacity to do that.”
In the last two years, however, Sri Lanka — just like most other countries — has had intermittent lockdowns, both national and local. Stuck at home, many Sri Lankans soon tired of twiddling their thumbs and began fiddling with their phones and computers.
Between January 2020 and January 2021, the number of social media users in the country grew by 1.5 million or 23.4 percent. Active social media users in Sri Lanka have been estimated to total some 7.9 million or about a third of the country’s population.
The most popular social media platform among Sri Lankans is Facebook, with about 7 million users. Twitter, however, hosts some of the most acerbic remarks and comments on the government and public officials.
In general, the social media posts and exchanges center on the impact of the pandemic on living conditions, especially the soaring prices and shortages of basic commodities, and the increasing inability of the government to help suffering citizens. There have been political commentaries as well, along with observations on how officials have been behaving.
One social media post, in fact, prompted the government to explain that the president did not order the closure of a milk-food outlet on the side of the road leading to his residence after crowds booed his motorcade. According to the press release, which was issued by the police, the president had merely ordered officials to see why there was a long queue at the store and to rectify the supply situation there.
For the most part, the government seems to be holding back in clamping down on digital dissent. Yet, in its latest report on online freedom worldwide, international rights monitor Freedom House says that while “(there) were no reported blocks or restrictions on internet during the coverage period, allowing Sri Lankan users to increasingly mobilize around a range of issues online” between June 1, 2020 and May 31, 2021, there was a rising number of arrests of individuals “for online posts related to COVID-19, environmental issues, and racial relations in Sri Lanka.”
The report also says that “the police arrested several individuals without a warrant for their online posts.”
Clampdown, early elections, or both?
As 2021 drew to an end, there were signs that the government was becoming less tolerant of online criticism. Following social media posts criticizing the president, Police Spokesperson Nihal Taltuwa announced that there are laws aimed at protecting the country’s chief executive from defamation.
But in one Twitter thread twitting the president’s apparent sensitivity to criticisms, a participant balked at that claim and tweeted that the government does not have such powers. The tweet continued with this quote: “‘To cause any annoyance or embarrassment to a Head of State or the Government will not form the basis of prosecution under Section 120 of the Penal Code. Essence of Section 120 is whether the words in question incite the People to commit acts of violence and disorder and not whether the words are defamatory or not.’”
So far, the online chatter has yet to go beyond expressions of frustration and annoyance with the government and public officials. In its 2021 online freedom report, Freedom House also notes that while the Web “has provided an avenue for robust digital activism and engagement on political issues … most campaigns register uneven progress in achieving their goals.”
It adds, “Many online campaigns are prompted by discrete events, crises, or stalled political processes, and campaigners are generally unable to gather the momentum needed to drive meaningful change and long-term citizen participation.”
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (right) and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa were regarded almost as heroes when they staged a comeback in 2019. Today, they are beginning to be vilified by citizens dissatisfied with the government’s pandemic response.
And yet the government seems to have nevertheless been spooked by the growing digital dissent. One reason could be that it has realized that the country’s economic travails are among the top triggers for the most vicious comments and discussions online — and that there is little it can do at this point to reverse that trend.
Already, shortages have been reported in commodities like milk, and price hikes have been rampant. On Dec. 23, 2021, Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture Udith Jayasinghe warned, “There is a possibility of food shortages happening due to the current economic and social problems we are facing.” He was sacked a day later.
The Rajapaksa administration has three more years left in its term, but observers are reading hints of early elections in recent announcements of allowances for government employees.
“I don’t think the government will risk a national-level election just yet; it may test the waters with provincial-level elections,” says Gajanayake. “But what is certain is that social media will be primed with the intended aim of swaying voters. Hopefully, Sri Lankans are a bit more digital-savvy than they were three years ago.” ●
Amantha Perera is a Sri Lankan researcher at the School of Education and the Arts of the Central Queensland University, Australia. He is currently in the final stages of his master’s research project on the impact of online trauma threats on journalism during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
