Arrest of ex-president Ranil Wickremesinghe reveals sharp polarisation in Sri Lanka’s politics

The last two weeks of August may well have been the most eventful in Sri Lankan politics this year. Former president Ranil Wickremesinghe, who served as prime minister on six occasions and assumed the presidency at the height of the 2022 economic crisis – the worst since the country’s independence – was arrested on allegations of misusing state funds, imprisoned, then released on bail.

Before the verdict, Wickremesinghe told the media that these incidents had revealed “the real face of the present administration”.

The charges are serious. In September 2023, Wickremesinghe’s wife, a gender studies scholar, was conferred with an honorary professorship by the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom. While on his way back from Cuba, Wickremesinghe stopped by in London to attend the convocation.

The Sri Lankan government alleges that though he did so as a private citizen, he used state funds for the purpose – 1.6 crore Sri Lankan rupees or around 48.5 lakh Indian rupees.

Supporters of Wickremesinghe, including members of his United National Party, have defended the trip. They say that the invitation was to Wickremesinghe in his public capacity as Sri Lanka’s president. The university itself has more or less confirmed that this was the case.

Yet for a great many Sri Lankans, these arguments do not hold water. For them, Wickremesinghe’s arrest goes deeper than the incident in question: it symbolises a transformational moment, a rupture, in the country’s politics.

Or as one Sri Lankan political commentator put it on Twitter, Wickremesinghe’s arrest has offered “a clear lens into the depth and nature of political and social polarisation”.

On social media, Sri Lankans who support the arrest clashed with those who backed the former president. Some claimed that Wickremesinghe’s trial showed that no one is above the law under the present regime. But others contended that Wickremesinghe had “saved” the country and economy and that the current government was using the judiciary to make an example out of him.

There was arguably no better example of these chasms than the scenes witnessed in Colombo the following week. On August 26, supporters of the former president marched to the city to observe his trial. Arguing with policemen, they hurled insults at the government run by the National People’s Power alliance, with many screaming that it needs to go.

Many of these protesters modelled the march on the aragalaya (struggle) of 2022 that toppled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and helped install Wickremesinghe as his successor. But the aragalaya had been about displacing the political establishment. These protests seemed to be about reinforcing it. The contrast could not have been clearer.

Even more intriguing was how quickly the most unlikely political outfits and figureheads banded together against the current regime.

At the August trial, Sri Lankans were treated to the fascinating sight of former president Maithripala Sirisena visiting Wickremesinghe to offer him solidarity. Exactly 10 years ago, Wickremesinghe had been sworn in as prime minister for the fourth time by Sirisena. Three years later, Sirisena expelled Wickremesinghe and appointed in his place Mahinda Rajapaksa, his rival at the time.

Sri Lanka’s Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa, who in 2020 had broken away from the United National Party over a leadership dispute with Wickremesinghe, also paid a visit. Premadasa was followed by members of the Rajapaksa family, who in the run-up to presidential elections in 2019 had accused Wickremesinghe of selling out the country’s sovereignty.

These visits proved to be a prelude to bigger things. A number of Opposition parties – from the United National Party to the Premadasa-led centre-right Samagi Jana Balawegaya alliance to the Rajapaksa-aligned Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna – soon announced a common front against the present regime. They claimed that the National People’s Power was imposing a constitutional dictatorship.

Needless to say, all the country’s living ex-presidents, including Chandrika Kumaratunga, have denounced the ruling alliance’s decision to arrest Wickremesinghe, who has since become the first former president to be arrested on corruption charges in Sri Lanka.

In response, National People’s Power MPs have declared that no one, not even former heads of state, will be spared the law.

Sri Lanka has a dubious but rich history of heads of state being interrogated, even imprisoned, once they are out of power.

For instance, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government (2015-2019) empowered the Bribery Commission to investigate allegations of misdeeds by the previous Mahinda Rajapaksa regime. Over the next four years, several officials from that administration, including Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, were repeatedly called and questioned.

Predictably enough, this hit a snag when the government itself got mired in corruption scandals, including one at Sri Lanka’s Central Bank.

As it turns out, these developments gave elements from the previous regime the legitimacy they needed to stage a comeback – which they did, in the 2019 presidential elections.

Arguably the most serious case of a head of state being brought to court and interrogated occurred under the government of JR Jayewardene, which ruled from 1977 to 1988. Barely two years after coming to power, Jayewardene – a neoliberal and pro-Western figure who tried to reform the country and economy along the lines of East Asia’s capitalist-authoritarian model, to devastating results – created an ad-hoc commission to question members of the previous government, including his immediate predecessor, Sirimavo Bandaranaike.

Widely criticised and reviled, though arduously defended by Jayewardene’s biographers, the commission led to Bandaranaike being stripped of her civic rights – a fait accompli the shrewd Jayewardene used to divide and break the Opposition.

In Sri Lanka these episodes, controversial though they are, tend to be celebrated by the right. Jayewardene’s biographers, for instance, justify the “Bandaranaike affair” as a sort of karmic justice for what she did as prime minister, including vast nationalisations of private property and the pursuit of “draconian” socialist policies. The questioning of the Rajapaksas, on the other hand, was celebrated by the Colombo elite who saw the family as outsiders and, as one editor put it, “country bumpkins”.

In both instances, the government in power was seen and defended by supporters as doing the correct thing.

Ranil Wickremesinghe occupied important positions in these regimes – as minister for dducation under Jayewardene and prime minister under Sirisena. By arresting him, the National People’s Power has done no less than turn the tables and flip the script.

Poring over social media posts and tweets, one could almost hear the fury of Wickremesinghe’s supporters, stung by the realisation that their political icon was now behind bars. For decades, Wickremesinghe had been seen as beyond reproach and above the law, a person who could do no wrong. In less than six hours, the National People’s Power had ruptured this narrative.

All this says much about the current government. Since coming to power last September, the National People’s Power alliance has been keen to distinguish itself from its predecessors. In the lead-up to presidential elections in September 2024, it openly condemned and ridiculed the political elite, across all parties.

While the Wickremesinghe government won plaudits abroad for its handling of the economic crisis, at home the language of the National People’s Power resonated with a population increasingly disgruntled by the austerity measures put in place to combat it.

The result is that at parliamentary elections in November, all the country’s districts bar one gave the National People’s Power sweeping and respectable majorities – more or less giving the lie to Wickremesinghe’s claims of having achieved economic and political stability under his watch.

Wickremesinghe’s arrest, in that sense, has revealed three contradictions underlying Sri Lankan politics today. The first lies between the narrative that Wickremesinghe achieved stability for Sri Lanka and the perception that this stability was achieved at the cost of people’s welfare.

The second lies between the policy elite’s response to the verdict and the response of ordinary Sri Lankans who are disgruntled by the former president’s policies and actions.

The third lies between how Sri Lankans are discussing and debating the incident and how foreigners, including political and diplomatic figures, have framed and commented on it.

We will elaborate on this in the second part of this two-part article on the implications of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s arrest.

Uditha Devapriya is an independent researcher, writer, and political and foreign policy analyst based in Colombo, Sri Lanka who has authored four books. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.

Rumeth Jayasinghe is an undergraduate at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka. He can be reached at rumethj17@gmail.com.

They are working on a publication on the 2022 economic crisis, the mistakes made and the lessons learnt. The book is slated for publication in 2026.

This is the first article in a two-part series on the implications of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s arrest. Read the second part here.