Sri Lanka: A look back at the 2010s | Daily News

Sri Lanka: A look back at the 2010s

A decade will end today – the decade of the 2010s. The decade marked a time of political and social upheaval in Sri Lanka, which as an island in the Indian Ocean also felt the many ramifications of global events. In Sri Lanka, politics came to the fore as the decade began and ended with Presidential Elections.

The conflict had ended in May 2009 when Sri Lankans went to the polls to elect their new leader in January 2010, from which Mahinda Rajapaksa emerged victorious. His victory was a foregone conclusion given his political leadership for the military effort. President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s second tenure was marked by a relentless development drive, which included the commissioning of two expressways (Southern and Airport), an international airport at Mattala, an international seaport at Hambantota, several power plants, new bridges and performing arts centres in Colombo. The just-liberated Northern Province received priority in the development process.

The passage of the 18th Amendment in Parliament enabled President Rajapaksa to contest for an unprecedented third term, but he was defeated by Common Candidate Maithripala Sirisena, who was backed by the UNF and SLFP rebels at the 2015 January Presidential Election and was sworn in as President. Sirisena contested on a platform of “Good Governance” (Yahapalanaya) and appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe as his Prime Minister. Just days after President Sirisena was sworn in, Pope Francis became the first Head of State to undertake a State Visit to Sri Lanka in the 2010s decade.

This period saw a formal cohabitation between the two major political parties – the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United National Party - for the first time ever. However, it did not take too long before fundamental ideological differences between the two parties surfaced, making cohabitation unviable. President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe also did not see eye to eye on many issues including national security and defence, which was to have devastating consequences almost at the end of the Sirisena Presidency.

At one point, the incontrovertible differences between the two parties boiled over, resulting in the sacking, by President Sirisena, of the incumbent Premier and appointment of Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Prime Minister on October 26, 2018. However, Ranil Wickremesinghe was back in the Premier’s post following several landmark Court rulings in December the same year. Nevertheless, the scars in the relationship between the two personalities never healed and cohabitation was dead for all intents and purposes. The economy was one of the biggest casualties of this political war.

Intelligence warnings about a possible military strike by religious fundamentalists went unheeded at the highest levels of Government in this political maelstrom as the country literally woke up to a series of suicide bomb attacks at several churches and luxury hotels on Easter Sunday this year that killed over 250 Sri Lankans and foreigners.

This was a rude shock for a country that had experienced peace for close to 10 years. While one may never fully understand why a number of well-educated and wealthy Muslim youth engaged in this truly horrendous act, it drove home the point that youth from any community and religious group could fall prey to online hate speech and religious extremism. Arresting these trends will be a major challenge for 2020 and beyond.

The Easter attack was the final straw for a populace fed up with the Yahapalanaya political dogfight, as they looked for the emergence of someone who could tackle the evils of ethno-religious extremism and terrorism. Thus when the candidates for the Presidential Election, the country’s last election of the decade, was announced, a majority of people unsurprisingly veered towards Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who had a proven track record in this field as Defence Secretary from 2006-2014. The decade ended with Gotabaya Rajapaksa becoming President (having defeated the UNF’s Sajith Premadasa) and Mahinda Rajapaksa becoming Prime Minister, creating a local record for two brothers ruling as President and Prime Minister simultaneously.

Sri Lanka did gain many accolades in the fields of health and education in the 2010s. It became only the second country in South Asia, after Maldives, to eliminate malaria. Sri Lanka also became an Upper Middle Income Country in the outgoing decade.

The decade was marked by the departure from our midst of many eminent Sri Lankans including Ven. Maduluwawe Sobitha Thera, Ven. Davuldena Gnanissara Thera, renowned film directors Lester James Peries and Vasantha Obeysekara, medical academic, writer and aesthete Prof. Carlo Fonseka, music maestro Pandit Amaradeva, former Prime Ministers Ratnasiri Wickremanayake and D.M. Jayaratne, economist Dr. Gamani Corea, educationist R.I.T. Alles and cricketer Mithra Wettimuny.

Away from the world of politics, Sri Lanka gradually began to experience the adverse effects of Climate Change during the 2010s. Huge floods were experienced in some years while prolonged droughts prevailed in much of the country for long periods. Rainfall patterns became virtually unpredictable. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami did give Sri Lankans an idea of what a natural calamity would look like, but overall awareness on Climate Change is still very low. In fact, when youth around the world protested political inaction on Climate Change, our youth remained silent. It is indeed time that the Climate Crisis entered the national consciousness so that the future generations will be safe from a climate catastrophe.


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