Sri Lanka’s Shame on the World Stage

by Our Diplomatic Affairs Editor

Sunil Handunnetti took a bad bath over the English language in China—an exhibition not merely of linguistic inadequacy, but of staggering delusion. His overconfidence in the face of his own incompetence was not only surreal; it was symptomatic of a deeper, national pathology: a political culture so drenched in ego and insulated ignorance that it no longer recognises its own irrelevance on the world stage. For Sri Lanka, this wasn’t just a cringe-inducing gaffe—it was a moment of irreversible reputational damage. And yet, predictably, there is no remorse, no accountability. These men wear their mediocrity as armour, mistaking bravado for brilliance, and shamelessness for strength.

What unfolded at the World Economic Forum was not an isolated lapse in judgement but a grotesque performance of national delusion. It was the spectacle of a man so utterly convinced of his own authority that he was blind to his own unreadiness—reciting a pre-scripted, disconnected monologue in response to a question he neither understood nor cared to address. This was not merely a personal failure; it was a public unraveling of the myth of competence that many Sri Lankan politicians hide behind. That Handunnetti believed he had ‘represented’ Sri Lanka in this moment is precisely the tragedy. We have cultivated a political class so drunk on self-importance that it confuses performance with policy, and noise with nuance.

This isn’t about English. To reduce the matter to language is to miss the entire point. It is about the dangerous conflation of ideological conviction with global understanding. The world does not owe us patience. Diplomacy and international engagement demand clarity, humility, and substance. But in Sri Lanka, we have normalised the spectacle of leaders turning up to global platforms utterly unprepared—armed with slogans instead of strategies, and fuelled by the delusion that international respect can be commanded through nationalist posturing alone. The tragedy is that the likes of Handunnetti are not anomalies—they are symptoms of a much larger disease: the systemic anti-intellectualism that has gutted Sri Lanka’s political and academic institutions.

To understand the full scope of this decay, one must interrogate the ideological womb from which such figures emerge. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), with its long-standing grip over student unions, has played a central role in the intellectual degeneration of our universities. Cloaked in revolutionary rhetoric and faux proletarian virtue, the JVP did not democratise education—it weaponised mediocrity. Under its influence, universities became theatres of ideological conformity, where academic inquiry was sacrificed at the altar of political allegiance. Student unions were transformed into militant gatekeepers who policed thought, punished dissent, and glorified ignorance as authenticity.

For decades, these unions cultivated a culture where confrontation was a virtue and knowledge a liability. Debate was replaced with disruption, and scholarship with slogans. Professors were intimidated, intellectuals driven into silence or exile, and the once-vibrant academic tradition of Sri Lanka collapsed under the weight of militant populism. This legacy of intellectual vandalism is what gave us a generation of leaders who cannot speak to the world—because they were never taught to listen to it. They were trained to recite, not to reason; to agitate, not to analyse.

Handunnetti’s performance, then, was not a failure of an individual—it was the logical endpoint of a political culture that views expertise with suspicion and celebrates ideological rigidity as virtue. It was the moment where decades of educational and political vandalism were exposed before an international audience, and no amount of revolutionary nostalgia can mask that humiliation. Here was a man, elevated by the machinery of student radicalism, standing on one of the world’s most prestigious stages, and proving incapable of basic comprehension, let alone global conversation.

What makes this even more damning is the sheer absence of accountability. In a functioning political culture, such a blunder would spark introspection, if not resignation. But in Sri Lanka, the political establishment thrives on impunity. The echo chambers are so tightly sealed that even disgrace is recycled into defiance. Supporters, instead of demanding competence, applaud the failure as authenticity. Dissent is labelled elitism. And thus the cycle continues: a nation trapped in the tyranny of low expectations.

One must ask: how did we arrive at a place where humiliation is interpreted as heroism? The answer lies in the ideological rot that has infected every stratum of our public life. The JVP’s long march through the institutions did not result in justice, equality, or empowerment. It resulted in a levelling down, where excellence was viewed as betrayal, and global engagement as foreign conspiracy. The movement promised to lift the masses but instead pulled down the standards. It created not a class of emancipated thinkers, but an army of obedient ideologues—many of whom now sit in Parliament, utterly unfit for the task of governance.

Sri Lanka today stands at the precipice of irrelevance. In a global order shaped by technological advancement, geopolitical complexity, and diplomatic nuance, we continue to send representatives who think that reciting local manifestos on international stages is a form of resistance. They mistake their own ignorance for cultural authenticity. They believe that being loud is the same as being heard. And when they fail—spectacularly—they retreat into the safety of domestic denial, where the public has been so beaten down by years of dysfunction that it no longer demands excellence.

There was once a time when Sri Lanka produced statesmen and scholars who could hold their own in any global forum—fluent not only in language but in thought, attuned to global currents while rooted in national identity. That time has passed. In its place stands a political generation bred in ideological bunkers, fluent in neither the languages of the world nor the realities of the present. They see the nation not as a partner in a global community, but as an isolated stage on which to perform outdated scripts.

Sunil Handunnetti’s debacle in China is not an isolated footnote in the annals of Sri Lankan embarrassment. It is a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that the erosion of institutions—especially universities—is not an academic concern, but a national emergency. It is the universities that produce the thinkers, the diplomats, the leaders. When those institutions are handed over to ideological cults, the country doesn’t just lose ideas—it loses its future.