by Luxman Aravind
Though Sri Lanka parades one of the highest literacy rates in South Asia and flaunts it as evidence of civilisational maturity within global development indices, the country has repeatedly displayed a chilling indifference to dignity, accountability, and consequence. Literacy, it turns out, has not inoculated the public against deception; it has merely trained them to consume it more fluently.
Over and over again, Sri Lankans have shown a willingness—sometimes an eagerness—to be misled by men who lie without hesitation, deceive without remorse, and rehearse dishonesty as political craft. Each electoral cycle becomes a ritual of self-humiliation, where the electorate punishes sincerity and rewards theatrical mendacity.
Today, as Sri Lanka celebrates yet another Independence Day, the nation remains trapped in a grim farce: ruled by a new cohort of moral exhibitionists who speak of reform while fighting only for their own political survival, incapable of admitting incompetence and therefore compelled to manufacture spectacle to conceal failure.
These are not leaders who err reluctantly. They err loudly and then declare error to be courage. One climbs a stage to verbally assault Buddhist clergy using language so obscene and feral that it would be unacceptable even in the most degenerate corners of civic life, and then brands this behaviour as revolutionary candour. Another sermonises endlessly about social reform and progressive education, invoking imported jargon about pedagogy and inclusion, while presiding over school textbooks so carelessly constructed that they direct children towards inappropriate online content, shielded by the arrogance of those who believe ideology absolves irresponsibility. A third dominates Parliament with hours of hollow oratory whenever public outrage threatens to turn concrete, flooding the chamber with noise so that his subordinates—clumsy understudies in this theatre of deceit—can retreat, recalibrate, and return with fresh lies. None of this is accidental. It is method.
What unites these figures is not vision but cowardice. They cannot admit the absence of skill, foresight, or administrative capacity. Such honesty would demand humility, and humility is a political death sentence in a culture addicted to bravado. Instead, every failure is rebranded as resistance, every critique dismissed as conspiracy, every demand for accountability recast as sabotage. This is how anti-corruption becomes not a principle but a performance, not a practice but a pose. In Sri Lanka, anti-corruption has been perfected as an art form of corruption itself.
This did not begin yesterday. The first betrayal occurred at independence in 1948, when political sovereignty was mistaken for liberation. The colonial apparatus was inherited intact, merely staffed by local elites fluent in the language of power but allergic to redistribution or structural reform. Independence arrived without introspection. There was no serious attempt to dismantle inherited hierarchies, no reimagining of economic justice, no effort to construct inclusive national institutions. The flag changed. The system did not. What was celebrated as freedom was, in truth, continuity masquerading as rupture.
By 1956, politics had learned the intoxicating utility of slogans. Language was weaponised, identity simplified, and grievance monetised at the ballot box. “Sinhala Only” was sold as cultural redemption but functioned as electoral arithmetic dressed up as historical justice. The applause it generated was not the sound of empowerment but of a nation consenting to its own fragmentation. From that moment on, populism became Sri Lanka’s dominant political grammar, privileging emotional mobilisation over institutional thinking. The consequences—alienation, conflict, eventual civil war—were not unfortunate accidents. They were logical outcomes.
The 1970s introduced another illusion: that ideology could substitute for competence. Socialist rhetoric promised equality and people’s power, but delivered scarcity, unemployment, and repression. A generation of educated youth discovered that degrees did not translate into dignity, and protest into progress. The state responded not with reform but with force. The lesson absorbed by the political class was not that governance requires pragmatism, but that slogans could pacify the masses until coercion became necessary.
The liberalisation of 1977 replaced socialist romance with market fundamentalism, wrapped in moral language about a righteous society. Growth arrived unevenly; corruption flourished creatively. The Executive Presidency was born, concentrating power without constructing safeguards. Economic reform was not accompanied by judicial independence or regulatory strength. The result was not prosperity but predation. When violence erupted—most catastrophically in 1983—the state responded not with accountability but with denial, cementing a culture where power insulated itself from consequence.
The end of the civil war in 2009 should have been a moment of moral reckoning. Instead, victory was converted into permanent propaganda. National security became a substitute for governance. Militarisation seeped into civilian life. Debt-funded vanity projects were justified as development, dissent as treachery. Reconciliation was postponed indefinitely, as if peace were an automatic by-product of silence. The war ended; the habits of authoritarianism did not.
The promise of good governance in 2015 was perhaps the most sophisticated deception of all because it mimicked the language of reform while hollowing out its substance. Commissions multiplied, speeches improved, English words like transparency and accountability were pronounced carefully for international consumption. Yet corruption merely evolved, becoming more technical, more legalistic, more insulated. The Central Bank bond scandal was not an aberration; it was a diagnostic moment. It revealed a political class that believed ethical language could substitute for ethical behaviour.
The economic collapse of 2022 should have annihilated the credibility of slogans forever. Instead, it produced a new one: system change. Once again, negation was mistaken for construction. Anti-corruption rhetoric returned with evangelical intensity, weaponised as moral absolutism. Yet the institutions remained unchanged, the personnel recycled, the habits intact. Coal procurement deals shrouded in opacity, laboratory reports delayed, tenders questioned and then buried under procedural fog. Parliamentary leadership descending into farce, with one nominee collapsing under fraudulent credentials and his replacement attracting his own cloud of allegations. A Health Ministry inexplicably dismantling digital systems designed to ensure transparency in medicine procurement, not through debate but through administrative sabotage. These are not isolated failures. They are expressions of a governing culture that fears transparency because transparency exposes emptiness.
Sri Lanka’s deepest tragedy is not corrupt politicians; it is a corrupted political imagination. The country confuses literacy with wisdom, eloquence with intelligence, outrage with ethics. It repeatedly rewards confidence over competence and noise over nuance. It grants moral immunity to those who shout anti-corruption loudly enough, even as they reproduce the same networks of patronage and deceit. Anti-corruption has become a performative industry: selectively enforced, strategically deployed, theatrically invoked. It is a cudgel for enemies and a shield for allies.
Each Independence Day is marked by ritual and amnesia. Flags rise, anthems play, speeches echo. Yet the state continues to function as a marketplace of impunity. Independence, stripped of institutional courage and ethical consequence, has become repetition without learning. Sri Lanka has not merely been betrayed by its leaders. It has betrayed itself—by choosing slogans over systems, charisma over competence, and moral drama over the slow, unglamorous labour of building institutions. Until this addiction to spectacle is confronted with intellectual honesty and structural reform, anti-corruption will remain Sri Lanka’s most elegant and devastating form of corruption.
