by Luxman Aravind
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s hush-hush address to Parliament, delivered after his subordinates literally lost their footing in the chaos of the Trincomalee debacle, revealed a leader floundering behind closed doors while pretending to command the room. It exposed a truth far more piercing than any statement issued by the government’s crisis committees. At a moment demanding lucidity and remorse, he elected instead to weave a skein of evasions, gesturing towards imaginary saboteurs while refusing to confront the corroded foundations of governance. It was a performance that betrayed a man overwhelmed by the weight of his own office, a leader who—having finally grasped the levers of power—has discovered the terrifying possibility that he possesses neither the aptitude nor the mental ballast required to steer a fragile state. And when a leader perceives his own incapacity, when the disquiet of inadequacy begins to gnaw from within, the metamorphosis into paranoia is almost inevitable. History, from Rome to Caracas, is littered with the debris of rulers who, sensing their own unraveling, turned frenzied and punitive.
Dissanayake’s unraveling is not an abstraction whispered in political salons; it is an observable deteriorating condition. His government, which came to office with fire-tongued promises of purification, subsists today on two debilitating reflexes: an incessant stream of nebulous accusations against the opposition—accusations that seem to mutate week by week—and a compulsive habit of assuring the public that everything is stable while concluding opaque agreements with external actors. Parliament, once conceived as a forum of national deliberation, has been reshaped into a ceremonial pawn, its overwhelming majority weaponised in the service of a minute circle of beneficiaries. In every corner of the state, the scent of centralisation is unmistakable; governance has shrivelled into a narrow consortium where two clusters of interests dictate the trajectory of 22 million citizens.
Dissanayake’s trajectory is not unusual among leaders who rise from deprivation and storm into power with romanticised visions of rectification. What begins as earnest ambition curdles into insecurity once the immensity of governing becomes unmanageable. It mirrors, in a distorted way, the psychological descent of Robert Mugabe, who, as the late Kofi Annan lamented, “could not reconcile liberation with governance.” Or the unraveling of Nicolae Ceaușescu in the winter of 1989, whose paranoia accelerated so violently that he began accusing his own ministers of conspiracies that existed only within his imagination. As Václav Havel put it, such leaders often “fear the world because they fear themselves,” projecting their interior frailties onto entire nations.
This government, too, behaves as though encircled by phantoms. Its rhetoric has shifted from developmental imperatives to retributive obsessions. While the economic terrain remains perilously perched on a knife-edge, the highest echelons of leadership expend their energies on vendettas, performative chastisements and social media theatrics. Week by week, policymaking resembles less a coordinated effort and more an improvisation staged for the digital crowd. The administration’s communication strategy has shrunk into a ceaseless cycle of online counterattacks, as if governance itself could be replaced by memes and combative press briefings.
Yet the opposition, in its own hollowed state, remains tragically unprepared to fill the looming vacuum. Its leaders, preoccupied with self-branding and presidential fantasies, exhibit neither an ideological compass nor a comprehension of the structural fissures threatening the republic. It is a bizarre political theatre: a government gasping beneath its own incompetence, and an opposition too enamoured with its own illusions to articulate a coherent alternative. A few delude themselves that accession to power will magically confer the capacity to govern. They forget the warning once offered by former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt: “If you have visions, go to the doctor.” Statesmanship demands method, not daydreams.
For all his inadequacies, Dissanayake still leans on the scaffolding erected by Ranil Wickremesinghe—whose accidental presidency, for all its flaws, prevented national collapse during the previous crisis. Ranil’s imprint, though fading, persists because no contemporary figure possesses his technocratic stamina. Even those who detest him cannot deny his peculiar endurance in Sri Lankan politics. But this inheritance is not infinite. A man who copies the answers from a predecessor may pass an exam, but he cannot claim mastery. Eventually, the façade collapses. And when it does, the vacuum that follows is not filled with wisdom—it is filled with repression. This is how nations slide from misrule into menace.
What emerges is a country drifting toward a familiar precipice, its leaders entering the phase where insecurity mutates into authoritarian reflex. It is when leaders feel power slipping from their fingers that they most often resort to coercion. Hugo Chávez’s confidant Jorge Giordani once remarked that Chávez became “most dangerous when he realised his charisma no longer subdued reality.” The same template appears here: a leader increasingly aware of the limits of his own competence, presiding over a state still shackled to external debt, vulnerable infrastructure and fraying public patience.
Sri Lanka is now on the threshold of an unprecedented political convulsion. The crisis that is gestating beneath the veneer of stability will not be resolved through speeches, nor by the ritualistic demonisation of opponents. As the fractures multiply, Dissanayake will likely continue dispensing the same anaemic assurances, insisting that all is well. But crises do not heed slogans. When the scaffolding collapses, it does so abruptly, and the violence of that collapse engulfs both rulers and citizens.
The opposition must therefore abandon its infantile theatrics and begin constructing a philosophical and structural blueprint for the post-Dissanayake era. It is not the downfall of this administration that should concern them—that downfall is already self-engineering—but the contours of what follows. A nation cannot stumble endlessly through cycles of improvisation and invective. If the vacuum after this government is filled by another unprepared cohort armed with nothing but ambition, the country’s descent will accelerate into calamity.
The hour demands sobriety, not spectacle. If neither government nor opposition rises to meet it, Sri Lanka will once again pay a devastating price for the insecurities of its leaders and the illusions of its politics.
