South America and South Asia are vastly different places on the map. The South Americans speak the language of the coloniser to this day and in El Salvador for instance, the lingua franca is Spanish with any use of other languages — mainly indigenous tongues — being negligible.
In contrast, we in South Asia have retained our ‘voices’, if not our varied tongues, and so, when anyone makes a comparison between say Nayib Bukele-led governance in El Salvador and the possibilities for the current or any future Government in Sri Lanka, they would be required to draw some distinctions.
Recently, this column highlighted the pros and possibilities of President Lula’s administration in Brazil. This week, there is a once-in-an-epoch Presidential election in the United States. In El Salvador, a neighbouring country to Brazil, meanwhile, there is a President who has caused a transformation that nobody thought was possible.
This writer, who previously followed Bukele’s fascinating rise to power, had his attention re-drawn towards the charismatic South American a few days back due to a TikTok that was doing the rounds on local social media. Refreshingly, a very young lady, the author of the TikTok said that leaders can make single-handed changes, and a single determined leader can accomplish anything, with the Salvadoran President Bukele being the best example.
SWOOP
For those uninitiated, El Salvador was considered the most dangerous country. Gangs were on the prowl particularly after the civil-war ended in the 90s, and people began getting murdered for the slightest thing, such as not crossing the road, or taking a wayward glance at somebody else’s wife or partner.
Enter Bukele, who had previously been a Mayor in a small town in a relatively remote part of the country. He ran for President in 2019 and won, and began negotiating with the gangs, offering them some leeway if they would tamp-down on the violence.
The talks soon broke down. The young President then decided to peremptorily crackdown, suspending civil liberties and arresting gang members in a massive military-led swoop which he swore would transform his gang-infested country.
He succeeded spectacularly. Today, El Salvador is statistically speaking, safer than Canada. Those who migrated to North America due to the impossible conditions in the country are said to be coming back in droves, even though the economy is still not doing all that well, as the bulk of public revenues have been spent on national security dealing with the gangland crackdown.
But the overwhelming majority of Salvadorans are eternally grateful to Bukele, and this includes those whose relatives had been allegedly wrongfully arrested and jailed because of the cleansing-operation launched against gangs, which didn’t exactly abide by so-called accepted norms regarding human rights.
Bukele is unrepentant. In a recent interview, he said that the interviewer could ask almost any countryman, to find out first- hand how popular his crackdown has been. He was not lying. The fact that he packed the Supreme Court with his own supporters and won a second term — which he was not constitutionally entitled to — is a testament to his enormous popularity after ending the killing spree and rampant lawlessness in his country.
But could Sri Lanka’s new President deploy Bukele-like tactics in his quest to transform this nation from economic under-performer, to booming Asian oasis?
The answer may be that he doesn’t need Bukele tactics. We do not have gangland violence, and the war, sometimes called a civil war especially by foreigners, ended more than a decade and a half back. So why strain at the sinews to crackdown on — or rather tilt at — imaginary demons?
Even so, though President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s problems may be of a decidedly different kind to Bukeles, they are no less daunting. Our debt-problems have placed the country’s fortunes on a knife’s edge, so to state. But the people have expectations, and they have lost confidence in democratic institutions to deliver, for the most part.
Though democracy survives at least for the present, that seems sometimes to be the hollowest of victories considering the public mood. But yet, irrespective of the depth and dimension of the problem, there is always a man for the moment in most other countries. Bukele was that man in El Salvador. Donald Trump seems to be than man in the U.S.A at least for half the population, even though it’s not certain that he would win this week.
We do not have El Salvador-type gang problems or U.S.A-type immigration problems in this country, but we have a variety of chronic issues that calls for determined and effective leadership. Could President AKD and his team provide that?
The Bukele-type of leadership or Trump-type doggedness can probably not be provided by say, Lula, the leader who was highlighted in this column two weeks ago. Each country sees off its challenges differently. Bukele confronted almost insurmountable problems, and he was to take drastic decisions that would be certainly termed undemocratic at some point, at least by certain people. Even though President AKD doesn’t face that type of odds, he faces a constant barrage of criticism, especially on social media. He is under more pressure than most Presidents to deliver, because Sri Lankan leaders failed so spectacularly in the past.
Credentials
The NPP has all the credentials. A NPP administration can be incorruptible, and can be qualitatively different in terms of the people that would be put forward to get the job done. Yet, there is no grand recipe for success.
It is still a substantial unknown, whether the NPP will succeed or not. The NPP can be good, meaning good as in free of graft and free of political grandstanding, and the other common woes that have afflicted largely self-aggrandising politicians of the Sri Lankan archetype.
But yet, there is such a thing as being too good. Being good and pious alone will not win the NPP a popularity-lottery. Bukele wasn’t good. In a way, he was mostly bad, but he was bad in a good way as he totally rode roughshod over the bad guys, which is what the people desperately wanted. Small wonder he won the popularity lottery eventually.
The NPP is not guaranteed to win the popularity sweepstakes just by being good and by taking the path of the straight and narrow, in terms of propriety/rectitude and all that. There is also a real risk of people tiring of a government that appears over time, to be too good.
This is not to say that the NPP should be corrupt, or should lapse into a state of reckless and thieving abandon. No, but it is to ponder out loud over what would be expected of a NPP Government.
They would be expected to deliver. Delivery is not synonymous with being seen as incorruptible and meting out justice by all. Delivery is about providing the people with a path to economic prosperity that has been eluding them for aeons in this country. It is about making young people want to stay back home, without hankering after so-called better lives in so-called greener pastures.
In many ways, the country may need decisive Bukele-like, or even Trump-like leadership. Of course, the tasks before President AKD and the NPP are — it bears repetition though obvious — not the same as those undertaken by any of the aforementioned leaders. But does AKD and his lot, possess the same kind of magic, is the question?
The only answer to that question, is that time alone would tell. Sri Lanka needs a different recipe of leadership that is unique to the challenges we face, and the trick for the NPP is to find that sweet spot where it comes up with the correct formula to address this country’s specific challenges.
This comment began with the observation that we, South Asians, are not South Americans. We didn’t end up speaking our colonisers language, and that should be at least one indication that that people here are fiercely resistant. They are resistant to everything including change, sometimes rejecting positive transformation as if all in a day’s work.
Besides all that, there have been several false dawns with successive Governments promising they would engineer the next-level reform everyone seems to be hankering after. Almost always, these promises ended in tatters, disaster, or near-disaster. The NPP as all others before them would be seeking to buck that trend. Good luck to them.
