Décryptage sur  RFI – Radio France Internationale consacré à “Le Sri Lanka au bord du gouffre” avec Delon Madavan

Nous partageons le lien pour réécouter le podcast de l’émission Décryptage sur  RFI – Radio France Internationale consacré à “Le Sri Lanka au bord du gouffre”.
Delon madavan, enseignant chercheur spécialiste du Sri Lanka était au micro d’Anne Corpet pour partager son analyse sur la crise que traverse alors le pays.

Podcast “Le Sri Lanka au bord du gouffre” avec Eric Meyer et Delon Madavan pour l’émission de radio “Cultures Mondes” de France Culture

Nous partageons un lien pour écouter le podcast de l’émission “Cultures Mondes” de Radio France consacrée à “Le Sri Lanka au bord du gouffre”. Eric Meyer et Delon Madavan ont été invité par Florian Delorme à partager leurs analyse sur la situation du pays alors en pleine crise économique, politique, sociale et humanitaire.

“Sri Lanka : comment la population a mis fin à la « Gotacratie »” par Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud et Delon Madavan pour The Conversation

Nous partageons un lien pour accéder à l’article “Sri Lanka : comment la population a mis fin à la « Gotacratie »” rédigé par Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud et Delon Madavan pour The Conversation

“Sri Lanka : nouveau président, fin de crise pour autant ?” Interview de Delon Madavan pour TV5 Monde

Nous partageons l’entretien de Delon Madavan accordée à TV5 Monde suite à la nomination, par le Parlement, de Ranil Wickremesinghe, comme Président intermédiaire de Sri Lanka. 

 

“Sri Lanka : une île au bord de l’implosion ?” Interview accordé par Delon Madavan à Société de Géographie

Nous partageons l’entretien vidéo de Delon Madavan réalisé pour la Société de Géographie sur la crise sri lankaise de l’Aragalaya. C’est l’occasion de revenir sur de nombreux sujets (causes de la crise, les conséquences de la crise pour la population, les revendication des manifestants, le fameux “passage à l’agriculture biologique”, les intérêts de l’Inde et la Chine ou encore des sociétés civiles à Sri lanka et en diaspora ). C’est rarement possible dans les médias classiques faute de temps .

 

“Un Musée (de théâtre) project” in Saint-Denis, after the one in Kandy and before the one in Jaffna.

 Un Musée (de théâtre) is an international participatory theatrical and photographic installation that invites visitors to create their own portrait, by combining a video-projected photo from the 20th century to the present day with one or more words. A photographer takes their portrait. This project is inspired by the play Hamlet-Machine by Heiner Müller. This play revisits the history of the 20th century and in particular that of the communist dream and its collapse. The session held in Paris provided an opportunity to look back on the work done with the participants in Kandy. It also provided an opportunity to recontextualise the participants’ choice of photos and words in relation to the economic and political crisis affecting SriLanka and the Aragalaya movement.

Delon Madavan gave an introductive présentation to help the French audience to understand to reality of Aragalaya for the Sri Lankans.   Here is a link to the website of the company La communauté inavouable to discover the results (photographs and theatrical performance) of the work done with the participants of the Kandy workshop: https://lnkd.in/e2D2aAfs

Thank you to the company LA COMMUNAUTE INAVOUABLE and to Clyde Chabot for  in this beautiful project!

“Sri Lanka : une île dans la tourmente” par Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud et Delon Madavan pour Echogéo

L’article d’Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud et Delon Madavan “Sri Lanka : une île dans la tourmente” pour Echogéo est disponible sur ce lien

Résumé :

Sri Lanka connaît sa pire crise économique depuis son indépendance (1948). Les pénuries et l’inflation des produits de première nécessité (denrées alimentaires, carburant, médicaments) ont provoqué, depuis mars 2022, un soulèvement populaire sans précédent des Sri-Lankais, au-delà des clivages ethniques et religieux, qui a entrainé la fuite du président Gotabaya Rajapaksa le 9 juillet 2022 puis sa démission deux jours plus tard ; mettant fin à quasi deux décennies de règne des frères Rajapaksa. Cet article revient sur les causes de cette crise politique, économique, sociale et désormais humanitaire pour entrevoir le caractère inédit de cette protestation et se questionner sur la mobilisation des sociétés civiles dans une île longtemps marquée par la bipolarisation de la vie politique, pour finalement envisager les effets géopolitiques de cette crise multiforme.

pour citer cet article: Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud et Delon Madavan« Sri Lanka : une île dans la tourmente »EchoGéo [En ligne], Sur le Vif, mis en ligne le 16 novembre 2022, consulté le 26 février 2026URL : http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/23844 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/echogeo.23844

“Sri Lanka: an island in turmoil” by Delon Madavan and Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud in Echogéo

The English version of the article written by Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud and Delon Madavan, on the Sri Lankan crisis, published in the online academic journal Echogéo is available here

Abstract:

Sri Lanka is experiencing its worst economic crisis since its independence in 1948. Shortages and inflation of basic necessities (food, fuel, medicines) have provoked an unprecedented popular uprising of Sri Lankans since March 2022, across ethnic and religious divides, which led to the flight of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on July 9, 2022, and his resignation a few days later, putting an end to almost two decades of rule by the Rajapaksa brothers. This article looks back at the causes of this political, economic, social and now humanitarian crisis to glimpse the unprecedented nature of this protest and to question the mobilization of civil societies in an island long marked by the polarization of political life, and finally the geopolitical effects of this multifaceted crisis.

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud et Delon Madavan« Sri Lanka: an island in turmoil »EchoGéo [En ligne], Sur le Vif, mis en ligne le 16 novembre 2022, consulté le 26 février 2026URL : http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/23917 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/echogeo.23917

“Élection présidentielle au Sri Lanka : l’heure du renouveau politique” entretien de Delon Madavan accordé pour France Culture

Nous partageons l’analyse de Delon Madavan sur les résultats des élections présidentielles de 2024 à Sri Lanka pour la matinale de France Culture.

Pour écouter l’analyse, veuillez cliquer sur ce lien 

“A Letter To Lanka: Soil that Breaks, Soil that Binds” by by Ilakkiya Mariya Simon

We would like to share an article by Ilakkiya Mariya Simon about her documentary “A Letter To Lanka” and her reflection on the question of identity for a person from the second generation of an exiled family living in Norway.

to read the article

About “A Letter To Lanka” documentary

A Letter To Lanka moves between memories of the civil war to the present political turmoil during Aragalaya’s protests. Told through a poetic and personal journey of the filmmaker`s reconnection to land, soil and people, it invites the audiences into existential questions of belonging in a chaotic world. What does it mean to be at home in the world? What binds people together, and what can break them apart?

About Ilakkiya Mariya

Ilakkiya Mariya Simon has recently completed her Master of Visual Anthropology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen, where she founded The Ethnographic Film Club. Prior to getting into anthropology, she was a teacher and movement practitioner from different disciplines and arts. Her experiences with movement and her Sri Lankan ancestry are what underpins her anthropological interest exploring existential themes of home, belonging, identity, and the environment. Ilakkiya is passionate about her intimate and fragmented relationship to Sri Lanka.

The Sri-Lankan exception: a unique re-democratization process in South Asia and its geopolitical implications in the Indo-Pacific

Summary of a lecture given at Sciences Po (South Asia programme) by Eric P. Meyer (30.01.2025)

The overwhelming success of the National Peoples Power (NPP) in the Sri Lankan legislative elections of November 14th, 2024 (more than two thirds of seats, 61.5% of the vote) confirmed the popularity of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, elected on September 21st with 42.3% of the vote (55.9% after counting the preferential votes that serve as a second round), and of the team he put in place headed by Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya. This success contrasts with the 3 to 4% of the vote obtained by Dissanayake in 2019 and by his party in 2020. Beyond a simple rejection of discredited outgoing parliamentarians, how can such a meteoric rise be explained? And how was the democratic process not derailed in Sri Lanka, in spite of the succession of shocks which affected the country since independence – insurgencies of 1971 and 1987-1989, separatist war from the early 1980s to 2009, economic and political crisis of the early 2020s?

The great popular movement of 2022, the Aragalaya, initiated by activists who ‘occupied’ a public space in the heart of Colombo, brought into the streets hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans hit hard by the economic crisis resulting from the disastrous management of public finances and agricultural policy, and the backlash from Covid. This movement, which bears some similarities with the ‘Arab springs’, denounced the corruption and the incompetence of the political class, and in particular of the Rajapakse clan which had dominated since 2006. It forced the resignation of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, elected in 2019. Following the legal procedure, the Parliament appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe, an experienced but unpopular politician, as interim President, who put a stop to the movement.

His mission was to obtain the agreement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), State creditors (mainly China, Japan and India) and international finance, to pull the country out of bankruptcy. The austerity measures imposed by the IMF in exchange for $2.9 billion in aid contributed to the decline of the living standards and gave the NPP arguments to assert its goals. Its activists, who had participated in the Aragalaya but were not its instigators, managed over the next two years to convince very diverse sectors of the population of their ability to radically transform the country’s political culture, through democratic means.

Dissanayake, who came from a modest rural background and had trained in politics since the 1990s in the People’s Liberation Front (JVP in sinhala language), a ‘guevarist’ movement that had organized two bloodily suppressed insurrections in 1971 and 1989, was able to both move the JVP in a democratic direction and rally the Sinhalese popular masses through his charisma and eloquence. Launching the NPP in 2019, he expanded his circle around the JVP core to include progressive intellectuals such as Harini Amarasuriya, social activists often belonging to minorities, young entrepreneurs looking forward to innovative change. On the other side, NPP’s competitors, led by Sajith Premadasa, the son of a former President, although critics of Wickremesinghe’s policy, lost popular support by their compromises with discredited politicians.

The other decisive element of the NPP’s success was the desire to turn the page on the civil war that ended in 2009 with the defeat of the Tamil separatists for which the Rajapakse brothers took credit, building their power on the instrumentalization of tensions between the Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the Tamil-speaking Hindu, Muslim and Christian minorities, relying on a police system that violated human rights, on pampered armed forces, and on organizations of political monks ; the Islamist attacks on Christian churches in Easter 2019 had served their propaganda well and allowed them to perpetuate a regime of exception. The Aragalaya, which was a multi-ethnic movement, had initiated change, in the context of the decline of Tamil separatist feelings in the north. The legislative elections confirmed this: the NPP displayed secularism and civil rule as its principles, and managed to win both the votes of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in the south, those of the community of Tamil plantation workers in the hills, and to have a relative majority of representatives elected in the north, facing divided Tamil autonomist candidates. It was the first time since independence that a party based in the south was able to rally the votes of the Tamil minorities.

The sequence of events since 2022 demonstrated the resilience of the democratic system, after decades of “tribulations of an old democracy” – title of the article I published a quarter of a century ago in the volume edited by Christophe Jaffrelot Les démocraties d’ailleurs (Karthala, 2000). With 67% participation, an electoral campaign without major incidents, meetings attracting crowds with modest means, the absence of discredited political bigwigs who preferred not to run or were defeated, balanced political speeches given by activists who abandoned their weapons for ballot papers, monks less conspicuous than usual, an army staying in its barracks, few fake news, and the smooth functioning of a complex proportional list ballot with preferential ranking of candidates: in the global electoral landscape of our time, can we speak of a Sri Lankan exception?

Rather than re-democratization, the goal fixed upon by the NPP is the re-invention of a ‘clean’ political culture appealing to what Orwell called ‘common decency’, through practical measures aiming at reducing poverty, banning communal politics, dynamizing the administration, and ensuring the impartiality of justice. On the other hand, economic and political liabilities represent a very heavy burden for the new government and its room for maneuver remains limited. Its parliamentary majority gives it a free hand, and the improvement in the country’s financial state eases its constraints a little. But it must try to renegotiate the agreements with the IMF to alleviate the poverty of the masses, fight against corruption and mafia practices, monitor the change in political culture, strengthen coexistence between communities internally and remove the mistrust of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.


Above all, in a geopolitical perspective, remains the challenge, for a small country in a strategic position, to keep an equal distance between India and China, and use international rivalries to raise the stakes and obtain direct investment, without further alienating the country’s sovereignty – considered as its most precious asset. The Rajapaksa regime, while pretending to defend Sri Lanka’s independence and unity, had mortgaged the island to Chinese economic-strategic interests. Wickremesinghe had attempted to reduce the imbalance and rely on the support of Western powers. Dissanayake is likely to follow a realist line: his first official visit was to India, the second to China. But in the case of five major projects the new government is confronted with difficult choices. The ‘Colombo port-city’ mega project, presented as a brainchild of Mahinda Rajapakse, but actually a link in the Chinese-engineered Belt-and-Road Initiative, is being developed as an extraterritorial enclave devoted to globalized business and leisure, on the Dubai model. Facing Galle Face, the hotspot of Aragalaya, the project has been severely criticized by the NPP, as a post-modern avatar of the colonial enterprise. So was the Hambantota port, located on the southern coast of the island, similarly built and financed by Chinese firms, which was leased in 2017 for 99 years to China Merchant Ports, because the government could not repay its debt; the connected project of a big oil refinery has been awarded to Sinopec in January 2025. On the north-eastern coast, the natural harbor of Trincomalee, where oil tanks had been built during WW2, is of strategic interest for India: it was central to the secret agreement imposed on Sri Lanka by India in 1987, which was vehemently denounced by the JVP; in 2022 a joint venture has been set up with Indian Oil Corporation to restore the oil storage facilities and build another refinery. Next year, the Wickremesinghe administration had approved a project by Gautam Adani, the Indian businessman close to Narendra Modi, to develop a string of wind turbines along the north-western coast, in Mannar and Pooneryn: the harsh financial conditions resembling those imposed by the same firm to Bangladesh, and the bribery charges levelled against Adani in India and USA, are calling into question the project. Back in Colombo, the extension of the port container terminal, another project partly funded by Adani with U.S.-borrowed capital, is similarly being reviewed. To quote the analysis published in The Diplomat (27 January 2025) by R. Kuruwita: “The Adani controversy transcends Sri Lanka’s energy policy. It is a litmus test for the country’s commitment to sovereignty and transparency in an era of great-power rivalry (…) For the NPP government, this is more than an economic dilemma: it is a chance to prove that campaign promises of integrity are more than rhetoric (…) As Sri Lanka navigates post-default recovery, its choices will resonate far beyond its shores. By prioritizing national interest over expediency, Colombo can pursue a policy that safeguards both its economy and its sovereignty, perhaps setting a precedent for other nations grappling with similar pressures. The world is watching.”