Two years after Dissanayake, Sri Lanka has restored stability but stalled on a new constitution and PTA repeal

The news

Colombo. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake completed two years in office last week, and The Hindu’s assessment finds a split record. He won in September 2024 with 42.31% of the votes, crossing the line on preferential votes, and his National People’s Power (NPP) then won a supermajority. It kept the inherited IMF programme and met or beat its targets. That left room to absorb Cyclone Ditwah in late 2025, which killed nearly 700 people, and the fuel-price shock from the West Asian crisis. A former intelligence chief has been arrested in the 2019 Easter bombings probe. The structural promises have not moved. Provincial Council polls are stuck in a parliamentary committee, and there is no new constitution. The executive presidency has not been abolished. Rights defenders say the draft law replacing the Prevention of Terrorism Act falls short of international standards.

Static syllabus linkage

1. The 13th Amendment is India’s standing stake in Sri Lanka’s constitution. The India–Sri Lanka Accord, signed in July 1987 by Rajiv Gandhi and J.R. Jayewardene, led to the 13th Amendment. The amendment created elected Provincial Councils with devolved powers. India has pressed ever since for it to be implemented in full, including holding council elections.
2. The IMF’s Extended Fund Facility funds deep balance-of-payments crises. An Extended Fund Facility (EFF) lends over a longer period in return for structural reforms. The IMF approved a 48-month EFF of about US$3 billion for Sri Lanka on 20 March 2023. In 2022 India had already given emergency credit lines for fuel, food and medicine, along with a currency swap.

Why UPSC loves this

1. GS2 asks about “India and its neighborhood — relations”. Sri Lanka brings together three recurring themes: Tamil devolution, the debt crisis and China’s presence in the Indian Ocean.

Analysis

1. Lens — Strategic autonomy and partnership: India’s leverage now runs through money, not the 1987 Accord. The JVP, the party at the core of the NPP, once fought the 1987 Accord, so stalled council polls are no surprise. What India holds instead is goodwill from 2022 and its weight as a creditor and investor, while China keeps Hambantota. The wise course is to back council polls as the NPP’s own promise to Tamil voters, not as New Delhi’s demand. That keeps the concern alive without a sovereignty quarrel.
2. Stability has been bought, and transformation postponed. Political scientist Pradeep Peiris calls the NPP “better rulers in the same system”. Sticking with the IMF brought credibility and a buffer against shocks. But poor families are eating less, and a government busy hitting fiscal targets has little political capital left for constitution-making. The counter-view is that a bankrupt country could not write a constitution first; that holds only if the clock is not run down to the next election.
3. Replacing the PTA still has to pass the proportionality test. The NPP promised repeal, but its draft replaces the Act. The 2019 Easter bombings show that the security case is real. The test is whether detention is time-bound, reviewed by courts and confined to genuine terrorism, or whether it can again reach minorities and critics.

Administrator's brainstorm