A 54-year-old port worker named Udeni Kaluthantri rose to fame over night last year for reasons unrelated to his employment.
In a video that emerged days after demonstrators occupied Colombo’s presidential palace, Mr. Kaluthantri can be seen relaxing on a bed covered in the presidential flag.
Pictures of young guys diving into the palace’s pool and bouncing on the four-poster bed belonging to the president had already gone viral. The movie by Mr. Kaluthantri joined the other visuals as lyrical evidence of how millions of Sri Lankans had become tired of what they saw as corrupt and ineffective leadership under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Rajapaksa abruptly left the nation following it and resigned a few days later. An unprecedented people’s movement was heralded as having won big, yet a year later, Sri Lanka is quite different.
The conflict of the people
Early in 2022, Sri Lanka’s inflation shot through the roof as its foreign reserves depleted and supplies of food, medicine, and gasoline ran low. The biggest economic crisis the nation has seen since independence resulted in power outages that lasted up to 13 hours for residents.
Many blamed Mr. Rajapaksa, the former president, and his family. The Rajapaksa family was charged with corruption and embezzling public funds in addition to his catastrophic economic policies, which were to blame for the shortage of foreign currency. However, the Rajapaksa family denies any complicity and ascribes the issue to other factors, including the steep decline in tourist earnings caused by the virus and the high cost of petroleum after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Last year, when thousands congregated at Galle Face Green, a well-liked beachfront public area in Colombo, I was there. The protests went on day and night, with the numbers growing in the nights as families, students, priests, nuns, and other clergy members joined them. The “Gota go home” anthem served as the demonstrations’ rallying cry as they spread across the nation, bringing together for the first time Sri Lanka’s three largest ethnic groups—Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims.
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