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How Ranil Wickremesinghe became Sri Lanka’s unlikely repairman

After decades as a political flop, Wickremesinghe engineered a nascent economic recovery and quietly depleted the once-mighty Rajapaksas. Has his presidency, for all its flaws, given Sri Lanka a chance at something better?

By Tisaranee Gunasekara
How Ranil Wickremesinghe became Sri Lanka’s unlikely repairman
Ranil Wickremesinghe’s chances of winning Sri Lanka’s 2024 presidential vote are slim. But the election is set to be the country’s most free, fair and non-violent one in living memory thanks in the main to constitutional and legal changes that Wickremesinghe effected.
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BERTOLT BRECHT’S The Caucasian Chalk Circle is probably the best-known international play in Sri Lanka, thanks to a superb Sinhala rendering by the dramatist Henry Jayasena in 1967. A parable set in a city facing an anti-feudal revolt, the play revolves around the kitchen maid Grusha and her decision to risk her life to save the abandoned baby of the deposed governor.

In one scene, deeply embedded in the Sri Lankan cultural consciousness, Grusha crosses a rotten bridge over a glacier, holding tight to the infant. Ranil Wickremesinghe invoked this iconic image when he addressed the nation soon after becoming prime minister in May 2022.

“Son, don’t look,” Grusha sings in the play’s popular Sinhala incarnation. “The abyss is deep.” Wickremesinghe asked Lankans to do the opposite – to look into the abyss and understand both its immensity and its nature. “Just as Grusha carried another’s child across a vine bridge, I now face an even greater challenge,” he said. “The abyss is deep, the bottom unseen. The bridge, a fragile sheet of glass, offers no support. With no handrails in sight, I tread cautiously, burdened by shoes with sharp iron nails.”