Lanka's liberal globalist unintelligentsia

Dayan Jayatilleka, island.lk

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Excerpt:

[T]here is a chance that the over-ambitious, ideologically driven neoliberal ‘reform agenda’ of the Yahapalana government will be replaced or displaced to the margins, by the conventional, normal logic of electoral performance and survival. If the reform agenda is neoliberal and globalist, electoral logic in this country is almost always populist, which also means nationalist.

The reforms should have been primarily democratic and national, not primarily liberal and cosmopolitan/globalist, but they were. Who were the designers and drafters of the neoliberal reform agenda? Most of these persons, institutions and networks have been around and active in the same business, with the same disastrous results to their political masters, for the past 25 years. Yes, for a quarter century, since their debut was in the early 1990s. The present leaders of the neoliberal unintelligentsia were protégés of UK High Commissioner David Gladstone, who, as his memoirs disclose, was tasked by London with applying the ‘New Public Diplomacy’ paradigm of Britain in Sri Lanka against the populist yet pluralist Premadasa (UNP) administration. Premadasa was the only President who could have anchored pluralism precisely because he was a successful populist. ...