Sri Lanka joins the growing list of 21st-century ‘colour’ revolutions against corruption and authoritarianism: Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, the Arab Spring that brought down several regimes in the Arab world, Georgia’s Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution, to name a few. Sri Lanka’s struggle could be called the ‘Purple Revolution’ after the colour of its national flower ‘Nil Mahanel’.
Leading the struggle, protesting Sri Lankan youth beat to death a member of parliament, surrounded houses of other ruling party MPs, ransacked the prime minister’s official residence, torched his private house, almost occupied the parliament, and chased their president and his ruling clan out of the country. These were representatives the country had elected less than two years ago. With Sri Lanka defaulting on its foreign debt, no money to pay for imports, an acute shortage of essential goods and runaway inflation, the simmering discontent with corruption, nepotism and economic mismanagement burst out into the open.
In the 1960s, wise public policies of successive governments had made Sri Lanka a role model for South Asian development. In 1964, Singapore’s founder, Lee Kuan Yew, said he hoped that his country would be like Sri Lanka some day.