The president’s departure, assuming it happens, is likely to disrupt the Rajapaksa family dynasty that dominated the country’s politics for decades and ultimately helped drive one of South Asia’s most prosperous nations to economic collapse and finally to uprising, uniting diverse groups in a country with a bloody history of ethnic conflict.
Although underlying domestic troubles caused most of Sri Lanka’s woes, they were made worse by a convergence of the same problems afflicting the rest of the world. The coronavirus pandemic destroyed Sri Lanka’s tourism industry, a major sector of the economy. Global spikes in food and energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine exacerbated the crisis, ballooning import bills just as the country ran out of foreign currency reserves.
Nirvikar Singh, an economics professor and South Asia expert at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told The Washington Post last month that the Sri Lankan government has been “astonishingly irresponsible and incompetent” at…
