Investigator: Sulochana Peiris
Ethnic and religious tensions have perennially torn the fabric of the Sri Lankan society since its independence from British rule in 1948. Dominated by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, the country has long been home to several minority groups such as Hindu Tamils, Muslim Sri Lankan Moors, and a significant Christian community. The country experienced a civil war from 1983 to 2009 after the minority Tamil community led by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged an insurgency against the state for an autonomous homeland in the country’s North/East.
The war’s end saw the emergence of new faultlines as the governing Mahinda Rajapaksa administration encouraged an expansion of its majoritarian ideological politics against the island’s ethno-religious minorities. UN and international rights-based organizations pressed for investigation of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Rajapaksa administration. Meanwhile, a surge of the Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist narrative was permeating every sphere of Sri Lankan public life, expanding, and solidifying the Rajapaksa vote base in the southern districts. The ethnic Tamil minority was languishing in war-torn North/East due to numerous socio-economic hardships and challenges stemming from heavy militarization and lack of government support measures.
After taking charge of the country’s executive, legislative and judicial centers of power, Rajapaksa’s administration continued to nurture the Sinhala Buddhist ideology at the expense of Tamil and Muslim minorities who make up a quarter of the country’s population. They paid little attention to the outstanding transitional justice issues connected to the country’s war and took no effort to reconcile conflict-torn inter-ethnic/religious relations. Instead, the Rajapaksa administration openly supported the permeation of the Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist ideology into institutions and practices of governance.
In this milieu, the Muslim community found itself to be the new enemy of the majority Sinhala community as ultra nationalist Sinhala Buddhist militant groups such as Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force, BBS) and Ravana Bala Kaya (Ravana Task Force) positioned themselves on the frontlines of a new anti-Muslim/Islam campaign. Strategically aligning their ethno-nationalist action against the Muslim minority with the larger global war-on-terror geo-political discourse, with covert support from their political puppet masters, Buddhist militant groups took full advantage of the domestic post-war transitional context to create and propagate anti-Muslim and anti-Christian narratives. Before long, the war-torn island was witnessing a spike in low-intensity violent attacks targeting Christian and Muslim places of worship. The ruling Sinhala political elite’s tacit approval for their Sinhala Buddhist supremacist-ideology centric action enabled the ethno-nationalist Sinhala groups to escalate their anti-Muslim campaign with impunity. The 2018 Digana riot was the most devastating post-war anti-Muslim violent incident to-date which was subsequently contained with the imposition of a country-wide curfew and a multi-day social media ban.
The media as a tool for division
Sri Lanka’s mainstream media has generally mirrored its divided society. Among media producers, Sri Lanka’s media is highly segmented by language. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s media audiences are segmented across language, format, and geographic spheres. In this landscape, the southern-based mainstream media has often played its own culpable role in the post-war era, by helping mediate the Sinhala Buddhist supremacist narrative to the Sinhala majority community. Over-crowded and under-regulated, Southern media has perennially colluded with, or supported, the Sinhala political elite for ideological reasons or financial gains enabling an elite capture of media. The elite capture of media has had a debilitating impact on media’s independence with clientelism enabling elite groups with ties to the government to benefit from uncritiqued media coverage and pursue their various agendas. Elite media capture has consistently undermined media’s independence while the unethical media practices have corroded the country’s already weakened democracy and rule of law situation.
No other single event has illuminated the lasting impacts of unaccountable and unethical media behavior than the August 2019 presidential election which was the apogee of elite media capture in the post-independence arena. Both state and private media organizations overtly supported the front runner of the election campaign and former defense secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to run an alarmingly racist campaign based on the Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist ideology. The 2019 Easter Sunday’s violence perpetrated by a local Muslim jihad group helped Rajapaksa to make the most compelling anti-Muslim case since the war’s end. Rajapaksa wasted no time in throwing his hat to the ring in the ensuing aftermath that was already witnessing a deadly escalation of the anti-Muslim sentiment in the entire country.
With the backing of rich moguls and media owners, Rajapaksa’s election campaign infiltrated all key media formats and platforms using very organic, strategic, and technologically advanced tools and approaches. Strategy planners and creative heads leading the Rajapaksa campaign fabricated “stories” and “incidents” involving members of the Muslim minority forcing them to a state of apprehensive silence amidst proliferating accusations as being supporters of jihadist violence and extremism. Apart from using state media through existing connections, the Rajapaksa’s election campaign captured key private media platforms, too.
The mainstream media is still the main source of information for most of the population, including a larger segment of the Sinhalese population, their main vote base. Even before his official campaign had kicked off, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was being promoted as the savior of the Sinhala Buddhist nation, once again. His campaign was headed by a media mogul whose media conglomerate comprised well-known television, radio, print, and advertising companies with outreach capacity to reach millions. By eating, drinking, and sleeping the frontrunner’s presidential campaign, the campaign runners helped Gotabaya Rajapaksa to get inside the Sinhala Buddhist heads rent free. Substantial amounts of unaccounted for-campaign finances were pouring in from countless domestic and overseas fronts.
Of note has been the way the Rajapaksa regime has innovatively used social media to propagate anti-Muslim narratives and hate speech to profound effect. This has been done through campaign adverts, setting up social media groups, as well as getting endorsed by prominent social media influencers with access to key digital spaces representing many thousands of followers. Digital influencers used their own social media platforms to campaign for Rajapaksa. Underpinning the messages of nation’s “security” and “eradicating terrorism” at the center, the Rajapaksa campaign manipulated widespread feelings of anger and disappointment at the previous government’s inability to prevent Easter Sunday’s violence. His campaign mobilized prominent academics, artists, and social influencers to extol the virtues of Rajapaksa’s character as the most suitable candidate to lead the nation towards a path of “vistas of prosperity and splendor”. Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the 2019 presidential election with over 6.9 million votes, representing 52.25% of the votes cast. As noted by academics interviewed in preliminary research for this project, some of the social media strategies deployed by the Rajapaksa have been used as a model by authoritarian governments worldwide.
Irrespective of who is in charge, state media in Sri Lanka has consistently displayed servility to the government in power. Except for one company, most of the other privately owned media showed blatant disregard for their independence, doubling down their support to the new Rajapaksa administration. The line of separation between government and private media became blurred as both were sounding alike in their coverage of ongoing affairs of the government and country. Those media which had always peddled ideas of nationalism driven by political or financial gains were now utilizing their platforms for the fabrication and mediation of anti-Muslim narratives at a level never seen before. They showed no compunction about the increasingly dangerous consequences resulting from lack of impartial and independent media in the country. Rajapaksa was given free rein by the media with no critique of a series of bad decisions and policies by his administration which brought the downfall of his presidency in less than three years. Erroneous fiscal policy decisions, unchecked clientelism, militarized state institutions, and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic led to the country’s worst economic crisis since its independence. Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned in exile in August 2022 unable to withstand youth-led protests that began earlier in the year.
So far, there has been no public apology by the responsible media organizations for their culpability in the propagation and proliferation of vicious anti-Muslim hate campaigns in the run-up to the 2019 presidential election and thereafter. Neither have they accepted accountability for providing uncritiqued support and media space for the Rajapaksa administration that led the country to economic bankruptcy whose devastating effects are both immediate as well as long-term and generational (currently nearly 30% Sri Lankans are facing food insecurity and nearly 40% children under five are suffering from malnutrition; the economic crisis prompted reductions in public spending for healthcare and education, denying urgent health care as well as education to thousands of poor Sri Lankans ).
Research project
The research will seek to tell the story of how the Rajapaksa regime came to power and the supporting role played by Sri Lanka’s captured media sector. The author will attempt to identify conditions and factors that enabled the Rajapaksa election campaign to infiltrate and capture mainstream media spaces, as well as the effects and impact of media capture on the country’s democracy, governance, and rule of law. Finally, the author will draw out the implications of this example for other countries, by establishing connections to how online media is being used to influence social and political movements worldwide through new configurations of power and technology.
Through primary data collection via interviews, the research will seek answers to several questions that address media capture by the elites, namely the relationship between the Rajapaksa election campaign and its impact on the voter behavior, public opinion of the Rajapaksa administration, the main short- and long-term socio-economic and political impact stemming from the rule by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa regime, the key policy implications/gaps unearthed by the elite media capture during the Rajapaksa election campaign and administration in terms of Sri Lanka’s mainstream media, rule of law and governance, the media capture impact on social cohesion and ethnic/religious coexistence, and the implications this case had for other political contexts.
Answers to the above research questions will draw on the following themes:
- The ways that elite capture of the media impacted the voter behavior;
- Key gaps in Sri Lanka’s media policy, law and regulation that allowed Rajapaksa-linked elite groups to capture mainstream media and manipulate media spaces to their advantage and achieve their vested interests;
- Gaps and problems in the adoption and compliance with journalism ethics related principles governing media’s independence that allowed elite capture to take place and continue unimpeded;
- How media capture by elite during the rise and reign of Rajapaksa did impact upon majority/minority relations; and
- How media capture during the period under review impacted on the overall democracy, governance and rule of law, with a focus on institutions and practices.
Research outputs
This research is expected to lead to three outputs as follows:
(i) A book telling the story of the Rajapaksa regime capturing the media. This book project will attempt to create a much-needed discourse on the nexus between elite media capture and democracy, governance, and rule of law mechanisms, practices, and institutions in Sri Lanka.
(ii) A one-hour documentary film anchored in the research themes discussed and findings put forward in the book; and
(iii) Presentation series involving book presentation and documentary screenings followed by a discourse at national and district level in collaboration with relevant media think tanks and local non-government and grassroots-based organizations in each district. In Sri Lanka, where media literacy is low, this step is crucial for the book and film to have impact and for people to learn lessons useful for their day to day lives.
The impact of the research project
The research will help shed light on key policy implications/gaps at two levels.
Firstly, it will expose policy gaps/loopholes pertinent to media law and regulation, including in the areas of media ethics, media independence, freedom of expression and freedom of information.
Secondly, it will also bring attention to how a lack of robust media legislation and regulation impinges on overall democracy, governance and rule of law-centric policies and practices. By creating a discourse on the existing situation and policy gaps in the above-mentioned areas at national and district level with key institutions and groups, the author will hopefully be able to motiavte them to work towards filling the existing gaps and formulating a possible new policy to secure media’s independence and impartiality, and protection agains captured.
This Sri Lanka-based research will also contribute to the overall debate and discourse at international level as a lessons-learned experience with the impact of elite media capture on democracy, rule of law and governance mechanisms, practices, and institutions. This will be done in collaboration with the Media and Journalism Research Center where the author is currently a fellow with access to its networks and platforms. Book talks and documentary screenings at international level will also be actively sought to further advance Peiris’s contribution to the topic at international level.