Is Sri Lanka’s New Regime Already Running Out of Tricks?

A biting political exposé unveils how the Punadura government, once hailed as a revolutionary force, is now ensnared in the same propaganda and conspiracy traps it vowed to dismantle. With satellite scandals, paranoia-fueled speeches, and institutional stagnation, Sri Lanka’s newest rulers face a reckoning between illusion and governance.

What Sri Lanka is witnessing is not simply the teething troubles of a young government; it is the public unmasking of a regime that has survived thus far on the twin crutches of deceptive propaganda and the residual hope of its electorate.

Consider the bizarre theatre now unfolding: Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, once celebrated as a brilliant intellectual, stood in Parliament to justify a satellite deal inked during the Rajapaksa era—a period her own government brands the most corrupt in Sri Lankan history. She didn’t just defend it; she glorified it, slamming critics including her superiors, and thereby undermining the regime’s anti-corruption narrative. It was a stunning display of contradiction.

Next came the well-worn choreography of political damage control. Trade Minister Wasantha Samarasinghe claimed Harini had been “misled” by the Board of Investment. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake then appeared with a dramatic speech alleging “new conspiracies” against the government. The survival narrative was now taking form: a regime gasping for credibility, clinging to invented threats.

Nearly a year into their tenure, this administration has grown adept at unmasking not enemies, but their own incapacity for effective governance. The same rent-seekers and opportunists who plagued past governments have embedded themselves once again. Only now, many hold JVP credentials. Their roles? Reduced to passive observers, mere “sitters and monitors,” courtesy of the infamous “pelwatte appointments” that now infest Sri Lanka’s bureaucratic machinery.

This is not reform; it is regression.

The Punadura regime, increasingly, resembles not a new dawn but a grim echo. Its propaganda, like cheap fireworks, dazzles momentarily but soon dissipates into acrid smoke. The brief honeymoon is over. We are in the phase where empty slogans crash into granite-hard realities, and the gap between performance and policy becomes too wide to ignore.

This was never a renaissance. The so-called revolution is now a farce, the sermon giving way to hollow deeds. The public, once patient, is growing aware.

Harini’s episode is not an isolated lapse but a symptom of deeper decay. Her passionate yet politically reckless defense of a tainted investment betrayed more than poor judgment. It exposed her naiveté and her obliviousness to the delicate choreography of governance. She handed her critics a loaded weapon, which they have used to great effect.

President Dissanayake’s grandiose rebuttal was textbook crisis spinning. His speech weaved together trade numbers, moral alarms, and dark warnings of conspiracies. It was less about governance, more a ritual invocation of paranoia, as if Nixon’s ghost haunted Diyawanna. Instead of reassurance, it reeked of desperation.

The louder this government chants about stability, the more fragile it seems. True stability doesn’t demand constant affirmation; it emanates from quiet competence. When leaders begin each day by proclaiming they will not fall, one suspects they already teeter on the brink.

This regime has reached the limits of narrative control. In its early days, it dismissed critics as remnants of a corrupt ancien régime. But governing is not campaign-mode theatre. It is trade-offs, compromises, and incremental gains a grind this administration appears unwilling or unable to confront. The satellite affair exposes the hypocrisy of railing against old systems while defending them when politically convenient.

Such moments often signal the beginning of a regime’s irreversible erosion. Think of Gorbachev’s unraveling Glasnost or Tony Blair’s fall from grace in post-Iraq Britain. Moral authority becomes toxic once exposed as selective. The same fate may await Punadura.

Its recent conduct also illustrates institutional capture a known pitfall where incumbents co-opt state machinery for party ends. The so-called reformers have simply mimicked the clientelist networks they decried. This is not transformation; it is entrenchment. The bureaucracy, instead of becoming a tool for change, is now the graveyard of reform.

President Dissanayake’s constant invocation of “conspiracies” mirrors the age-old strategy of manufacturing enemies to justify power. From Caesar to Erdogan, history abounds with such examples. But the problem with invented threats is that once the public senses the lie, vigilance turns into mockery, and strength into insecurity.

The satellite saga encapsulates this evolving strategy. No longer can the administration coast on past virtue or economic slogans. It now must manufacture crises to sustain political energy. The tactic is clear: deflect attention from failures by projecting treachery onto critics.

Yet this game has a shelf-life. Voters grow weary of circus acts. In a country rocked by alternating waves of hope and betrayal, patience is thin. Propaganda can carry a regime across rough waters, but it cannot pave roads. Eventually, people expect more than tales. They demand outcomes.

The Punadura regime’s real test isn’t resisting opposition barbs. It is confronting the systemic decay it inherited and now perpetuates. Should it fail, it will join the long list of governments who mistook drama for policy, only to find their audience gone.

In the Mahabharata, Duryodhana once lamented, “I know what is right, but I cannot do it.” That may soon be the Punadura confession caught in its own web of patronage, propaganda, and paranoia. The applause has faded. The honeymoon is dead. No exoneration, no conspiracy, no satellite can substitute for the boring, brutal work of actually governing.