The Lessons Sri Lanka Can Learn from India’s AAP – Part 1
Photo courtesy of Lanka Leader
In September and November 2024, the NPP government led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake swept to power on a historic wave of popular discontent. Voters exhausted by decades of entrenched corruption, dynastic misrule and the catastrophic 2022 economic collapse turned to an outsider movement that promised nothing less than a systemic transformation of the country’s political culture.
Thousands of kilometres to the northwest, a strikingly similar story had unfolded a decade earlier. In 2015, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), born out of India’s mass anti-corruption movement, stormed the Delhi Assembly with 67 of 70 seats. It was a landslide that shook the Indian political establishment and offered a new template for popular democratic politics. Ten years later, in February 2025, the AAP won only 22 seats as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Delhi. The AAP’s top leaders have been jailed, its narrative shattered and its parliamentary ranks fracturing from within.
The parallels between the AAP’s rise and fall and the NPP’s current trajectory are not incidental; they are instructive. For those who believe that the NPP government still represents a genuine opportunity for systemic change, the story of the AAP is not merely a cautionary tale from a foreign land but a mirror held up to the present moment. The question will be whether the government will look into it honestly.
The outsider movements
Both the AAP and the NPP emerged from profound crises of legitimacy. The AAP grew from the 2011 India Against Corruption movement, channelling mass fury at political dynasties and patronage networks that had long treated state resources as personal property. Its founder, Arvind Kejriwal, a former civil servant, embodied the promise of a clean, competent, citizen-led politics. The party’s famous slogan was simple: governance for the common person.
The NPP, built around the JVP as its core, similarly positioned itself as an outsider untainted by the corruption of the Rajapaksa era or the failures of the UNP. Its decades in opposition, including its conspicuous absence from the governments that presided over the 2022 economic disaster, gave it a moral credibility that no established party could claim. President Dissanayake with his humble rural origins and personal history of surviving state repression embodied a compelling narrative of integrity and authenticity.
In both cases, the voter base was defined not so much by ideological alignment as by a desperate desire for something different. Voters did not vote for the AAP or the NPP because they fully trusted them. They voted because they no longer trusted anyone else. This distinction matters greatly. It means the mandate was conditional, fragile and deeply susceptible to the corrosive effects of perceived hypocrisy.
The BJP’s playbook against the AAP
From the moment the AAP came to power in Delhi, the BJP, which controlled the central government, deployed a sustained and relentless campaign to delegitimise, incapacitate and ultimately destroy it. These tools were familiar to anyone who has observed politics in South Asia: the weaponisation of central investigative agencies, the amplification of corruption allegations (real, exaggerated, and fabricated), the curbing of the Delhi government’s administrative powers through legislative manoeuvres and an unending propaganda offensive across loyal media platforms.
The BJP used the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to arrest and detain AAP’s top leaders, including Kejriwal himself and his deputy Manish Sisodia, on charges related to the Delhi liquor policy. Regardless of the legal merits, the political effect was devastating. With its leadership imprisoned, the AAP was forced into a posture of perpetual self-defence rather than governance. Its budgets were cut, its schemes obstructed and its bureaucrats rendered answerable to an unelected Lieutenant Governor rather than elected ministers.
It is important to note that the BJP itself harboured many politicians facing serious corruption allegations. The AAP correctly pointed this out. However voters, particularly the urban middle classes who had once been the party’s core base, responded not to comparative moral accounting but to the vivid, immediate imagery of AAP leaders in handcuffs. In politics, perception governs reality, often brutally so.
In Sri Lanka today, opposition forces, many of them drawn from the same political classes whose corruption contributed to the 2022 catastrophe, are mounting a campaign against the NPP government that bears more than a passing resemblance to the BJP’s playbook against the AAP. The NPP is being framed as incompetent, corrupt and hypocritical. Every procurement irregularity, every delayed reform, every governmental misstep is amplified and presented as proof that the NPP is no different from the governments it replaced.
The crucial difference, as clearly apparent, is structural. In India, the BJP was the central government attacking a regional Delhi government. In Sri Lanka, the NPP governs the country nationally and holds a two-thirds parliamentary majority. The opposition cannot deploy the levers of the central government’s power in the same way but this structural advantage does not make the NPP immune to the political dynamics that destroyed the AAP – it merely means those dynamics will play out differently.
The anti-corruption mandate
For both the AAP and the NPP, the anti-corruption mandate was not merely a policy platform; it was the very foundation of their moral authority. It is what distinguished them from their predecessors and persuaded sceptical voters to take a chance on political outsiders.
The NPP government has made a genuine and notable effort in this area. Under President Dissanayake, the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) has been reinvigorated but not to the extent needed due to the prevailing socio-economic and political environment. A retired high court judge was appointed as its Director General. Investigations and indictments have been initiated against former ministers, senior officials and members of the Rajapaksa family. In February 2026, the former intelligence chief Suresh Sallay was arrested in connection with the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, a case that many had believed would never be pursued.
Sri Lanka’s corruption ranking has shown modest improvement and the NPP launched a comprehensive National Anti-Corruption Action Plan (NACAP) for 2025-2029, supported by UNDP and Japan. These are real achievements and they should be acknowledged as such.
However, they are also under threat and the threat comes partly from within. The NPP’s decision to defend the Energy Minister, without allowing him to step aside on a temporary basis, against a CIABOC indictment for alleged misappropriation of funds was a serious blow to its credibility. Anti-corruption activists, including prominent NPP supporters, responded with cries of betrayal. The party that had campaigned on the principle that no one is above the law appeared to be protecting one of its own.
This is precisely how the AAP lost its way. The party that had risen on the promise of clean governance found itself defending its own leaders in court with Kejriwal himself characterising the corruption charges against him as political persecution. Whether or not that characterisation was accurate, the implication was fatal. The AAP’s anti-corruption narrative, once its greatest strength, became its greatest liability when its own leaders were in the dock.
Corruption in Sri Lanka is not a minor administrative inconvenience; it represents a systemic disease that has hollowed out public institutions, eroded citizen trust, distorted economic policy and contributed directly to the 2022 economic collapse. The IMF’s governance diagnostic was unambiguous: corruption and governance failures had imperilled national wellbeing. For the NPP to deliver on its mandate, it must be willing to hold its own members to the same standard it applies to its predecessors, not selectively but consistently.
Governance, inexperience and the bureaucratic trap
One of the most striking parallels between the AAP and the NPP is the challenge of inexperience. Both parties came to power having spent their entire political lives in opposition. Both had cultivated powerful moral narratives but limited experience of actually running a government. Both discovered upon taking office that the machinery of the state is resistant, complex and often loyal to forces other than the elected government.
In Delhi, the AAP found itself governing a city-state whose bureaucracy answered in practice to the Lieutenant Governor rather than to elected ministers. This was a situation the BJP had deliberately engineered through legislative changes that overturned a Supreme Court ruling. The result was a nightmarish paralysis in which government decisions were blocked, budgets delayed and the AAP’s flagship schemes – the mohalla clinics, the free electricity, the public-school improvements – were starved of resources or obstructed at every turn.
In Sri Lanka, the NPP faces a different but equally challenging version of this problem. Decisions are being made by a small circle of ministers who find it difficult to delegate. The party’s mistrust of senior bureaucrats, many of whom are perceived as loyal to the Rajapaksa-era establishment, has led to a reliance on less experienced loyalists, creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies. The devastating impact of Cyclone Ditwah in November 2025 exposed these weaknesses painfully: lifesaving alerts were issued only in Sinhala and English, leaving Tamil-speaking communities in the worst affected central hills without timely warning. District level officials hesitated to authorise emergency relief expenditures for fear of later corruption investigations. These were not failures of intention but failures of institutional capacity and governmental competence.
The NPP’s isolation from outside expertise compounds the problem. Unlike previous administrations that involved academics, professionals and civil society leaders in developing reform strategies, the NPP has remained largely insular. Non-JVP members of the NPP coalition – the professionals, civil servants and community activists who joined the alliance precisely because they wanted to contribute to policymaking – report feeling sidelined by the larger and better organised JVP. As one discouraged supporter put it: there is a real risk of the JVP damaging what the NPP promised to build.
The moralism trap
Both the AAP and the NPP fell into what might be called the moralism trap. Having built their political identities on the claim of superior ethical standards, they became uniquely vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy. Any misstep, however minor, could be presented, and has been presented, as evidence of fundamental dishonesty.
The AAP’s rhetoric about clean governance made corruption allegations against its leaders especially damaging. Whether or not the charges were politically motivated, and there are serious grounds to believe that at least some of them were, the optics of a party elected on an anti-corruption mandate with its leaders in jail on corruption charges proved impossible to survive.
The NPP is navigating similar terrain. Its moralistic language – the promise of a clean Sri Lanka, the rhetoric of system change, the claims to a new political culture – has set expectations that are extraordinarily difficult to meet. Every accusation, however baseless, is amplified by an opposition. Paradoxically, that opposition is composed largely of figures whose own records of corruption appear well known among the general public. Yet this does not insulate the NPP. The voter who previously supported the Rajapaksas and now votes NPP is not making a comparative moral judgement; they are expressing a demand for tangible improvement. When that improvement does not materialise at the speed promised, disillusionment follows quickly.
The NPP’s defensiveness in the face of criticism – ministers regularly requesting police investigations into alleged fake news rather than engaging with established complaints procedures, party leaders claiming that opposition parties forming coalition councils is undemocratic – echoes the arrogance that eventually alienated the AAP’s middle class base. The praise for elements of one party governance model and the suggestion that the NPP might need 15 to 25 years in power to achieve its vision raised alarm bells among those who had hoped for a genuinely pluralist politics.
