The Year That Refused to End

Photo courtesy of DW

Sri Lanka did not enter 2026 through celebration. It crossed the threshold quietly, carrying grief. The final days of 2025 did not offer closure but catastrophe. Cyclone Ditwah, the most devastating climate disaster since the 2004 tsunami, swept across the island with a force that felt sudden yet deeply foretold. Floodwaters swallowed towns in the lowlands. In the Central Highlands, long abused in the name of development, the earth itself gave way. More than 1,500 major landslides were recorded within days. Entire villages vanished beneath mud and rock. Roads collapsed, rivers shifted course and families were buried before their names could be written into any official record.

Over a thousand lives were lost in a matter of days, many still uncounted, many never formally named.To call Ditwah only as  a natural disaster is an ethical failure. What unfolded was not nature alone but nature responding violently to decades of political negligence, ecological vandalism and a development model driven by profit over care. Ditwah stripped the country bare, exposing not only geological instability but the moral bankruptcy beneath its political economy. As Sri Lanka steps into 2026, it does so on unstable ground physically, politically and ethically.

A post-colonial democracy built on fractures

Sri Lanka’s present cannot be understood without returning to its post-colonial beginning. Independence promised dignity, equality and democratic participation. What followed was a state increasingly shaped by elite capture, ethno-religious nationalism and a political culture that treated power as inheritance rather than responsibility. Democratic institutions survived in form but democratic substance slowly eroded. Economic inequality widened. Patronage replaced accountability. Elections became rituals rather than corrections.These contradictions exploded through three major youth uprisings, each marking a generation’s refusal to accept exclusion.

The 1971 southern insurrection, rooted in unemployment and political marginalisation, was crushed with extraordinary brutality. Thousands of Sinhala youth were killed before their demands were even understood. Reform was replaced by repression.

July 1983 shattered the promise of equal citizenship. The anti-Tamil pogrom was not an aberration; it was a revelation. Tamil youth radicalisation followed not as destiny but as consequence. What emerged was a 26-year war that consumed generations of Tamil and Sinhala youth alike.

The 1988-89 southern uprising repeated the pattern. Abductions, disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings became routine. Families were left without bodies or answers. Justice was postponed indefinitely. Across Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim communities, across Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Islamic traditions, the loss was collective. What collapsed was not only life but trust in the state itself.

Disaster as governance

The 2004 tsunami should have humbled the nation. Instead, it rehearsed a dangerous political lesson: catastrophe could be governed without accountability. International aid flowed. Transparency did not. Reconstruction was politicised. Coastal communities were displaced under buffer zone policies while tourist infrastructure quietly reclaimed the same land. Suffering was managed, not addressed. Disaster became absorbed into the logic of power.

The war’s end in 2009 brought relief but not transformation. Military victory hardened into political ideology. Under the Rajapaksa regime, power was centralised, dissent criminalised and governance militarised. Development became spectacle; expressways without livelihoods, ports without sovereignty and cities without citizens. Environmental safeguards were dismantled. Hills were cut, forests cleared and rivers redirected. Debt replaced sustainability as the engine of growth.

Democracy survived procedurally but fear replaced debate. Accountability became treason. The foundations of collapse – political, economic and ecological – were quietly laid.

Communalism as political technology

When legitimacy weakens, division becomes strategy. The 2014 anti-Muslim violence exposed how Sinhala-Buddhist ultranationalism could be mobilised tactically rather than ideologically. Fear was manufactured. Minorities were scapegoated. Political survival was secured through polarisation.

This was not mass hysteria; it was political technology.The gap between the people’s democratic aspirations and the political class’s instinct for control widened further. Democracy became something to be invoked, not practised.

The betrayal of reform and the politics of fear

The 2015 electoral transition briefly reopened democratic imagination. Accountability, reconciliation and reform returned to public language. But the promise collapsed under corruption, cowardice and contradiction.

The 2018 constitutional coup permanently damaged public trust. Good governance became a term of ridicule. Reform itself was discredited.

The 2019 Easter Sunday attacks were a national tragedy and a political instrument. Fear replaced debate. Militarisation replaced democracy. The Rajapaksas returned promising strength and stability.

COVID-19 did not cause Sri Lanka’s collapse. It exposed it.

Debt-fuelled growth, corruption, elite tax cuts and reckless borrowing surfaced brutally. Fuel queues, medicine shortages, hunger and despair became everyday realities. By 2022, the state was bankrupt. And then, something unprecedented occurred.

Aragalaya: When ordinary people reimagined power

The aragalaya was not perfect but it was historic. Ordinary citizens occupied public spaces peacefully. They practised collective decision making. They removed a powerful, majority elected president without civil war. For a brief moment, Sri Lanka witnessed direct democracy in action – fragile, plural and unfinished  but real.

Although later contained and redirected, the aragalaya permanently altered the country’s political imagination. Power was no longer unthinkable.

 A new government, old structures

The 2024-25 electoral victory of the NPP under Anura Kumara Dissanayake marked a historic rupture with dynastic politics. Expectations were immense. One year on, reality is mixed. Genuine reforms coexist with IMF-driven austerity. Structural constraints remain. Old habits persist. Internal contradictions sometimes weaken momentum.

Then came Cyclone Ditwah, tearing away remaining illusions.

Ditwah and the collapse of the development myth

Ditwah was not an accident. It was the outcome of decades of hill cutting, deforestation, extractive infrastructure, river manipulation and neoliberal development that ignored ecological limits. The central highlands collapsed not because rain fell but because governance failed. Climate change did not create inequality. It weaponised it. Villages became no man’s lands. New waterfalls appeared where roads once stood. Development’s promise was revealed as an illusion.

Sri Lanka as a South Asian mirror

Sri Lanka’s crisis is not isolated. It reflects a regional condition.

Bangladesh struggles under democratic repression. Pakistan remains trapped between military dominance and civilian fragility with Balochistan bleeding in silence. Nepal’s transition stagnates. The Maldives balances precariously amid geopolitical rivalry. India deepens majoritarian authoritarianism. Across South Asia climate disasters, economic stress, drug economies and youth disillusionment intersect dangerously.

Crisis is no longer exceptional. It is normalised.

Asia and the global interregnum

Myanmar collapses under military rule. Authoritarian populism rises elsewhere. Cities choke under pollution from Delhi to Southeast Asia. Floods, earthquakes, wildfires and tsunami alerts reshape daily life.

Globally, genocide unfolds live in Gaza. War grinds on in Ukraine. Sudan disintegrates. International law weakens. The UN fails repeatedly.

This is the interregnum Antonio Gramsci warned of when the old order dies and the new cannot yet be born. Monsters roam.

Venezuela’s crisis, unfolding dramatically in early 2026, reveals how power is seized and legitimised through force, spectacle and global media while ordinary people absorb the shock. Truth fractures. Human life is ranked.

Signals of another possibility

And yet, there are counter currents. Moments like Zohran Mamdani’s historic election as Mayor of New York gesture toward something larger than individual victory: multicultural democracy as lived practice; politics rooted in care, climate justice and ethical restraint. These are not distant symbols. They are mirrors.

Across the Global South, youth-led resistance emerges,from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Latin America, and Africa. Imperfect, fragmented, but alive.

 2026: A choice point

Sri Lanka enters 2026 walking a fragile bridge over political uncertainty, economic precarity and ecological collapse. The ground has not stabilised; it has merely paused from crumbling.

This is not a moment for saviours. It is a moment for collective moral courage – patient, plural and rooted in everyday acts of care we witnessed when neighbours helped neighbours as the waters rose. The children born today will inherit either rubble or renewal. 2026 is more than a calendar year. It is a choice point.

The bridge still holds. For now.