How this South Asian country is transiting from a stable liberal democracy into a chaotic illiberal mobocracy
THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | The news from Sri Lanka is intriguing and confounding both as politics and as economics. Let us begin with its politics. Sri Lanka has, since independence from Britain in 1948, been consistently a liberal-democracy. Only India has that record in South Asia. Elections have always been held and are fairly free and fair. Control of government (the president, prime minister and parliament) has consistently changed hands from incumbent to opposition and back again. True some powerful individuals and families have dominated the politics of Sri Lanka at certain times, but that is the stuff of politics in many democracies.
