Sri Lanka’s revolution looks doomed

Reporting from Sri Lanka over the years has left me with mixed memories. On the one hand, there’s the horror and trauma of the Easter Bombings of 2019, which claimed 269 lives. The traumatic scenes at the hospital and morgue have been hard to forget, as have the eeriness of the tourist spots after all its foreign visitors had fled.

On the other hand, there is the country itself. It is relatively poor, of course, and beset by endemic corruption and nepotism, particularly at the top of government, along with its fair share of ethnic tension. But it has an incredibly warm-hearted and hospitable culture, filled with Buddhist gentleness and good humour, and that charming, slightly stuffy anachronistic Englishness that you find in certain postcolonial societies.

So it was unnerving to see the scenes of chaos and downright chutzpah emerging from the president’s residence in recent days. Crowds of ordinary people, suffering under the precipitous collapse in living standards that have led to severe fuel and food shortages, swam in the president’s swimming pool, jogged on his personal treadmill and took turns taking selfies in his bed.