COLOMBO — Eighteen months after a landslide election victory that swept away Sri Lanka’s discredited political dynasties and promised a new era of transparent, accountable governance, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his National People's Power government are struggling to deliver on the sweeping changes they rode to power on, according to a new report by the International Crisis Group titled “Sri Lanka’s Bumpy Road to a Political Reset.”
The findings, drawn from dozens of interviews with politicians, lawyers, diplomats, activists and business leaders conducted between late 2024 and February 2026, offer the most detailed independent assessment yet of the NPP’s tenure — and the picture they paint is of a government that has kept the lights on economically, arrested a handful of powerful figures, and occasionally said the right things, while failing to make decisive progress on any of the core reforms it promised: from ending impunity for wartime atrocities, to reining in the national security apparatus, to offering Tamils and Muslims a meaningful share of political power.
“The window has already begun to narrow,” the report warns, cautioning that failure to act boldly risks a return to “ethnic tensions and political authoritarianism.”
THE CRITICS SPEAK
Perhaps the sharpest edge of the Crisis Group report is its documentation of what reform advocates — including some inside the NPP itself — described as a growing gulf between the government’s rhetoric and its actions.
Tamil and Muslim communities in the north and east, who helped deliver the NPP’s historic sweep of every one of Sri Lanka’s 22 electoral districts, say they have seen little in return. Counter-terrorism police and military intelligence units continue to surveil, question and intimidate Tamil activists, survivors’ groups and journalists in the north and east, the report documents — a pattern it calls “a deliberate strategy to prevent accountability.” The government, for its part, insists these tactics are not occurring.
All nine provincial councils have remained dormant since 2019. The NPP promised to hold provincial elections within a year of taking office. That deadline passed without elections being scheduled. Now a parliamentary committee has been appointed to study a new electoral system for provincial polls — a move critics warn is designed to delay further.
“For many people outside the north and east, the only reason they give for voting NPP is that there is no alternative,” a journalist told Crisis Group researchers in May 2025.
Women’s groups, who mobilised heavily for the NPP’s campaign and celebrated the appointment of feminist academic Harini Amarasuriya as prime minister, also report disillusionment. The first chair of the newly established National Women’s Commission resigned after four months, citing the government’s failure to provide funding or resources. An all-male committee was appointed to manage post-cyclone reconstruction funds. And the government has yet to act on longstanding demands — backed by the UN and Muslim women’s rights activists — to reform the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act.
Anti-corruption campaigners and legal professionals warn that some of the independent oversight institutions the NPP promised to strengthen are instead being weakened. The position of auditor general sat vacant for most of 2025 after the Constitutional Council rejected four consecutive presidential nominees as unqualified; critics alleged that Dissanayake was seeking a loyalist. The Right to Information Commission issued a public statement in November 2025 saying it was forced to operate with “a skeleton staff” despite an “increasing caseload” because the government refused to provide the dedicated funding the law requires.
“There is a real risk of JVP ruining the NPP,” one discouraged supporter told researchers.
A TEST OF POLITICAL WILL
Few issues have exposed the gap between promise and delivery as starkly as the government’s handling of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, which left 270 dead and more than 500 injured.
Dissanayake made justice for the bombings a central plank of his presidential campaign. On coming to office he reappointed senior police investigators who had been sacked by former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and in October 2024 he removed Suresh Sallay, the former intelligence chief long suspected of links to the attacks, from his post. In February 2026, police arrested Sallay, charging him with allegedly conspiring with and assisting the Islamist network responsible for the bombings.
But the arrest came after more than a year of government pledges that breakthroughs were “imminent.” Those pledges often came in response to public pressure from the powerful Catholic archbishop of Colombo, Malcolm Ranjith, most of whose diocesans were among the victims. Sallay has not yet been indicted, and the Crisis Group report documents significant resistance within the national security apparatus to the broader investigation.
In September 2025, Dissanayake told parliament that a number of military officers would “soon” be arrested in connection with the bombings. Months later, no such arrests have been made. The report notes that in at least one emblematic case — the abduction of cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda in 2009 — proceedings have stalled, and the victim’s wife has appealed directly to the president for protection after receiving threats.
The report attributes some of the delay to obstruction: evidence was destroyed and manipulated under previous governments, and criminal networks within the state, the president has acknowledged, are actively resisting accountability. But analysts also point to what they describe as the NPP’s own links to the military as an additional complicating factor — a charge the government rejects.
THE HARDER ROAD
If accountability for the Easter bombings has proven difficult, accountability for atrocities committed during Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war — which ended in a catastrophically bloody government military offensive in 2009, with an estimated 150,000 or more killed — remains almost entirely absent.
The NPP government, like its predecessors, has rejected the Sri Lanka Accountability Project operated by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, calling it “counterproductive.” In October 2025, Colombo voted against a UN Human Rights Council resolution that included a two-year extension for the project. Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath told the Council in September that the government was “committed to advancing accountability through credible domestic processes.”
Tamil and human rights organisations, both in Sri Lanka and internationally, greeted this language with scepticism. Successive governments have issued similar assurances. In the meantime, families of the forcibly disappeared in the north wait for answers, the Office on Missing Persons remains underfunded and widely viewed as ineffective, and not a single member of the Sri Lankan military has been prosecuted for war crimes.
The Crisis Group report does note one area of cautious hope: a mass grave in the northern town of Chemmani is being exhumed, and Dissanayake reportedly promised the UN Secretary-General in September that his government would formally invite UN technical assistance for the process. But Tamil families, the report notes, will be watching closely to see whether the government provides the resources, expertise and political backing necessary to bring evidence to the point of prosecution.
On the question of the Prevention of Terrorism Act — which allows indefinite detention without charge and which human rights organisations have long documented as a driver of custodial torture — the NPP’s record is worse than its rhetoric suggested. The government used the PTA to detain 49 people in just its first five months in office. In December 2025, the justice ministry released draft replacement legislation — the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act — which critics say is as draconian as the law it purports to replace, with provisions for detention of up to two years without full judicial review at special police sites outside the normal prison system.
STABILITY WITHOUT JUSTICE
On the economy, the picture is mixed in a different way. The NPP was elected, in large part, on a platform of relief for millions of Sri Lankans devastated by the country’s 2022 economic collapse. It also campaigned against the austerity imposed by the International Monetary Fund as a condition of a $2.9 billion bailout. In power, it embraced that same program without fundamental revision.
The results, by conventional macroeconomic measures, have been respectable. Growth reached 5 percent in 2025. Foreign currency reserves are up. Inflation is under control. The IMF commended the government for staying within the “guardrails” of the 2023 bailout, and in February 2025 released another $334 million tranche of the loan.
But nearly a quarter of the population remains in poverty — double the pre-pandemic rate. Real wages are still well below pre-crisis levels. Three quarters of the government’s increased tax revenue comes from indirect taxes, especially VAT, which falls disproportionately on lower-income households. Total social protection spending remains at just 0.7 percent of GDP, the lowest in South Asia. And interest payments alone are projected to absorb 49 percent of total government revenues in 2026 — one of the highest ratios in the world.
The government’s fiscal position was further strained by Cyclone Ditwah, which struck in late November 2025, killing more than 800 people and causing an estimated $4.1 billion in damage. The government faced widespread criticism for its response: life-saving alerts were issued only in Sinhala and English, endangering Tamil-speaking communities in the worst-affected areas of the central hills. District officials reportedly hesitated to authorise emergency relief spending, fearing later corruption investigations.
In mid-March 2026, with oil and gas shortages resulting from war in the Middle East adding to the economic strain, the government imposed fuel rationing and a four-day working week for state institutions.
A GOVERNMENT LEARNING ON THE JOB
Much of the Crisis Group report is devoted to understanding why a government with a two-thirds parliamentary majority — enough to amend the constitution outright — has accomplished so little on its legislative agenda. The answer it offers is partly structural and partly political.
Structurally, the NPP simply had little experience of governing. Ministers find it difficult to delegate. The party’s distrust of senior bureaucrats, many of whom retain loyalties to the Rajapaksa era, has led it to rely on inexperienced officials with personal ties to ministers, limiting the government’s capacity to move quickly on complex policy reforms. No serious outside experts have been invited in to help drive the reform agenda, departing sharply from the approach of previous reform-oriented governments.
Politically, the tension between the NPP’s two faces — the liberal, pluralist coalition the party presented to voters, and the tightly hierarchical, Sinhala-nationalist JVP that forms its core — has not been resolved in power. JVP leaders hold most of the key cabinet positions. Professionals and community activists who joined the NPP hoping to contribute to policymaking say they have been systematically sidelined. The NPP manifesto’s promises of devolution, ethnic inclusion and constitutional reform reflected the priorities of the coalition’s non-JVP members; the failure to deliver on those promises reflects the JVP’s continued dominance.
There have also been incidents that critics say betray the NPP’s claims to operate differently from its predecessors. The president warned voters in local election campaigning that central government funding would be more carefully scrutinised in councils won by opposition parties. NPP leaders complained it was “undemocratic” for smaller opposition parties to form working majorities in councils where the NPP had won the most seats but fell short of a majority. Ministers bypassed established media complaints procedures to instruct police to investigate sources of news coverage they deemed unfavourable. JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva publicly praised the “democratic” qualities of China’s one-party system and suggested the NPP might need to remain in power for “fifteen, twenty or 25 years” to achieve its goals.
The August 2025 arrest of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe on charges of misusing public funds for a foreign trip was celebrated by the NPP as proof that “no one is above the law.” Opposition parties and many in civil society called it a political witch hunt designed to humiliate a six-time prime minister. The case remains unresolved.
THE ROAD AHEAD
The Crisis Group report stops well short of writing off the NPP. It notes that the government remains broadly popular and that the opposition remains fragmented. At the local elections of May 2025, the NPP won twice as many votes as its nearest rivals, even as its support fell sharply from the parliamentary peak.
The report’s recommendations are direct. The government should pursue prosecutions of security officials implicated in the Easter bombings and in Rajapaksa-era political killings. It should back the exhumation of mass graves and end military intimidation of Tamil rights activists and families of the disappeared. It should either repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act outright, or ensure that any replacement legislation conforms to international human rights norms. It should hold provincial elections without further delay. It should pursue progressive taxation, including property taxes and wealth levies, to shift the burden of economic recovery away from the poor. And it should conduct its own independent assessment of Sri Lanka’s debt sustainability, which the IMF’s own models acknowledge remains dangerously high for many years to come.
International actors urged to press Colombo to end surveillance and harassment of civil society and to remain open to further debt restructuring given the combined damage of Cyclone Ditwah and the Middle East war.
Above all, the report calls on Dissanayake to return to the spirit of his early speeches as president, in which he acknowledged that the country’s “profound crisis” could not be resolved by “a single government, political party or individual” and stressed the importance of “constructive criticism” and “public scrutiny.”
