Profile – Anura Kumara Dissanayake
By: Upali Obeyesekere
Anura Kumara Dissanayake (born November 24, 1968, Thambuttegama, in the Anuradhapura district. He received his education at the Thambuttegama Gamini Maha Vidyalaya and the Thambuttegama Central College, becoming the first student from the college to gain university entrance. He is the ninth executive president of Sri Lanka and leader of the National People’s Power (NPP). Dissanayake’s election marks a major turning point in Sri Lankan politics. Unlike most previous presidents, he does not come from a political family. His victory in the presidential election reflects public frustration in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s 2022 economic collapse, as well as a desire to break away from the country’s traditional political elite. He became involved in student politics as a JVP activist in 1988, during the JVP’s second Marxist insurrection (1987–89). Dissanayake continued to be active in youth politics into the 1990s, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Kelaniya in 1995.
Dissanayake entered the Sri Lankan parliament in 2000 as a representative of the JVP, and he has continued to work in the parliament ever since. From 2004 to 2005 he served as Sri Lanka’s minister of agriculture, livestock, lands, and irrigation. He became leader of the JVP in 2014, and shortly afterward he began to rehabilitate the party’s image. Dissanayake served as the chief opposition whip in the Sri Lankan parliament from 2015 to 2018. In 2019 he established the National People’s Power (Jathika Jana Balawegaya; NPP), a progressive coalition of 21 political organizations, and ran in that year’s presidential election, in which he ultimately received only 3 percent of the vote.
Since assuming office, Dissanayake has both proclaimed a “new era of renaissance” for Sri Lanka and stated that “we have deeply understood that we are going to get a challenging country. We don’t believe that a government, a single party or an individual would be able to resolve this deep crisis.”