Who is Harini Amarasuriya?

Harini Amarasuriya is an academic, activist and a former member of parliament from the Marxist party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) to which Dissanayake also belongs.

She was born the youngest of three children in March 1970 in Galle on the country’s southwestern coast. Her father was a planter in a tea estate, which the government took over as part of a nationalization effort. The family later shifted to Colombo.

She attended Bishop’s College, an Anglican girls’ school in Colombo, and spent a year in the US as an exchange student while in school. With a fresh spurt of violence in 1988-89, she was forced to discontinue her studies in Sri Lanka. This led her to India: she completed her BA (Honours) in Sociology from Hindu College, Delhi University in 1994.

She followed this up with a Masters in Applied Anthropology and Development from Macquarie University, Australia and a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh.

Her first job was as a social health officer in a community mental health center where she worked with institutionalized women. “That (experience) changed the way I saw the world and opened my eyes to what was really going on in places that are not always visible to us,” Amarasuriya told Women for Politics in 2020.

Before entering politics full-time in 2021, the 54-year-old was the Head of the Humanities and Social Sciences department at the Open University of Sri Lanka.

And why is her appointment as PM significant?

Dr Amarasuriya is only the third woman to hold the post of Prime Minister – the country has had 16 Prime Ministers so far.

Amarasuriya has always identified as a feminist and advocated for a greater involvement of women in politics. She described the prevailing political culture as “largely dynastic politics” and being extremely toxic, masculine, violent and exclusive. She has also described the notion of politics not being a respectable profession as a key barrier to entry for women.

Her academic work has explored intersectionalities among gender, class and employment, as well as the impact of conflict in accessing resources. These concerns have extended into her activism as well.

She described the 2011 worker protests as a significant influence on her politics, extending her support as a member of the Federation of University Teachers Association. “I joined the union on my very first day at the university and went for my first protest march – without a job offer letter in hand,” she told Women for Politics.

These efforts led her to the JVP, which until then had been considered a militant outfit, responsible for the bloody insurrections against the government in 1971 and 1988-89 which had killed around 80,000 people. By then, the party had also changed its stance, with its leader, Anura Dissanayake apologizing for its crimes.

Most importantly, her appointment as the country’s Prime Minister may be the most credible way the JVP, and the larger National People’s Power alliance can assure their commitment to improving the lives of all citizens, especially the minority Tamil community. The JVP in particular has been accused of favoring the majority Sinhalese community, comprising about 70 percent of the country’s population, and Dissanayake did not secure major votes from the Tamil region in the north.

Amarasuriya has described growing up with Tamil neighbors who had to drop out of school in the early 1980s. This, coupled with a resistance to her Sinhalese family’s conservative stance, would go on to inform her political views. In May 2020, she wrote in The Wire“It seems as if nurturing constant tension with an ethnic/religious ‘other’ is essential for doing politics in Sri Lanka.”

She has also advocated for women, particularly Tamil women who bore the brunt of the civil war, to be included in the reconciliation process and policy changes.