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Facing a Pandemic at a Time of Elections and Cricket: Socio-Political Consequences of Sri Lanka's COVID-19 Curfew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Udan Fernando
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Abstract

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Sri Lanka's first confirmed coronavirus cases of a foreigner and a local took place on 27 January and 10 March respectively. Upon prematurely dissolving the Parliament, the country's attention was on holding an election on 25 April to further consolidate the power in the legislature riding on the victory at the Presidential Polls in November 2019. All were gearing up for a tough electoral battle. This was also the season of school cricket battles - a Sri Lankan preoccupation. While the number of infected cases as well as deaths gradually increased, the response to the pandemic was an embellishment of public health, politics and cricket within a quasi-democratic vacuum.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 15 , August 2020 , e13
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2020

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