When Liberal Values for South Asia was published, way back in 1998, the future of democracy seemed reasonably secure in South Asia. India of course, except during the relatively brief period of the Emergency, had never really swerved from the path of democracy and the rule of law, and the preceding decade had shown how governments could change at the polls without extravagant rivalries or ill effects; but every other country in South Asia had suffered the rigours of authoritarianism, from which a few at least seemed to have moved into democratic systems during the nineties.

Though previous lapses in Sri Lanka had been less protracted than elsewhere, during the eighties the impact of the Jayewardene regime, and its efforts to guide democracy (on what its less authoritarian apologists presented as an East Asian model) had been tragically divisive. Though his efforts had been accompanied by what was seen as economic liberalism, the entrenched statist mentality had meant that little of the economy that had been taken into government hands was actually privatised. An open economy for Jayewardene only meant the encouragement of private business and trade, without the shrinking of the government sector or the opening up of the social sector, so that rent seeking became further entrenched. Insistence on continuing centralised control of government, with a growing economy, meant that disparities grew worse, and in the end the state had to deal with two youth insurgencies.