Little left of Sri Lanka's left, and the right is divided too

The Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front-JVP) that launched two insurrections (the first long before the Tamil Tigers started theirs in earnest) in which several thousand people died, split in two this month over ideological and other differences.

The JVP, a well-organised group with support among the rural poor, the universities and trade unions, was the last of the revolutionary parties still standing in a country where the socialist movement is one of the oldest in Asia.

The movement dates back to the mid-1930s and at least 15 years before independence from Britain in 1948. With Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, enjoying universal franchise as far back as 1931, the first of the left-wing parties, the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Equal Society Party-LSSP) with its socialist and forward-looking policies, was able to garner support among the country’s progressives and working class.

The Communist Party subsequently emerged in the 1940s, and together they advanced revolutionary ideas that seemed attractive enough for a country just emerging from 450 years of western colonial rule, first under the Portuguese, then the Dutch and finally the British.

Most of the leftist leaders of the day were western educated, mostly in Britain, and had carried back with them the ideas preached by the founders of Marxism or the milder left-wing ideology of Britain’s early socialists. After all, Karl Marx had worked on his monumental work, Das Capital, in the British Museum.

In that sense, Sri Lanka’s leftist leaders, who had studied at prestigious universities or legal inns preceded many African leaders who were also educated abroad and introduced socialism to their newly-emergent nations.

Despite their revolutionary ardour, the leftists realised early enough that they could never gain political power under their own steam through the parliamentary system they appeared wedded to. The only road to political power sharing was to coalesce with established parties that enjoyed support nationally and had a much wider reach.

Even the Communist Party, for all its Marxist-Leninist preaching, had settled for a parliamentary-democratic path to win even a modicum of power. 

So the left aligned itself with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), whose founder, the Oxford-educated Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, was elected prime minister in 1956.

But the LSSP first and the communists six years later joined hands only after the widow of Bandaranaike assumed leadership of the party and the country following the assassination of her husband in 1959.

Less than one year after this three-party coalition won a resounding election victory, the JVP, which had only been a shadowy movement at the time, launched its first armed assault on the government.

A militarily ill-equipped government sought assistance from abroad and from neighbouring countries such as India and Pakistan. They provided arms, as did certain countries of the Non-Aligned Movement such as Yugoslavia and Egypt.

What then took the world by surprise was that another Marxist-oriented group would try to topple a socialist government that included Trotsky-ites and communists among its number, hardly a year after coming to power.

However, the JVP, consisting largely of unemployed rural youth, many of them graduates, urban workers and university students, saw the traditional left-wing parties as merely mouthing Marxist shibboleths but fraternising with urban-centred middle-class politics, to which the English-speaking leftist leaders themselves belonged.

To the revolutionary JVP, these were “parlour-pinks and reds” who denied rural youth their rightful place for lack of proficiency in English.

While the traditional left had become ideologically diluted and lost its original fervour, the JVP, whose insurrection was crushed and its leaders arrested, maintained its revolutionary character, though it subsequently entered mainstream politics and entered parliament triumphantly, garnering nearly 40 seats.

The re-emergence of the JVP in a more vicious and murderous form was propelled by external circumstances. When the then rightist Sri Lanka government had cornered the Tamil Tiger leadership, which was conducting its own separatist war in the north, Indian intervention not only gave the Tiger leaders a fresh lease of life but the signing of the Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987 brought Indian peace-keeping troops to northern Sri Lanka.

The presence of foreign troops on Sri Lankan soil was a sufficient impetus for the JVP to launch itself anew, adding nationalism to its Marxism, with a determination to oust the government that allowed Indian troops into Sri Lanka.

The JVP went on a killing spree. Politicians, state officials, journalists or anybody the JVP considered an enemy was grist to their murder mill. Perhaps no other country has in living memory faced two insurrections at the same time – one in the north by the Tamil Tigers, who had now engaged the Indian troops, and the JVP in the south, crippling the government.

But now the JVP – which begaan suffering from internal factionalism about four years ago when dissidents left to join President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government – has broken up again. Nothing characterises this deep schism more than the planned commemoration of the JVP’s founder Rohana Wijeweera next month. Each faction will do it their own way.

With the official opposition, the rightist United National Party, facing severe internal problems and a power struggle, only the JVP provided some kind of opposition to President Rajapaksa, whose three major electoral victories since the military defeat of the Tamil Tigers in May 2009 are proof enough of his huge domestic popularity.

Now with the JVP committing political hara kiri and the opposition UNP bruised internally, President Rajapaksa is sitting pretty with no opposition in sight.

 

Neville De Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist now on a diplomatic assignment in Bangkok.