AKD’s NPP-JVP & the Generic Left Aren’t Doing Their Best to Win

Dr Dayan Jayatilleka

The Left has the best chance of being elected to office in Sri Lanka since 1964 or 1947. That’s speculative. So let me put it more clearly. Never in my lifetime has the Left been closer to assuming governmental power by democratic means, i.e., leading the country. We have never been closer to having a left-wing leader and administration.

Society is dividing between those who think that’s a good thing and those who think it’s bad. As Mao said in his first political essay on the Peasant Movement in Hunan, opinion is divided between those who say “it’s fine” and those who say “it’s terrible”. Mao thought it was fine.

We had a similar division of opinion during the Aragalaya. Opinion remains divided about it. I was among those who said “it’s fine”. Ranil thought it was fine and then that it was terrible. The Pohottuwa thought it was terrible all along.

This was a throwback to the division of opinion in Ceylon about the Hartal of August 1953, the popular uprising that left eight dead of Police shooting and a Prime Minister who resigned. Progressive-minded people, like my father, at the time a reporter for Lake House just out of university, were in sympathy with and admiring of the Hartal. His father, a staunch UNPer, thought it was terrible. Those who sympathized with the Hartal ’53 went on to applaud the crushing defeat of the UNP by SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956.

Why I Welcome AKD-JVP-NPP

Those who supported the Aragalaya would tend to support the Anura Dissanayake candidacy and the JVP-NPP, but with an interesting difference. A splinter supports Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sir John Kotelawala’s political descendent. True, those who endorsed the Hartal were also divided between the Marxist Left and the center-left SLFP, but no one supported Sir John Kotelawala, Ranil’s political ancestor.

I supported the Aragalaya as my published writing shows. I also welcome and support the rise of the Left in the form of the JVP-NPP led by Anura Dissanayake. I do this despite being prominently on the other side of Wijeweera’s JVP during the left-on-left mini-civil war of the 1980s. The issues which divided us then no longer exist or do not divide us anymore.

There’s another reason that I welcome the AKD-JVP-NPP option this year. My intellectual formation having been Marxist, I have always regarded myself as on the Left. When this article appears, the top international policy journal in Moscow, namely Russia in Global Affairs, would be featuring an essay by me on Lenin’s relevance today, marking his death centenary.

However, since 1984-5 when I wrote four cover stories in the Lanka Guardian supporting Vijaya Kumaratunga and his new party, I have been a leftist committed to Social Democracy and have preferred to support the closest available approximation to it, which chiefly meant progressive-populists (Vijaya, Premadasa, Mahinda) rather than Marxist-Leninists.

Today, the candidacy and the party I thought would fill that slot, Sajith Premadasa and the SJB, do not do so and have abandoned the progressive-centrist space. Unlike as presidential candidate in November 2019 and through to mid-late 2022, Sajith is objectively functioning today as a mask for economic (neoliberal) Harsha Chinthanaya which is itself a mask for economic (neoliberal) Ranil Chinthanaya.

Harsha’s current claim to fame being his World bank credentials (he says ‘advisor’ in Sinhala, but could mean ‘consultant’ or participant in World Bank projects—in Nepal and Bhutan) is amusing. If those credentials were so decisively valuable, then why did Ranil and his economic team including Dr Harsha de Silva totally ignore the advice given in Colombo in 2015 by no less than the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and Nobel Prize-winner for economics, Joseph Stiglitz? And why isn’t he critical of it even in retrospect? Why doesn’t he embrace Stiglitz’ advice even today, but prefer Ricardo Hausmann instead?

In the absence of a progressive-centrist alternative, and with the populist-developmentalist or populist-centrist formation turning right, embracing neoliberal austerity, my foundational leftism provides the compass which points me to that Left—the clearly main party of the Left– which has built a political mass movement of a left-populist character.

However, and completely unrelated to the 1980s, my support of the AKD-NPP-JVP formation is not uncritical. What I am critical about is that they are not doing all they can or should – because this may be all they can—to win this historic victory.

I am critical, though supportive, not only of the JVP-NPP, but also of the Left in general. That’s because the ‘generic Left’ is not doing all it can to help secure this historic victory.

Left Gaps and Deficits

I note the following gaps and deficits, which if not bridged could cost AKD and the NPP-JVP either the presidential or parliamentary election or both. Bridging these gaps in time could secure victory.

The cold war or unbridgeable distance between the JVP-NPP and the FSP-JAV (Frontline Socialst Party – Jana Araala Vyaparaya).

The lack of activity by the left intellectuals and academics of both the pro-NPP-JVP camp and the non-NPP-JVP camp.

The lack of outreach of the non-JVP-NPP Left in the direction of the JVP-NPP.

The lack of outreach of the JVP-NPP to other left and progressive elements.

Firstly, the gap between the JVP-NPP and the FSP-JAV. Let’s be frank. Anura Kumara is concerned that the FSP’s radicalism could scare off middle-class voters. There’s no point debating that. What must be recognized is that each party needs the other, and though the FSP is far smaller, the JVP has more to lose.

What the FSP could bring to the table is the power of public persuasion wielded so modestly by the JVP’s former educational Secretary and currently the FSP’s Educational Secretary, Pubudu Jayagoda. No one mounts a better economic critique than he does. Jayagoda is the country’s most successful public pedagogue and model of what Antonio Gramsci called an organic intellectual.

The JVP and FSP must be creative and flexible enough to work out an understanding whereby the FSP-JAV opens an autonomous, parallel ‘second front’, waging a politico-ideological ‘guerrilla war’ of resistance against the common neoliberal enemy. One possibility would be cooperation NOT between the JVP and FSP but between their respective social movements or political mass movements.

Secondly, the strange silence of the left academia and intelligentsia, both ‘pro’ and ‘non’ NPP-JVP. In pre-election 1970 the universities were ‘ideas factories’ for the oppositional United Front coalition. I know because my uncle (my father’s brother-in-law) Prof PEE Fernando, was in the forefront at Peradeniya. OK, so there’s no united front today, but there are academics sympathetic to the NPP as to the FSP-JAV.

For the NPP this is election year. For the FSP-JAV, which isn’t that into elections, there’s the biggest threat of a neoliberal shock therapy agenda in Sri Lanka’s history. However, there’s far more activity and a higher profile of the economic neoliberals who are waging an ideological offensive to ensure that whatever the electoral outcome, the neoliberal model and agenda are adhered to, than there is of the collective left intelligentsia—with the academia at its core.

The latter should be waging a battle the ideas, the battle for moral-ethical, intellectual-cultural and ideological hegemony, without which there can be no sustainable political victory.

Thirdly, the non-JVP Left parties have limited options, none of which they are activating. They can reach out to the JVP-NPP and arrive at some arrangement which entails a division of labour in what must be recognized as a decisive common battle. Or they can become part of a parallel ‘second front’ with the FSP-JAV-IUSF (Inter University Students Federation). Or they can form a solid front with the Dullas faction of the FPC (Dullas’ Freedom People’s Congress), which in no way contradicts the earlier mentioned option of a second front. If they do none of these, they will be discredited by company of the social chauvinist dominated Uttara Lanka and wiped out electorally.

Fourthly and finally is the JVP-NPP’s insistence that in a repetition of the ‘Walk of Shame’ in the Game of Thrones, penitents may enter the NPP as individuals, but parties or factions will not be accommodated in a bloc.

Why Risk Defeat?

In a tribute to Lenin on his death centenary, I could of course quote Lenin on the united front, from the proceedings of the second and third Congresses of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920 and 1921, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll stick to the hard historical facts of elections on this island.

Except for the first two occasions, every time a party won, it was as a coalition. Those two exceptions were DS Senanayake in 1947 and Dudley Senanayake in 1952. DS immediately formed a multi-party, multiethnic coalition government. Dudley’s UNP didn’t, and he was overthrown in one year by the Hartal 1953, and the UNP swept away in 1956.

Every government was formed after an election (barring 1952) was as a coalition.

Every single time a government was defeated in the island’s historical victory, it was by an Opposition coalition. That includes the JR-led landslide of 1977. The UNP had one powerful ally, a trade union plus political party, the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) led by the iconic S. Thondaman.

That indicates something about the complex terrain of the Sri Lankan social formation and therefore its politics.

The JVP-NPP is trying to go it alone. Again. Why does it want to run the risk of bucking those odds, when it can easily form a political coalition of the left, progressive and democratic parties and organizations under its leadership and around, i.e., in support of, Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s presidential candidacy?