Anatomy of a Movement: Jathika Chintanaya

By Uditha Devapriya

Though I am not in complete agreement with Jathika Chintanaya –both the ideology and its ideologues – I do recognise that, at a certain point, it made a significant intervention in Sri Lanka’s intellectual life. For better or worse, though, the Jathika Chintanaya of today is no longer the Jathika Chintanaya of yesterday. It does hold a wide appeal, but it no longer is led by the intellectual currents which steered it decades ago.

In saying this, I am both paying tribute to the founders of the movement, Gunadasa Amarasekara and Nalin de Silva, and criticising the intellectual decline which followed its founding in the 1980s. Jathika Chintanaya became relevant at a particular juncture in the country’s history. The opening of the economy and the onset of two civil wars, one in the North and the other, a youth insurrection, in the South, virtually castrated the Left, leaving the oppositional space open to other, alternative political streams.

The dismantlement of the Left, in other words, was what made Jathika Chintanaya relevant. But the Left’s dismantlement had nothing to do with Jathika Chintanaya. That had to do with the internal contradictions of the Left movement itself. More than anything, the Old Left failed to tap into the progressive potential of Sinhala and Tamil nationalism and to channel these currents into a wider, cohesive, and more inclusive Sri Lankan nationalism. Instead it veered from one extreme to another, ignoring or sidelining nationalism at first and then, just as disastrously, capitulating to its worst excesses.

All that led to the Left’s diminution on not one, but three fronts. First, it lost the largely Sinhala Buddhist rural petty bourgeoisie in the late 1960s to the JVP. Second, it lost the Tamil petty bourgeoisie, and the militant-revolutionary Tamil youth in particular, to the cause of Eelam after it joined the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government and acquiesced in its doings. Third and most crucially, it lost vast swathes of the Sinhala (and Buddhist) middle-classes after the 1977 election to the UNP, on account of the J. R. Jayewardene government’s own mobilisation of nationalism against the Left and Mrs Bandaranaike.

The Old Left’s ideological sterility and failure of imagination – it remained committed to a crude, economistic analysis of the situation in the country – prevented it from updating its profile and of emulating, if not borrowing from, the many liberation movements springing up in Latin America. The tragedy of the JVP was that it sought to emulate these movements, but deteriorated into a pale shadow of what it wanted to be.

When an ideological movement loses its credibility – as the LSSP and, to a lesser extent, the Communist Party did – It loses what space it has in the marketplace of ideas. Following the 1977 election, it lost its space to three outfits: the New Right, represented by the UNP; the New Left, represented by the JVP; and the Tamil liberation struggle, represented by the LTTE but including numerous other groups.

Though not a political movement in the way the UNP or SLFP were, Jathika Chintanaya absorbed Sinhala middle-class elements drawn from the first two categories and opposed to the third. From inception, then, it was eminently political, and despite its avowed opposition to mainstream politics, shaped by the politics of its time.

It would be crude and not altogether accurate to limit Jathika Chintanaya’s ideology to the construction of a rural Sinhala Buddhist arcadia. This is what its founders envisioned – it is the basis of Gunadasa Amarasekara’s Jathika Arthikaya, which he held up as a model to emulate at the height of COVID-19 in 2020 – but it is hardly the only paradigm it looked up to. The truth was that Jathika Chintanaya’s rise would not have come to be were it not for the Left’s spectacular descent. Both Amarasekara and de Silva had been Left stalwarts. De Silva, in fact, had been a member of the Nava Sama Samaja Pakshaya (NSSP), which at the height of the Southern insurrection advocated devolution of power.

What these ideologues mobilised was middle-class dissatisfaction with both the UNP’s liberalisation of the economy and the Left’s proposed alternatives. They couched a cultural critique of what the Left saw as an economic issue, especially after the 1983 riots. Jathika Chintanaya had nothing to do with the latter. But it formulated an alternative approach to the ethnic problem and the National Question in their aftermath.

This caught on fairly well with middle-class elements disenchanted with the Jayewardene reforms, but stridently opposed to Marxist solutions, in particular those that would require a restoration of the Sirimavo Bandaranaike years.

It must be noted, though, that, at least in Amarasekara’s framing, Jathika Chintanaya did not stand in complete opposition to Marxism. What Amarasekara critiqued was not Marxism per se, but its supposed failure to respond to and incorporate Sinhala culture. In Anagarika Dharmapala Marxvadida?, for instance, he criticises S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike for failing to transcend his Western liberal political tendencies and the Old Left for failing to transcend its European lineage. Indeed, during the second insurrection, in an article to Lanka Guardian, Amarasekara expressed sympathy for the JVP for going against the grain.

Such intellectual interventions are sadly no longer possible today. The nationalist right sees conspiracies everywhere and plays the conspiracy card at every opportunity it gets. This has drained it, and paradoxically its fellow travellers on the Left, of what little credibility it once possessed. To be sure, it does hold some appeal, in particular among sections of the Sinhala middle-classes. But its potential for mobilisation is very limited.

The reason is fairly simple. It’s not that Jathika Chintanaya itself lacked imagination, but that most of its followers today lack the impetus and the initiative of its founders. As with every other political formation in this country, it has gone downhill all the way. The question remains, though: if the failure of the Left was what portended Jathika Chintanaya, what would the sterility and decay of Jathika Chintanaya portend?

Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.