Estranged strange bedfellows

Tuesday 2nd March, 2021

The JVP has torn the Easter Sunday Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI) report to shreds. Its leaders have picked many holes in the document, and their arguments are tenable. Their position is that the PCoI has served no useful purpose as it has failed to identify the masterminds of the terror strikes. One cannot but agree with them on this score.

JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, MP, has gone a step further; he has demanded to know why Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was the Prime Minister at the time of the Easter Sunday attacks, has been let off the hook. We asked the JVP a similar quetion when the COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises), which probed the Treasury bond scams, went out of its way to ensure that Wickremesinghe’s name did not appear in its report. The COPE probe, under the chairmanship of the then JVP MP Sunil Handunnetti, was a farce. The JVP ran with the Opposition and hunted with the UNP, so to speak. Its notables stand accused of having had nocturnal meetings with Wickremesinghe and other UNP leaders (most of whom are currently in the SJB) to decide how to deal with the political enemies of the yahapalana government.

So, the defenders of the Easter Sunday PCoI report may ask the JVP what moral right it has to demand that the identities of the masterminds of the 2019 bomb attacks be revealed. Those who peddle this argument should realise that the present-day JVP is vastly different from its former self, as it were. It conducts itself very democratically, and its election campaigns are exemplary. It has parliamentary representation, and its leader is a member of the very Parliament, which it once bombed. Battles for manape, or preferential votes, are absent among JVP candidates. So, the JVP’s ugly past should not be held against it. But the outfit, which always takes moral high ground and looks down upon others, needs to be asked how it could reconcile its concern for human rights and democracy with the practice of commemorating its late leaders who destroyed thousands of lives and properties worth billions of rupees and brutally suppressed political dissent; among their victims were leaders of political parties and trade unions, students, teachers, Buddhist monks and civilians who dared exercise their franchise. Shouldn’t it publicly disown its leaders who were a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists if it is to convince the public that its current democratic agenda is not a façade?

Why has the JVP taken to bashing Ranil? It is in the current predicament with only three seats in Parliament, where it had six members previously, because it got too close to the ‘capitalist’ UNP, which eliminated its key leaders in the late 1980s. It was also represented in the so-called National Executive Council, which determined the agenda of the UNP-led yahapalana government, initially. In 2018, it threw a lifeline to the UNP-led government, which the SLPP and the then President Maithripala Sirisena sought to oust in the most despicable manner. It declared that it had done so to save democracy, but nobody bought into that claim. It is now trying to have the public believe that it has had nothing to do with the UNP.

Interestingly, the JVP’s honeymoon with the SLFP in 2004, when it contested a general election as part of the United People’s Freedom Alliance, enabled it to have 39 of its candidates elected; it also donated two National List slots to the SLFP. Its leaders even beat their SLFP counterparts in Colombo, Gampaha and Kurunegala in manape battles. But its clandestine affair with the UNP proved both politically and electorally disastrous! So, it is now bashing Ranil as hard as it can in the hope that it will be able to be seen to be anti-UNP. Whether it will succeed in its endeavour remains to be seen. People are the best judges.