Horrific complexity:

The political economy of “Paangshu”

By Uditha Devapriya

For well over a month, Paangshu has been the talk of the town. Initially shown to a select audience during the yahapalana regime, then given a public release two months ago under the current government, it continues to win overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Meera Srinivasan of The Hindu correctly considers it as “perhaps the first mainstream Sinhala film to foreground the struggle of a missing person’s family.” Of course, the missing person happens to belong to the majority Sinhala community rather than the minority Northern Tamil community, since Paangshu isn’t about the war up there; it’s about the war down here, in the South, one that, over three years, killed as many people as, if not more people than, those killed over three decades in the conflict with the LTTE.

That reason alone makes Paangshu worthy of more than a cursory review, which is what I came up with last Saturday. I say that because of the muffled backlash it has received from those who object to its perception of the political history underlying it, which not many directors have forayed into. For Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s film delves into an experience most from my generation didn’t live through: while my contemporaries came face-to-face with the war against the LTTE, only their parents and grandparents encountered the war against the JVP, in all its horrific complexity.

And yet its relevance to the search for the missing from that other war – the 30 year one – can’t be denied. The missing then, as with the missing now, continues to be missed, and to be unaccounted for. As an elegy on reconciliation, Chandrasekam has made a great work, certainly a brave one. My problem, however, has nothing to do with what he’s made. Rather it has to do with the selectivity of some of those who praise it.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Wars don’t just arise. They may be rooted in ethnic, religious, even caste differences, but fundamentally, they reflect economic differences.

The second JVP insurrection (1987-1989) differed from the first (1971) owing to the wave of sympathy it created among the Southern youth for the JVP. The first insurrection had been carried out mostly by undergraduates, the sons of a petty bourgeoisie who later became ideological vessels for the establishment.

As Gamini Keerawella once observed in an essay on the JVP, by 1967 the party had begun to recruit vast sections of the petty bourgeoisie, distancing itself from the rural proletariat from whose ranks it had got in its membership until then. The insurrectionists thus couldn’t hold for long after their uprising. By the end of the 1970s, they had begun to transit to the establishment, reflecting if not betraying their class interests; one of these ex-JVPers now describes the insurrection, no doubt with the wisdom of hindsight, as “a stupid rebellion poorly executed.” What this means is that the class composition of the first insurrection was considerably different from the class composition of the second.

Rohan Gunaratna’s book on the 1987-1990 uprising, the most scholarly account of it written so far, relegates the economic roots of that conflict to the background. My chief complaint with an otherwise comprehensive study, its lack of a proper assessment of the economic backdrop against which the insurrection played out gives to that insurrection the character of a spontaneous uprising. Similar complaints can be made of studies of other conflicts from other regions, but in this instance, it has led to commentators to view the second insurgency in terms of the first, as a backlash against the Indo-Lanka Accord, and to draw parallels between it and the war against the LTTE.

To put it simply, what transpired from 1987 to 1990 cannot be explained without reference to the policies of the regime that crushed the insurrection. The uprising was the result of a multitude of factors: a ban on eco-friendly chena cultivation; the diversion of land to what one outfit today refers to as “Western boondoggles” (J. R Jayewardene’s “robber barons”); the devaluation of the rupee which deflated severely the value of food stamps (by as much as half from 1979 to 1981), thereby leading to the malnourishment and impoverishment of vast swathes of the working class; and the “Indianisation” of the civil war.

Added to that, the crushing of the Left, the crippling of trade unions, and the proscription of anti-government political groups all left behind a vacant space. These groups soon found themselves squeezed out of the democratic framework. It was against that backdrop that the Indo-Lanka Accord, despite the opposition of several government figures, was signed, immediately sparking off a wave of discontent across the South.

In class terms, the second insurrection thus came to differ from the first. Even in caste terms it was different: most of those arrested in the 1971 insurgency, as Gananath Obeyesekere documented at the time, hailed from higher castes (in fact 58.5% of them were Goyigama), whereas many of those who took part in the 1987-1990 uprising came from depressed communities. That is not to say caste factors always militated against those higher up in the hierarchy – indeed, there were cases of upper caste insurrectionists campaigning against lower caste officials – but all the same, it refracted class discrepancies. At any rate, class or caste, the war was protracted and fought over economic reasons.

The difference between the JVP uprising and the war against the LTTE – which many critics, in their reviews of Paangshu, seem to be comparing to each another – comes out here. While the State, as Susantha Goonetilake notes in Recolonisation, engaged in a “class war on the poor” in the South, in the North it was pitted against a separatist movement led by a community that, in economic terms, had suffered much less under successive regimes than the two most discriminated groups in 20th century Sri Lanka: estate Tamils and Sinhala peasants. By disenfranchising them and stripping them of citizenship, the UNP had robbed the former of an opportunity to take up arms. The latter, on the other hand, grabbed that opportunity the moment the political crisis reached its peak.

There were two ideological routes you could take at this juncture: you could either support the Accord or oppose it. By supporting it you took the side of the UNP, or a considerable section of the party which accepted it, and of the Old Left, which endorsed it because it saw India as a countervailing influence against the State. On the other hand, by opposing it you took the side of the Sinhala nationalists, or of the JVP.

It was simply difficult not to choose. The closest historical analogy I can think of would be the case of an ex-Jacobin living under Napoleon in France: he couldn’t have supported the Bonapartists, but then he couldn’t have supported the Holy Alliance either. And yet he had to take a side. Gambling on anti-government sentiment, the Old Left thus chose to support the Accord, severely underestimating the extent of anti-Accord sentiment.

In my essay on the Jathika Chintanaya written to the Midweek Review months ago, I pointed out that as much as their support for the Accord brought the UNP and the Old Left together against the JVP in the insurrection, no such intersection of interests brought the JVP and the Sinhala nationalist groups to a common platform. The result was that, with the proscription of anti-UNP student groups, the JVP, lacking an ally, took the fight to the streets alone.

The South soon turned into a violent battleground; it wasn’t because of the war in the North, after all, that The Economist called Sri Lanka “the bloodiest place on earth.”

Given the Old Left’s endorsement of the Accord and, later, the 13th Amendment, it was only to be expected that it would not only help form anti-JVP hit squads, but also affirm the NGO sector’s demonization of the JVP. Since Susantha Goonatilake has recorded this in his study Recolonisation, all I will say here is that much of the NGO intelligentsia, which purports to stand up for the radical youth today, branded the JVP then as not just chauvinist, but also anti-Tamil. It took Mahinda Rajapaksa and Mangala Samaraweera – both from the South, occupying diametrically opposed political positions today – to take the names, the details, of those made to disappear by paramilitary squads to Western capitals.

This remains, then as now, a blot on the conscience of NGO intellectuals; their failure to give equal coverage to the Northern war and the Southern insurgency (Witharanage 1994) led to a distorted view of what was happening on the ground. Meanwhile, right until their separation from Mahinda Rajapaksa’s coalition in 2006, even the most liberal commentators here went on labelling the JVP as Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist. Only when the JVP broke away from Rajapaksa’s coalition and began to endorse what is, for me at least, a pseudo-Marxist-lumpen ideology did these commentators abandon that stereotype.

The failure of the NGO-cracy to identify the root causes of the insurrection is symptomatic of its inability to view that uprising in class rather than ethnic terms: a failure that explains why it could, while opposing a neo-fascist regime, interpret the JVP’s opposition to Indian intervention as chauvinist, and worse, anti-Tamil. Those who write on Paangshu without recalling the callous lack of sympathy towards the insurrectionists, displayed by what the late Prins Gunasekara described as “local human rights magnates”, should thus bear in mind the political economy, the horrific complexity, of the period depicted in the film. For history, as we all ought to know, is too precious to be forgotten.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com