JVP’s volte-face

Tuesday 7th February, 2023

President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s decision to implement the controversial 13th Amendment (13A) fully could not have come at a worse time for pseudo-patriots such as the SLPP leaders, who enabled him to realise his presidential dream, and are therefore responsible for his acts or omissions. They have refused to grant the Provincial Councils land and police powers, claiming that such measures are fraught with the danger of leading to secession. Now, they find themselves in a dilemma. They, however, did not resort to violence in a bid to scuttle 13A when it was introduced in the late 1980s. But the same cannot be said about the JVP.

The JVP has said it sees nothing wrong with efforts being made to implement 13A, which is now part of the Constitution. This is the very opposite of what it said in the late 1980s, when it went on a spree of violence, claiming that 13A would lead to the division of the country, and had to be torpedoed, at any cost. Its savage suppression of dissent left hundreds of people dead. Its victims included politicians, student leaders, trade unionists, traders, monks, public officials, police and military personnel and voters who defied its order to boycott elections. Among the state assets it destroyed were 240 agrarian service centres, numerous Paddy Marketing Board warehouses with stocks of paddy therein, countless CEB transformers, power cables and pylons, and hundreds of state-owned buses. It also disrupted universities and schools, insisting that one’s love for the motherland had to take precedence over one’s education. Due to its brutal anti-13A campaign, its founder, Rohana Wijeweera, and all its senior leaders save Somawansa Amaraweera, perished at the hands of the police, the military and the pro-UNP vigilantes during counterterrorism operations. The same fate befell thousands of its junior cadres as well. Now, it says 13A is a fact of life!

The JVP claims to be a Marxist outfit but Machiavellian thinking seems to have polluted its revolutionary ideology. It is apparently guided by the Machiavellian maxim anent its pledges — ‘the promise given was a necessity of the past, and the word broken is a necessity of the present’.

What characterises the JVP is a chronic lack of policy consistency, as we pointed out in this space, on 05 April 2021, when the quinquagenary of its first sanguinary revolution fell. The only thing consistent about the JVP is perhaps its modus operandi to gain political momentum periodically to propel itself. It honeymoons with the main political parties and then takes them on. It backed the SLFP-led United Front ahead of the 1970 general election. The following year, it took up arms against the government formed by that coalition. In the late 1970s, it went politically steady with the UNP under J. R. Jayewardene, who released Wijeweera and others from prison. A few years later it turned against the JRJ regime and caused another bloodbath. In 2004, it closed ranks with the UPFA led by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, and thereafter left her administration. In 2005, it backed Mahinda Rajapaksa in the presidential fray, making a tremendous contribution to his victory; subsequently, it fell out with him and tried to topple his government. In 2015, it threw in its lot with a UNP-led coalition, which fielded Maithripala Sirisena as its presidential candidate and captured power in Parliament after his victory. Its honeymoon with the UNP lasted several years before it took on the UNF government and Sirisena when they became extremely unpopular.

This kind of political promiscuity, as it were, has cost the JVP dear both politically and electorally, as can be seen from the number of seats it has secured at the general elections over the years: one MP (elected on the Sri Lanka Progressive Front ticket) in 1994; 10 MPs in 2000; 16 MPs in 2001; 39 (from the UPFA) in 2004; four MPs (from the Democratic National Alliance) in 2010; six MPs in 2015, and three MPs (from the NPP) in 2020. This time around, the JVP leaders seem to think there is a tide in their affairs, and it has to be taken at the flood, but let them be warned to tread cautiously, mindful of the fact that Brutus, who acted likewise, finally ran on his own sword in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It was a huge mistake for the JVP to try to march on Parliament last year.

As we have argued in a previous editorial comment, the JVP’s style of politicking smacks of demagogy like that of other political parties although it takes the moral high ground, and whether it will be able to charter a course and navigate the shoaly waters of national politics it has drifted into remains to be seen.

Everything undergoes change. The universe itself is said to be in a state of flux. Therefore, it is only natural that political parties evolve, and the cadre-based JVP is metamorphosing into a mass-based political entity. It has demonstrated its willingness to abandon its threadbare ideology and associated anachronisms such as dirigisme; it has come to terms with the current global economic reality and is wooing the local business community. Besides, its current leaders are known for their sartorial and tonsorial elegance and predilection for dernier cri. These are no doubt welcome signs. But the question is whether the heinous crimes that ‘revolutionary’ groups commit in the name of liberation should be allowed to go unpunished.

The JVP has to show that it feels remorse for having resorted to savage terror to compass its political objectives. The least it can do is to tender an apology to the public, especially to the victims of its terror, the families of its cadres who answered its call to arms, came forward to ‘save the country’ and perished in vain.