On Dayan Jayatilleka’s detractors, mildly

For far too long, the opposition in Sri Lanka has concerned itself with abstractions and ideals: presidential term limits, constitutional checks and balances, judicial independence, individual rights, and so on. While these are laudable and must certainly be planked into the platform of any democratic resistance, by themselves they are hardly enough.

Debates over which direction the opposition – the SJB – should be headed generally centre on the extent to which it has adhered to these tenets and incorporated them. These debates have bifurcated into two schools of thought: one that holds the opposition should take on the government head first, and another that holds it should come out clean on those tenets. Dayan Jayatilleka, Senior International Relations Advisor to the leader of the SJB, subscribes to the first school; pretty much everyone else prefers the second.

Lately, though not too lately, the SJB has tended to attract the ire if not scrutiny of those opposed to the present government. Their criticism and scrutiny of the opposition generally revolves around two points: that it doesn’t conform to their conception of a liberal democratic outfit, and that the leader isn’t doing as much as he should to challenge the status quo. These critiques dovetail with still others: for instance, that Sajith Premadasa should not have let Dr Dayan, against whom they project some ineffable phobia I find difficult to explain, let alone rationalise, into the party. Indeed, much of the anti-SJB rhetoric among critics of this regime centres on the SJB selecting him. It’s as if, frustrated by the failures of the government, its critics are channelling their fury against the opposition.

Indeed, over the last few weeks and months, criticism after criticism has been made, remade, and published again and again about the SJB, and more frequently about Dr Dayan. Hence Harindra Dassanayake calls the latter a “frenemy of democracy”, Chamindra Weerawardhana calls him a “Premadasa hagiographer”, Krishantha Cooray wonders what would happen with him “roaming the corridors of power” in a SJB government, and Kumar David frames him as “an agent of the arsonist bent on stoking the flames.” On Twitter these censures tend to turn vitriolic, as a cursory glance at tweets on the SJB will show; to give but one example, Asanga Welikala’s blunt dismissal of him as a “Cold War era Third Worldist dinosaur.”

It pays to make sense of how critiques of this Third Worldist dinosaur reflect on critiques being made of the SJB. Dr Dayan’s argument regarding the latter is simple: an opposition cannot be expected to enter into an alliance with a party associated with the politics of appeasement, a party not only reduced to a single, still unclaimed national list seat, but one which not too long ago opposed every reformist move from within. The SJB could not have come to where it is but for the intransigence of the UNP; but it is less an irony than a tragedy that the UNP could have avoided its shrinkage had it conceded to the Young Turks of the SJB. To quote Dr Dayan, this was a long time coming.

His second line of argument follows from his first: if the opposition cannot be expected and should not allow itself to be co-opted by the UNP, it must not cave into tactics advocated by ex-pro-UNP ideologues. Instead it must turn and look inward, taking a cue from democratic oppositions from everywhere while mobilising races and classes, and every other grassroots group, against the government. He does not specify what these tactics are, but cites examples from Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, Uruguay, and the US.

Having adopted such a front, the opposition’s battle of ideas must intersect with a battle of hearts and minds. It must engage in a balancing act, addressing the concerns of the majority without indulging them to the exclusion of the minorities. While that tactic does not in itself exclude such liberal civil society concerns as the abolition of the Executive Presidency, these concerns should be relegated to the exigencies of a resistance movement. The primary goal is to win in 2024, not conjure up fanciful approximations of liberal utopias.

His prescription, then, isn’t so much abolishing institutions associated with the government as performing a careful surgery on them. On the Executive Presidency, for example, his position is unequivocal: no country in the world governed by an autocratic presidency got rid of its leadership by getting rid of the presidential system. This reasoning unnerves his critics, but insofar as his point about the futility of ditching the system goes, it must be pointed out that autocracy has hardly ever been the preserve of specific political systems; to assume that the Executive Presidency solely has led to a concentration of authoritarianism in the country is to forget the periods of authoritarianism which prevailed before its establishment in 1977; even with Dominion status, after all, the absence of a powerful presidency did not prevent the then UNP regime from disenfranchising estate workers and attacking the Left.

Given the commonsensical rationale underlying these tactics, it’s not a little surprising that the latter have been dismissed by many intellectuals. That says more about those dismissing the tactics than they do about the viability of the tactics themselves.

The failure of the liberal and left-liberal intelligentsia in Sri Lanka, which in general has excluded Dr Dayan from its cloistered circles, has always been its failure to compromise on values in the face of battles against bigger enemies. Its lapses are not so much of flexibility and adaptability as those of rationality, indeed of logic itself.

These lapses of logic explain their myopic attitude to the LTTE. While several Western publications, including The Economist, condemned the latter as totalitarian or fascist, local intellectual heavyweights dismissed them or regarded them with apathy. History proved the latter wrong, eventually; as late as 2004, they were arguing the government would lose the war, while Dr Dayan penned the only serious piece that predicted the opposite. In a country of Dick Morrises (American political author) who get their political predictions wrong almost all the time, the opposition leader’s Senior Advisor on International Relations, whose credentials speak for themselves and are second to none, remains as refreshing an exception as ever; I realise that this is less a tribute to him than it is an indictment of the intellectual obduracy of his critics.

What explains the latter’s jaundiced view of things? Fundamentally, it reveals a failure to distinguish between political movements as well as systems. The liberal/left-liberal caucus in the country persists in viewing the excesses of the Rajapaksas and the Executive Presidency, and indeed every institution associated with the latter, on a continuum: the one is seen as tied to the other. Simultaneously, it tends to conflate authoritarianism with populism, making the one indistinguishable from the other. In other words, liberal critics of the regime recommend that structures be dismantled and personalities replaced, rather than question why people vote in large numbers for such personalities and such structures.

These commentators view politics as a contest between liberalism and populism and identify the latter with fascism. The experience of the Global South, however, shows that such fine distinctions, though quite relevant in the West, do not really hold water in societies like ours. This has nothing to do with a tilting of voters to authoritarianism and populism, as wry commentators snidely imply from time to time. Rather, it has to do with the failures of reformist liberals to address issues which really matter to those voters.

In fairness to Dr Dayan, I must confess that I disagree with him over certain matters. For instance, while he sees the present regime as ultranationalist or bordering on fascism, I see it more as that of a centre-right Bonapartist lacking the Bonapartist’s ability to balance classes. His critique of the regime’s economic model also seems a tad misplaced: contrary to what he and the likes of Harsha de Silva insinuate, the government hasn’t completely banned imports, apart from certain consumer items, and will probably not do so either.

Yet these niceties do not detract from the validity of what he writes about the opposition: that unless it grows up and discards the ideologies and the personalities of the past, it cannot win. In this he is hardly a dinosaur, let alone a Cold War era Third Worldist. Perhaps the real dinosaurs are the ideologies of those who use such terms: ideologies that have been tried and tested, again and again, in this part of the world, only to flicker away. What we need is a reset in the opposition. That can only come from someone like Dr Dayan in it.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com